Pharaoh, the Red Sea and the Great Seal design Franklin and Jefferson wanted

You know what a committee is. A committee is a group of brilliant people locked in a room until they produce something that none of them would have written alone. Now take that idea and run it on the day the United States declared its independence, with three of the sharpest minds in the country on the committee, and give them a simple assignment: design a seal for the new nation.

What did they come up with? Pharaoh, drowning. Chariots, wheels and all, going under the Red Sea. The Israelites trudging through the wilderness behind a pillar of fire. Two of the Founders, one a printer and one a Virginia lawyer, looked at the whole sweep of Western history, the Greeks, the Romans, the kings of England, the lot, and said that what the new republic most resembled was a bunch of runaway slaves and a very angry sea.

I love it. And I think it tells you something true about America that most of the people who write our textbooks have forgotten. Let me tell you the story, then I will argue what it means.

The assignment, July 4, 1776

On July 4, 1776, the same day that Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, it appointed a committee to prepare a device for a seal of the United States. The members were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Think about the sheer nerve of that. The delegates had just committed treason against the most powerful empire on earth, and before the ink was dry they were asking for the stationery.

It makes sense, though. A government needs a seal to sign treaties, authenticate documents and stand as the sign of its authority. The Continental Congress knew that a nation exists partly in the imagination, and a seal is how a nation introduces itself.

The three men consulted a Swiss-born artist in Philadelphia, Pierre Eugène du Simitière, who helped with the design. And each of them came up with his own idea.

Franklin's proposal: Moses and Pharaoh

Benjamin Franklin proposed a scene from the book of Exodus. As he described it, it showed Moses standing on the shore, extending his hand over the sea and causing the waters to overwhelm Pharaoh, who was in an open chariot with a crown on his head and a sword in his hand. Rays of light came from a pillar of fire in the clouds, reaching to Moses, to show that Moses was acting by command of the Deity. The motto, for which Franklin is credited, was "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God."

Read that motto again, slowly. It is one of the boldest lines of the whole revolutionary period. The British government said that resistance to the king was rebellion, a sin as well as a crime. Franklin flipped the charge. If the king is a tyrant, he said, then resistance is not rebellion against God. It is obedience to him.

And look at the choice of image. Pharaoh is a king in a chariot with a crown, and the people he is chasing are runaway slaves led by a man who answers to a higher power. King George III is not named. He did not have to be.

Jefferson liked the motto so much that he used it on his own personal seal. And he proposed a different scene.

Jefferson's proposal: the wilderness

Thomas Jefferson's design was also taken from the story of Exodus, but from a later chapter. He proposed a picture of the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. On the other side of the seal, he proposed two figures from the Anglo-Saxon past, Hengist and Horsa, the legendary Saxon chiefs who, according to tradition, were the founders of the English nation. The idea was to remind everyone that Americans were descended from English people who had come from the German forests, and who had lived under their own ancient laws long before the Norman Conquest.

That second image tells you something about how Jefferson saw the quarrel. He thought Americans were not rebels against the English tradition but its true heirs, claiming the old Saxon liberties that the later kings had trampled. It is a lawyer's picture, and a Virginia lawyer's at that. The first image, the wilderness, is a pilgrim's picture: a people who have left the place of their bondage and do not yet know where the road ends.

John Adams proposed neither, but something classical: a scene drawn from a painting of Hercules, the hero choosing between virtue and pleasure. It was a very Adams idea, serious and moral and slightly lecturing. It did not go anywhere either.

What happened to the designs

The committee reported to Congress on August 20, 1776. Congress did not adopt the design. It was tabled, and it took until June 20, 1782, after two more committees, before the seal that is on the dollar bill was approved. That design, an eagle with the motto "E Pluribus Unum," was largely the work of Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress, working from earlier proposals. The Exodus scenes did not make it onto the seal.

So, one could say, nothing came of it. But something did come of it, and it is the reason I am telling you about it. The fact that these men, in the first hour of the new nation, reached for the same story tells you what they thought the nation was. The designs were discussed, preserved and later published. And the story they chose runs through American life in a line that is easy to trace once you know to look.

The line through American history

Let me follow it, with dates.

The Liberty Bell. In 1751 the Pennsylvania Assembly ordered a great bell for the State House in Philadelphia, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the colony's Charter of Privileges. The bell was cast with an inscription from the Book of Leviticus, chapter 25, verse 10: "Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof." The verse is about the year of jubilee, in which slaves were freed and debts forgiven. It was not intended as a revolutionary slogan in 1751. The bell was long called simply the State House bell, and it was the abolitionists, in the 1830s, who gave it the name "Liberty Bell" and made it their emblem. A verse about the release of captives became the sign of a nation that believed in liberty.

The abolitionists and the spirituals. Enslaved Americans took the Exodus story as their own. The spiritual "Go Down, Moses," with its refrain "Let my people go," made the story a song, and the figure of Harriet Tubman, who led so many out of bondage on the Underground Railroad, was nicknamed Moses. Abolitionist preachers and writers used the story of Pharaoh and the Israelites in the same way. It was the nearest thing to a shared script for people who wanted slavery ended.

Lincoln. In his Second Inaugural Address of March 4, 1865, Lincoln read the Civil War as a judgment on the nation for slavery and quoted Scripture to say so. The language is full of biblical cadence, though the tradition of the Exodus is more implicit than named.

The civil-rights movement. On April 3, 1968, the night before he was killed, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in Memphis and used the picture of Moses on the mountain. He said he had been to the mountaintop and had seen the promised land, and that he might not get there with his people. The story of Exodus was, for that movement, not a metaphor but a map: a people in bondage, a deliverance by the hand of God, a long march and a land not yet reached.

So the thread runs from the 1776 committee through the bell, through the spirituals, through Lincoln and on to Memphis. That is a thread you cannot cut without losing something.

The argument: why liberation fits America

Now let me argue the point, and I will do it in numbers, because the lawyers in the audience like numbers.

1. America began as an act of leaving. The Pilgrims left England and the Puritans left it a decade later; the colonists of 1776 left the empire's authority. Whatever else the Exodus story is, it is a story about leaving a place of oppression and setting up a new way of living. That was our national situation in 1776, and the Founders saw it.
2. The story is about law, not just escape. The Israelites do not merely flee. They go to Mount Sinai and receive a law, and they bind themselves to a covenant. That is the shape of the American founding too: a revolution that ends in a constitution. The people leave the old order and then they write down the rules of the new one. The pattern of freedom followed by lawful order is what separates 1776 and 1787 from the French and Russian revolutions, which found the first part much easier than the second.
3. The story names the enemy as a tyrant, not a nation. Pharaoh is a king who treats people as property. The story does not say the Egyptians as a people are damned. It says that a power which enslaves its own subjects is in rebellion against heaven. That is exactly the claim in Franklin's motto and in the Declaration.
4. The story gives the lowly a claim against the great. Slaves, shepherds, runaway people with nothing but a promise: they are the heroes. For a country that wanted to tell the world that ordinary people could govern themselves, no story could be better.
5. The story has been used for everyone's liberation. This is the strongest point. The same text that the Founders used against George III was used by enslaved people against their owners and by the civil-rights marchers against Jim Crow. A story that can be turned against the tyranny of its own readers is a story worth keeping.

The steelman: it is a Christian text used by deists

Here is the best objection. Franklin and Jefferson were not orthodox Christians. Franklin was a deist in his mature years, with great respect for the moral teachings of Jesus and doubts about his divinity. Jefferson famously cut the miracles out of the Gospels to make his own edition. So how can their design tell us anything about the religious character of the Founding? It might be only a handy source of imagery, like the Greek myths.

That is partly right and worth conceding. The two men chose the Exodus for its force as a political picture, and neither was making a confession of faith. I would not claim they were.

But the objection proves my point. If skeptical Founders reached for the Exodus, then it was not a story of one denomination. It was the common property of the culture. You use the language everybody knows. In 1776, everybody knew the Exodus. You did not need to be a believer to see that a scene of tyranny drowned and a people delivered would land with the audience. And the committee chose that scene, from every image in history, to introduce the country to the world.

A second objection says the Exodus has a darker side, because the Israelites then conquer Canaan. That is a fair point as a matter of Bible reading, and it is one that Americans in later generations argued about. What the Founders took from the story was the liberation, not the conquest, and what the abolitionists and the civil-rights leaders took from it was the same. Nobody has ever marched in the name of the book of Joshua.

Where to read more

The biblical vocabulary of the Founding runs through several posts on this blog. Thomas Paine's use of Scripture is told in Thomas Paine, a deist, argued for independence from the Book of Samuel. The preaching that taught colonists when resistance to a ruler was lawful is in The Boston sermon of 1750 that taught colonists when to resist a king. The first Americans to attack slavery on religious grounds are in The 1688 Germantown protest and the believers who started abolition. The church roots of the movement that used the story most powerfully are in pulpits, boycotts and the church roots of the civil rights movement. And the question of why the Declaration says rights come from a Creator is in Why 'created equal' is a claim about God and not just about politics. The Declaration itself is at the Constitution page, and the men who wrote it are on the founders page.

One last thought, because I promised a joke and a fair finish. If a modern committee were asked to design a national seal, we know how it would go. There would be a consultant, a focus group, a logo agency and a rebranding budget, and the result would be two overlapping circles and a sans-serif font. The committee of 1776 had no budget and no agency, and it gave us Pharaoh going down with all his chariots. I know which one I would rather put on a flag.

The case in brief

1. On July 4, 1776, Congress named Franklin, Jefferson and Adams to design a seal. Franklin proposed Moses parting the Red Sea over Pharaoh, with the motto "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God," and Jefferson proposed the Israelites in the wilderness.
2. Congress did not adopt their designs, and the seal approved on June 20, 1782 carried an eagle, not an Exodus scene.
3. The story nonetheless runs through American life: Leviticus 25:10 on the Liberty Bell, the spirituals and Harriet Tubman, Lincoln's Second Inaugural, and Dr. King's last speech.
4. Liberation fits America because the nation began as a leaving, because the story ends in law, because its villain is a tyrant, and because the story has served the freedom of everyone who has used it.
5. That skeptical Founders reached for it shows it was common cultural property, not the creed of one church.

What you can do: read Exodus 14 and Leviticus 25:10 with your family, then visit the Liberty Bell page of the National Park Service before you plan a trip.