Virginia's flag stages a small piece of political theater on a blue field: a woman in armor stands with her foot planted on a beaten man, his crown knocked to the ground, above a Latin caption that promises the same fate to every tyrant. The image is older than the flag by 85 years. The seal was designed in the summer of 1776 by some of the same men who built revolutionary Virginia, while the flag carrying it was adopted in 1861 by a Virginia that had just left the Union. Between those two dates, and after them, the design has been quoted, standardized, censored, and shouted from a theater stage.
A seal from the first summer of independence
Virginia declared itself free of Britain before the Continental Congress did, and in July 1776 its revolutionary convention needed a seal that did not feature the king. The job went to a four-man committee: George Mason, George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, and Robert Carter Nicholas. The design that emerged is generally believed to be principally the work of Wythe, the law professor who taught Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall.
The committee reached past Britain entirely, to Rome. On the obverse stands Virtus, the genius of the commonwealth, dressed as an Amazon: spear in one hand pointed downward, sword sheathed at her side, one foot resting on the chest of a fallen man. The man is Tyranny. His crown lies beside him, he grips a broken chain in his left hand and a scourge in his right. Below runs the motto "Sic Semper Tyrannis," thus always to tyrants, the line tradition assigns to Brutus as Caesar fell. In 1776 the meaning required no footnote. The tyrant was George III, and Virginia was the boot.
A flag born in secession
For its first eight decades, the commonwealth got along without a state flag; the seal lived on documents. That changed in April 1861. Virginia seceded from the Union on April 17, and on April 30 the state convention adopted an official flag: a deep blue field with a white circle bearing the obverse of the great seal. Virginia regiments needed a banner to fight under, and the new flag gave them one. There is an uncomfortable irony in the timing, a flag proclaiming death to tyrants adopted in defense of a slaveholding order, and the motto's revolutionary pedigree did not go unquoted on either side of the war.
The design survived the Confederacy's defeat without much change. The General Assembly readopted and standardized it in 1912, and in 1950 the description entered the Code of Virginia, where it remains: a deep blue field, a circular white center bearing the coat of arms, shown alike on both sides, with an allowance for "a white fringe on the outer edge, furthest from the flagstaff." The fringe, unusual among state flags, appears on most officially made Virginia flags.
Standardizing Virtus
For decades, no two renderings of the seal quite agreed. Engravers and flag makers improvised details of Virtus's dress, the tyrant's pose, and the surrounding wreath, so the flag varied from one manufacturer to the next. In 1930 the sculptor Charles Keck, whose public monuments stand across Virginia, produced a standardized rendering to end the variation, and his composition is the one still in use.
The standard art settled one long argument and preserved another. Keck kept the classical convention of showing Virtus with her left breast exposed, as Amazons were drawn in antiquity, which makes Virginia's the only US state flag depicting nudity. Most of the time nobody notices. Occasionally somebody does. In 2010, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli distributed lapel pins to his staff with a modified seal, Virtus's breast covered by an armored breastplate, and the resulting ridicule was national. In 2025 a Texas school district blocked the flag's image from an online library platform for the same reason, briefly making Virginia's 249-year-old seal a culture war item.
The motto's long afterlife
"Sic semper tyrannis" escaped the flag long ago. Its darkest moment came on April 14, 1865, when John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, leaped to the stage, and shouted the phrase to the audience. Booth, a Marylander loyal to the Confederacy, knew exactly what he was quoting: he was recasting Virginia's revolutionary slogan with Lincoln as the tyrant. The words have carried that echo since.
The motto has been claimed by militias and printed on t-shirts, cited by revolutionaries and satirists, and it remains on every Virginia flag and on the seal stamped across the machinery of state government. The flag itself draws mixed reviews as design; by vexillological standards it is a seal on a bedsheet. But few state flags depict anything at all, let alone a complete political argument with a body count of one.
References
[1] "Flag and seal of Virginia," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_and_seal_of_Virginia
[2] Code of Virginia § 1-506, "Flag of the Commonwealth." https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title1/section1-506/
[3] "The History of the Virginia State Flag," US Flag Supply. https://www.usflagsupply.com/u.s.-state-flag-history/virginias-flag-history.html
[4] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State and Provincial Flags Survey." https://nava.org