Asked to propose a national seal in 1776, Adams and Jefferson chose religious themes.
On
July 4, 1776, after voting to approve the Declaration of Independence,
the Continental Congress advanced the following resolution: “That Dr.
Franklin, Mr. J. Adams and Mr. Jefferson, be a committee, to bring in a
device for a seal for the United States of America.”
Of
these three founders, two suggested seals that incorporated profoundly
biblical images. Franklin, according to his own notes, proposed the
following as the national seal: a picture of “Moses standing on the
Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to
overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head
and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds
reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity.”
Underneath the image, Franklin added, would appear the following motto:
“Rebellion to Tyrants is obedience to God.”
Jefferson,
as described by John Adams in his correspondence, suggested a seal that
bore a different image, but also from the Hebrew Bible: “the Children
of Israel in the Wilderness, led by a Cloud by day, and a Pillar of Fire
by night.”
While
the Declaration’s approval on the Fourth of July is still celebrated
throughout the land, the tale of the seal that began on the same day in
1776 has been all but forgotten. Bruce Feiler, author of “America’s
Prophet: Moses and the American Story” (2009), reflected that when he
first encountered the story, it “stunned me. Why hadn’t I heard about
this before?” The legal historian Michael I. Meyerson, in his 2012 book
“Endowed by Our Creator,” reported that he had used Google Books to
search more than 200 Thomas Jefferson biographies published since 1950
and had found only 12 describing Jefferson’s national-seal proposal.
The
messages behind the two Founders’ proposed images are quite different.
In the biblical tale of the splitting of the sea, Franklin chose a
scriptural story in which God himself miraculously intervenes into the
natural order and redeems his people. The book of Exodus emphasizes
that, in this event, only the Almighty was actively engaged: “And the
Lord saved Israel from the hands of Egypt, and Israel saw Egypt dead on
the shores of the sea.”
Jefferson’s
symbol, by contrast, focused on the courage of the people of Israel in
journeying into the desert; it celebrated not so much the miracle
performed by God as much as the human spirit. This, too, is lauded by
the Bible, in the book of Jeremiah: “I remember thee, the loyalty of thy
youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the
wilderness, in a land that was not sown.”
Religious
Jews to this day observe two separate holidays that commemorate these
disparate themes. In the spring, they observe Passover. It is a
remembrance of God’s miraculous intervention against a tyrannical
Pharaoh, when Jews emphasize at the Seder that the Exodus occurred
through the Almighty’s hand alone, “not by angel nor any other
intermediary.”
Then,
six months later, Jews celebrate Sukkot, or Tabernacles, and build huts
to commemorate, according to one opinion in the Talmud, the ramshackle
shelters in which Israelites dwelled as they followed God through the
desert.
As
Britain’s former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has written, Sukkot can
thus be seen less as a celebration of divinely wrought miracles than of
Israel, of a people’s courage to begin a journey “with no certainty
other than faith itself that they would reach their destination.”
Taken
together, these two national-seal proposals uncannily presaged what the
young nation would experience during the Revolutionary War that
following the Declaration’s adoption.
The
American victory against the most powerful empire on earth was seen by
many patriots as a miracle, a re-enactment of the Exodus itself. This
sentiment was expressed by George Washington, who, in his 1789 letter to
the Jewish community in Savannah, Ga., concluded his correspondence by
invoking the “wonder-working Deity, who long since delivered the Hebrews
from their Egyptian oppressors . . . whose providential agency has
lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an
independent nation.”
At
the same time, as miraculous as the American victory may have been,
Washington himself, and the soldiers he led, remind us that the
Revolution is also a tale of human endurance. “These are the times that
try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine famously reflected in 1776, and his next
words ring true today: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot
will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he
that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
Ultimately,
the Continental Congress adopted the Great Seal familiar today. The
front shows a bald eagle clutching an olive branch and 13 arrows (for
the original states), and the back bears an unfinished pyramid of 13
layers—with the Eye of Providence overhead.
As
we observe the Fourth of July, it is entirely apt for Americans to
thank God for the miracle of the nation’s founding—and to express
gratitude as well for the courage of the men and women who helped bring
it about.
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