The creation and promotion of symbols to represent the United States of America was a process that started with the Continental Congress in 1776, which issued a Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and charged a committee with designing an official seal for the nation. A complex effort ensued to create usable symbols that would communicate unity of purpose, core principles, and sovereignty. Participants in committees and competitions for designs—for everything from buildings in the federal city to flags, holidays, and currency—drew from familiar European forms to fashion symbols that would serve as reminders of ancient republics and recall revolutionary unity and sacrifice. But the creation of symbols to represent the nation and the people of the United States was not solely a governmental process. Artists, writers, and ordinary citizens also participated in creating symbols and rituals that expressed their vision of the new nation and its future.
Many symbols that were to become national had their origins in local efforts to instill revolutionary unity. The "liberty tree" or "liberty pole" became both a symbol of resistance and a physical location for planning that resistance during the war. Following the Revolution, partisan politics surrounded these symbols as they became a rallying site for dissent. In the 1790s inflamed Federalists described them as "sedition poles" to cast the actions associated with them (especially those of Democratic Republicans) not as dissent but as dangerous or even treasonable activities. Likewise, the "liberty cap," derived from the Phrygian cap worn by freed Roman slaves, had a limited life after the Revolution in part because of contemporary politics. Revived in the early 1790s during the initial excitement over the French Revolution, the classically inspired figure of Liberty on the half-cent coin took on a martial appearance complete with liberty cap. As the violence of the French Revolution became distasteful to the wary American government, overt symbols of revolution fell from favor.
The figure of "Columbia," sometimes called "America" or "Liberty," was created deliberately to represent the nation. Traditionally Europeans, and particularly the British, had used the figure of an Indian to represent alternately the former North American British colonies or the entire New World. Like the new national figures, the Indian was usually female, with feathered skirt, bare breast, and bow and arrow. The inclusion of a crownlike headdress hinted at the idea of a native aristocracy as personified in the Indian princess. As an American symbol, the Indian figure quickly became relegated to marginal official items such as the Indian Peace Medal, first struck in 1800. Such an item was meant only to be presented to Indians themselves as a mark of formal treaties with the United States; its supposedly Indian features were depicted in a hand clasped in "peace and friendship" below a crossed hatchet and peace pipe. The central image on the medal was that of the current president. After the Revolution, as the nation looked for representative figures, the Indian became undesirable. The founding generation of race-conscious Anglo-Americans looked to symbols they could more readily identify with and that could stand against similar European symbols. In such images Americans sought to reinforce their European origins and keep any lingering provincial insecurities at bay.
The choice of Columbia as the central figure honored Christopher Columbus. Variations on the name "Columbus" appeared everywhere in the 1780s and 1790s. Colleges and towns were named in his honor, and Columbus was a popular subject in poems and songs. The names of scores of newspapers and periodicals such as the Columbian Magazine and Monthly Miscellany and The Columbian Centinel also paid homage. The new federal city would be housed in the Territory of Columbia, and schoolbooks signaled American authorship and content by choosing names like The Columbian Reader.
The search for symbols that might easily communicate the principles and character of the nation went far beyond formal allegorical figures. To counterbalance the feminine figures, the masculine eagle was borrowed from the iconography of the Roman empire to remind all of the link to ancient republics. The committee charged by Congress in 1776 to create a symbol for the nation initiated a six-year process resulting in a Great Seal that held the motto "E Pluribus Unum" (out of many, one) and a central figure of an eagle. The eagle's vigilant stance suggested power and, in the inclusion of a red and white striped shield for a breastplate, an aggressive and even individualistic posture. To mark the number of original colonies, the image included thirteen leaves on the olive branch clutched in one claw and thirteen arrows in the other. The centrality of the motif of thirteen carried over to the national flag. In the version adopted on 14 June 1777 by the Continental Congress, thirteen red and white stripes beside thirteen white stars on a field of deep blue signified the colonies in revolt and, more important, their presumed relationship to one another as equals.
Read or "proclaimed" in cities and towns in the summer of 1776, the Declaration of Independence achieved its own iconic status. Bonfires, gun salutes (observing the ritual number of thirteen shots), parades, and toasts (again, thirteen) celebrated the document. In the 1790s Democratic Republicans used the Declaration in their own Fourth of July rallies and based their claims to authority on issues of government not only on the document itself but on the party membership of Thomas Jefferson, its author. Under the party system that emerged in the 1820s, both Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs claimed descent from the party of Jefferson and so too a particular guardianship of the Declaration's principles. In 1818 John Trumbull's paintings for the Capitol included the popular and widely reproduced Declaration of Independence, depicting the fateful proceedings at the Continental Congress as imagined by the artist. As the generation who fought the Revolution was dying off, a wave of nostalgia and filial piety swept the nation. Lafayette's visit in 1824, the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument in 1825, and the twin deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on 4 July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, inspired commemorative fervor. Jefferson himself asked to be remembered for only three things on his gravestone. The first was his authorship of the Declaration of Independence.
Many Americans fervently desired a capital city to rival those of Europe. That the capital was to be located in the new, independent Columbia Territory (later the District of Columbia) was itself symbolic, because the city would neither depend on nor favor any single state. By 1790 the long, complicated process of designing the city, which would be fraught with competing visions through several administrations, was under way. Pierre Charles L'Enfant, a veteran of the Continental Army and a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, developed a city plan that emphasized large lots and wide boulevards to frame imposing buildings, whose design borrowed freely from ancient Roman and Greek architecture.
L'Enfant's vision called for numerous allegorical figures to adorn the facades of buildings, but President John Adams found these figures too "pagan" for his simple republican and Christian tastes.
The architect Benjamin Latrobe, whom Thomas Jefferson appointed in 1803 as surveyor of public buildings, modified L'Enfant's designs. Latrobe emphasized classical architectural forms, reduced the allegorical figures that so distressed Adams, and increased the number of eagles, stars, and representations of the Constitution. A primary element of building design in the federal city was symbols of the individual states of the union. The visiting citizen was to be reminded directly of the power of the nation and its component states rather than only abstract ideals. Where Latrobe did retain classical figures, such as the one of Justice and a winged youth, he added eagles in a watchful position and a copy of the Constitution in the youth's hand.
Ritual observance of holidays injected the symbols of the nation into public activities. First celebrated in Philadelphia on 4 July 1777, the Fourth of July became the preeminent national holiday. In 1778 George Washington ordered a double ration of rum for troops to mark the day; by 1783 Boston had enacted legislation officially declaring the day a holiday. The memory of the Revolution was the critical factor in shaping nationalism and political culture. Speeches, sermons, songs, poetry, and newspapers all focused on the ideas of shared sacrifice, heroism, and dedication to the principle of liberty. Grounding Independence Day festivities in tributes to those qualities of national character and founding principles created emotional bonds among citizens as well as to the nation itself. By 1800 public figures across the nation were taking advantage of local Fourth of July celebrations to lend authority to their political positions.
Building new traditions on old foundations was often precarious. Washington's position as architect of the military victory in the Revolution and then as its first elected president went beyond simple celebrity and approached the divine. The popularity of and affection for Washington created a climate that was dangerously reminiscent of monarchical cults of personality. In Europe celebrations of the king's birthday were important public holidays; Washington's birthday was celebrated in Virginia in the years after the Revolution and by the 1790s was widely and popularly celebrated across the nation. Upon his death in 1799, following two terms as president and his principled rejection of a third, extravagant public displays of grief included simulated funerals, memorials, needlepoint tributes, and reams of obituaries, songs, and poems. A move was made to bury him within an elaborate tomb in the Capitol itself, but dissenters to this plan included Washington's own family. Another idea floated was to put Washington's face on the penny, but, like the burial plan, this too smacked of monarchical practices.
Ultimately, the penny featured the eagle, and Washington was buried, according to his own wish, at his Mount Vernon home. But the impulse to raise George Washington to the pantheon of the gods found its expression in numerous illustrations, in Horatio Greenough's statue of the president in a Roman toga at the Capitol, in the federal holiday marking his birthday, and in the countless reproductions in schoolrooms across the nation of Gilbert Stuart's famous portrait. Although George Washington was among the elite, the force that propelled his fame and the celebration of his birthday was a product of popular will.
Although powerful figures—politicians, presidents, newspaper editors—attempted to shape the symbolic elements of nationhood, popular symbols emerged and endured. The personification of the American people and, later, the American government was the natural outgrowth of a society born out of the words "We the People" and whose unfettered press drove political culture.
A prime example of personification is Yankee Doodle. For British soldiers stationed in the American colonies, "Yankee Doodle" was a term of derision that mocked the bumpkin colonists. But during the war the Patriots transformed Yankee Doodle into a symbol of American pride. The high point in this process was the victory over the British at York-town, where the troops played the "Yankee Doodle" song at the surrender ceremony to ask, in musical fashion, Who should be ridiculed now?
Following the Revolution, Brother Jonathan arose to fill the need for a figure illustrative of the new citizen of the new United States of America. This character appeared in stage plays and humorous newspaper pieces from the mid-1770s until the midnineteenth century. A figure of both energy and common sense, Brother Jonathan looked toward the future and always got the better of the confidence man or elitist who tried to trick or shame him. Northeastern, middle-class, and relentlessly entrepreneurial, Brother Jonathan eventually became less useful as a national figure. As sectional divisions deepened in the 1830s, Jonathan became a victim of politics. Southern periodicals began to use him as a symbol not of an American type but of a despised Yankee type. The figure of Jonathan gradually melded with that of Uncle Sam, who is first found in soldiers' jests during the War of 1812. With a wiry build, large hat, and striped trousers, Uncle Sam shared physical traits and costume with Brother Jonathan. A common element of political cartoons, Uncle Sam was American but less representative of the American people than of the American government itself.
The United States of America, in its unique position as the first popularly created nation, promoted nationalism and sovereignty by means of the images that symbolized its principles. So that individual citizens would identify their interests with both the nation and their fellow citizens, the government needed to forge the affective ties of patriotic devotion. For the uneasy new states, fearing by the late 1780s that they had traded a royal master for a federal master, the constant reassurance that the foundation for the federal government was the individual state was key to binding the states to a common purpose. To the world beyond its borders, the new nation communicated unity of purpose, strength, stability, and, above all, sovereignty by means of its symbols. Thus American iconography contributed not only to its developing culture but to its standing in the eyes of the world.