The Seals of Massachusetts

As I discussed yesterday, state flags weren’t a big deal in the early decades of the U.S. of A. They weren’t official symbols. Indeed, since flags were national emblems, raising a state flag usually signaled an attempt to break away from the nation.

In contrast, colonial and state governments needed seals to make laws and other government documents official. State seals were therefore a big deal from the start.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony received authority to use a seal in its charter from King Charles I in 1629, and it continued to use the same seal design long after Charles lost his head.

That first seal included a figure of a Native American, clad only in leaves, carrying a bow and arrow pointed to the ground. This man even had a word balloon twirling from his mouth: “Come over and help us,” based on Acts 16.

That picture nodded to the Massachusett people the colony took its name and land from, and to the Puritans’ self-appointed mission to convert those locals. The downward-pointing arrow symbolized peace.

Massachusetts received a new charter in 1692, making it officially a province instead of a colony. The official seal then became the royal coat of arms.

When in July 1775 the Massachusetts General Court took on the role of governing most of the colony without the input of Gov. Thomas Gage, it needed a new seal. After all, Gage and his appointees had the old one inside besieged Boston.

The legislature turned to the most prominent Patriot engraver: Paul Revere. He produced the image the lawmakers requested: a typical contemporary Massachusetts man holding a sword and the Magna Carta. That was Massachusetts’s official seal from 1775 to 1780.

At the end of 1780, the state had a new constitution and a new governor, and the General Court adopted a new seal. Or rather, it returned to the old figure of a Native American man with a bow and arrow. Nathan Cushing proposed the design, and Revere was once again the first engraver. Over the years, there were many little variations on that basic design.

An 1885 law went much further in specifying the details of the seal, including:

an Indian dressed in his shirt and moccasins, holding in his right hand a bow, and in his left hand an arrow, point downward, all of gold; and in the upper corner above his right arm, a silver star with five points. The crest shall be a wreath of blue and gold, whereon is a right arm, bent at the elbow, and clothed and ruffled, the hand grasping a broadsword, all of gold.

Heraldically, the man and the arm aren’t part of the same scene. However, brandishing a broadsword over the head of someone representing the original people of the region doesn’t make for a peaceful look. Not as awkward as the long-used seal of Whitesboro, New York (which was considerably changed a couple of years after this posting), but still.

Massachusetts’s flag is one of many state flags created simply by putting the state seal on a solid field. And in our case, that field is plain white. So the state flag isn’t terribly imaginative or eye-catching, even beyond the question of appropriating a Native American figure and then waving a sword over him.

In May 2022 a Massachusetts commission recommended changing the state’s seal to better reflect its values. That in turn would change the flag, or open the door for a new flag design. However, the commission couldn’t agree on an alternate proposal before its legal mandate ran out. So by default we’re sticking with an Indian whose presence goes back to 1629 and an arm with a sword perhaps borrowed from Paul Revere’s Patriot of 1775.