It has taken us awhile, but after a few years of our followers and tour goers asking for the ability to purchase ERW merchandise, we have finally created a store via Cafe Press. You will find a few clothing options along with hats, bumper magnets and it wouldn’t be an ERW store without a pint glass.

It is nothing fancy, but wanted to give everyone the ability to purchase some ERW bling and we appreciate the support as you wearing our logo is the best marketing we can hope for! We have tried to keep the prices low and all proceeds go to support our operations (website and podcast support etc..).

You can visit the merchandise store here: https://www.cafepress.com/shop/EmergingRevolutionaryWar

Join us this Sunday night at 7pm on our Facebook page as we welcome Dr. Susan Brynne Long. While partisan warfare in the American south has gained popular and scholarly attention in recent years, little work has been done on the prisoners of the backcountry theater. Scholarship on British and Loyalist captives has emphasized the vigilante justice to which they were often subject, but less attention has been paid to the role of military tradition and lived experiences with prisoners in their administration. Dr. Long is filling that gap, with her research emphasizing the role of these factors in the progression of the backcountry war, resulting in an administrative structure of prisoner administration that prioritized humane treatment, even though southern revolutionaries failed to enforce compliance with this standard.

Dr. Susan Brynne Long is an instructor of history at the University of Nebraska – Omaha, whose research and teaching focus on early America and military history. Her current research is about the American administration of British allied prisoners of war in the Revolution.

This Rev War Revelry will be pre-recorded and posted on our Facebook page at 7pm on November 16. 2025. Then it will be posted to our You Tube and Spotify channels.

World War I ended in a Burger King parking lot in New Jersey. Really! Trust me. While visiting Revolutionary War sites in New Jersey, I had to chance to visit something I’d known about but not yet seen. I hope readers are ok this slight deviation from Revolutionary history.

World War I raged from 1914-1918, with the United States entering in 1917. The Allied nations consisted of the U.S., U.K., France, Italy, Russia, Serbia, and Japan. The Central Powers included Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. By the fall of 1918 the other Central Powers had dropped out, leaving only Germany still fighting.

On November 11, 1918, Germany agreed to an armistice with the Allies, halting the fighting. Negotiations began on a final peace treaty, resulting in the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919. But the U.S. did not sign it. Wilson, a Democrat, faced Republican opposition in Congress. Large portions of the American population also opposed the settlement. There was also opposition to Wilson’s proposed League of Nations, an organization similar to today’s United Nations.

So while the rest of the Allies settled with Germany in 1919, for two more years the U.S. and Germany were still at war, with the Armistice in place. President Wilson’s successor, Warren G. Harding, also opposed the Treaty of Versailles, so suggested that Congress make a separate peace treaty that did not include American membership in the League of Nations. Senator Philander Knox introduced such a resolution and it passed the Senate in April, 1921.

Representative Stephen G. Porter proposed a similar measure in the House. Both houses of Congress modified the two proposals, creating the Knox–Porter joint resolution and passing it on July 1. At the time President Hardig was visiting New Jersey Senator Joseph S. Frelinghuysen and were playing golf at the Raritan Valley Country Club.

The golf course was across the street was the Frelinghuysen estate. Word arrived that a courier was on his way from the Raritan train station, having traveled from Washington with the signing copy of the resolution. Harding walked back to the estate, signed the document, and then returned to complete his round of golf. The Frelinghuysen estate was destroyed by fire in the 1950s, and the site is now occupied by a shopping center and parking lot, with a small plaque marking the place where the home once stood.

Senator Joseph S. Frelinghuysen was the descendant of Frederick Frelinghuysen, who served as a Major General of militia during the Revolution. He was also in the Continental Congress and the Senate.

So while we think of World War I as ending on November 11, 1918, the actual peace treaty with Germany didn’t occur until three years later. Article 1 of the treaty required Germany to grant to the U.S. government all rights and privileges that were enjoyed by the other Allies that had ratified the Versailles treaty two years earlier. And today there’s a Burger King on the site in Somerville, New Jersey.

We’re excited to share a sneak-peak of our next upcoming title in the Emerging Revolutionary War Series, published by Savas Beatie:

About the Book:

“The man to whom the country is most indebted for the great measure of independence is Mr. John Adams…. I call him the Atlas of American independence.”

So attested one of the delegates to the Second Continental Congress, moved to support independence after months of angst, indecision, dithering, and fear. Thomas Jefferson called Adams “our colossus on the floor,” arguing with power, passion, and persuasive force of reason why America needed to take the extraordinary step to break from the British Empire and set up an independent nation.

Born of humble means outside Boston, Massachusetts, Adams’s work ethic led him to become one of the colony’s most successful attorneys. Yet he burned with a powerful ambition and yearned for more. “I never shall shine, till some animating Occasion calls forth all my Powers,” he fretted.

Festering tension in Boston with British soldiers and taxation and trade policies—tension that spread across all thirteen colonies—provided the occasion Adam longed for, and soon he found himself at the center of the storm, thrust onto the national stage where all his “Powers” transformed him into the intellectual architect of American independence. Perhaps more than any other American, he rose to the historical moment, urging his contemporaries into the unknown future.

But his efforts came at tremendous cost: long separations from his beloved children and “dearest friend” and wife, Abigail, who forged for herself a role as long-distance political counselor even as she managed affairs on the family farm in a way nearly unprecedented for 18th century America.

“The times alone have destined me to fame,” Adams wrote. Atlas of Independence: John Adams and the American Revolution offers a reader-friendly overview of Adams’s seminal role in that tumultuous Founding time.

About the Author:

Chris Mackowski, Ph.D., is a writing professor in St. Bonaventure University’s Jandoli School of Communication. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Emerging Civil War and advisory editor for Emerging Revolutionary War.

He has written, co-written, or edited more than thirty books.

Where do our rights come from?  The answer to this question is at the heart of the pine tree flag that was flown by soldiers and sailors during the Revolutionary War. The Founding Fathers were very clear about where they believed rights came from. In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders say that their “unalienable rights” were “endowed by their Creator”.  This was a distillation of hundreds of years of religious and enlightenment thought and writing. Because their rights came from God, the role of government was not to provide rights, but to protect their natural rights from people or governments that would infringe them. 

If a government were to attempt to subvert a people’s natural rights, who could the people appeal to for justice? At that point, the only recourse is an appeal to God or Heaven to protect their natural rights.

The actual phrase comes from a passage in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689): “And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment . . . And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have, by the constitution of that society, any superior power, to determine and give effective sentence in the case; yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz. to judge, whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven.” [emphasis added]

As war between American colonists and British regulars began in 1775, the colonists stressed that the need for war was to defend their natural rights, or the “rights of Englishmen.”  Supporters of the patriot cause developed numerous flags and banners that highlighted the cause for which they were fighting.  These banners which flew from ships, forts, and carried into battle often included symbols and motifs as well as words and phrases.  There were rattlesnake flags with the words “Don’t Tread on Me”.  There were regimental flags with Latin phrases.  Many included stars and stripes, though a standard American national flag was not developed by the Congress until 1777.  Among the banners and flags created in the early days of the conflict that demonstrated the justice of their cause, was an “Appeal to Heaven” flag.

This popular flag that was flown by the colonists was a white flag with a green pine tree in the center and the words “An Appeal to Heaven” (sometimes it would say “An Appeal to God”) scrawled across it. No version of this flag still exists today, but descriptions from the time tell us what it looked like. This flag had much symbolism beyond the important phrase.

The pine tree symbolized the New England colonists’ home. The pine tree had long been used as a symbol of Massachusetts during the colonial period.  The eastern white pine was very common to the area and New Englanders adopted the tree as a symbol of their land as early as the 17^th century. As the colonies went to war with Great Britain in 1775, many Massachusetts troops carried flags with pine trees on them.  New England Continental army units used pine tree flags in battle, such as at Bunker Hill.  The colonial leader Dr. Jospeh Warren used the phrase “appeal to Heaven” in a letter he penned to the people of Great Britain after the first battles at Lexington and Concord in which he noted that “to the persecution and tyranny of his cruel Ministry we will not tamely submit; appealing to Heaven for the justice of our cause, we determine to die or be free.” He lived up to his words.  In one account, at the Battle of Bunker Hill, just before being shot in the head, Dr. Jospeh Warren pointed to one of the “Appeal to Heaven” flags and asked his men to remember what they were fighting for.

Following the incredibly bloody Battle of Bunker Hill, and following George Washington’s arrival as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, the Continental Congress published a declaration of “the Causes and Necessity of their taking up Arms.” In this declaration the Congress asserts that they had no “ambitious Designs of separating from Great Britain, and establishing Independent States”, but that they were “resolved to die Freemen rather than to live Slaves.”

This declaration reached the army encamped outside Boston in mid-July. General Israel Putnam had his division paraded at Prospect Hill on July 18, 1775 where the declaration was read to the troops.  A flag had been sent to Putnam from Connecticut and it was unfurled after reading the declaration and a prayer.  As the flag was raised, the wind caught it and unfurled it. On one side was emblazoned “An Appeal to Heaven” and on the other side “Qui Transtulit Sustinet” which is Latin for “He Who Transplanted Still Sustains.”  Included on this banner was the Connecticut armorial bearings.

By October of 1775, not just army units were using this banner, but also American floating batteries and ships were flying it. Col. Joseph Reed wrote to two other officers: “Please to fix upon some particular colour for a flag, and a signal by which our vessels may know one another. What do you think of a flag with a white ground, a tree in the middle, the motto “Appeal to Heaven”? This is the flag of our floating batteries.”  By January of 1776, British newspapers were reporting the flag flying from American privateers.  In April of 1776, the Massachusetts government directed that their naval forces use the banner.

Ultimately, the Patriots’ appeal was answered, and the United States won its freedom from British rule.  Today, the flag symbolizes a central aspect our Revolution: that our rights come from God and when tyrannical governments attempt to deny those rights, we have a right and a duty to appeal to the highest level.

Join us this Sunday at 7 p.m. on our Facebook page as we welcome back historian and author Gary Ecelbarger to discuss his latest book, George Washington’s Momentous Year: Twelve Months that Transformed the Revolution―Vol. 2: Valley Forge to Monmouth, January to July 1778. Volume 2 picks up where Volume 1 concluded, in the wake of the Battle of Whitemarsh in early December 1777, with the British army returning to Philadelphia and French officials opening formal negotiations with American diplomats. Check out our discussion with him last year for Volume 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFFTklzSDmI

Ecelbarger’s original research revises the history of this crucial period, presenting for the first time Washington’s aggressive plan to attack Philadelphia soon after arriving at Valley Forge and the fact that the encamped army was much larger than previously understood.

This video will be posted on our Facebook page and then later go up on our YouTube page and audio podcast.