Great Seal Eagle Coloring Page: Free Printable PDF Sheet

Great Seal Bald Eagle: History and Symbolism

Choosing the Eagle for the Great Seal

The bald eagle was selected for the Great Seal of the United States on June 20, 1782, six years after the Declaration of Independence was signed. The design committee — Charles Thomson, William Barton, and others — chose the bald eagle specifically because it was native only to North America. Unlike the lion of England or the eagle of the Holy Roman Empire, the bald eagle had no old-world royal association. It belonged to the new nation alone.

Benjamin Franklin famously preferred the turkey, calling the bald eagle a bird of bad moral character that lived by robbing ospreys. His complaint was made in a private letter, not in an official vote, and the eagle was confirmed without serious debate. Franklin's preference for the turkey is often repeated, but the committee's reasoning was about originality and strength, not temperament.

The Thirteen Arrows and the Olive Branch

The eagle on the Great Seal holds thirteen arrows in its left talon and an olive branch with thirteen olives and thirteen leaves in its right talon. Both numbers refer to the original thirteen states. The olive branch is a centuries-old symbol of peace stretching back to ancient Greece, where athletes received olive wreaths at the Olympics and ambassadors carried olive branches into negotiations. The arrows represent the military capacity the new nation needed to protect its independence.

The eagle faces its right, toward the olive branch, to signal that the United States favors peace over war. Congress can shift the eagle's attention toward the arrows — symbolically choosing conflict — but the default posture looks toward the branch. This directional choice was intentional and debated by the designers.

The Shield and the E Pluribus Unum Scroll

The heraldic shield on the eagle's chest has thirteen vertical red and white stripes covered by a blue horizontal chief bar. In heraldic tradition, the unsupported shield — one not held by a human figure — represents self-reliance. The blue chief stands for the legislative branch; the red and white stripes represent the states. Below the eagle, a scroll or ribbon carries the Latin phrase "E Pluribus Unum," meaning "Out of Many, One." Charles Thomson chose this motto because it had already appeared on the title page of a colonial magazine in 1692 and carried clear meaning for a nation of thirteen distinct states joining together.

The phrase remained the unofficial national motto for nearly two centuries before Congress adopted "In God We Trust" as the official motto in 1956. Both phrases appear on US currency today — "In God We Trust" on the face and "E Pluribus Unum" on the reverse of many coins.

From Official Seal to National Symbol

The Great Seal design appears on the reverse of the one-dollar bill, on military officer insignia, on the President's flag, on passports, and on government buildings across the country. It was first pressed into wax on a treaty document on September 16, 1782, just months after the design was approved. The original die — a brass stamp pressed into soft wax — is still kept by the US State Department, which is the official custodian of the seal.

A second, different eagle image appears on the Presidential Seal, where it was redesigned in 1945 under President Truman to face the olive branch rather than the arrows. Before 1945, the Presidential version had the eagle facing the arrows — a detail that drew criticism during wartime when the symbolism felt unnecessarily aggressive. Truman's redesign aligned the Presidential Seal with the Great Seal's peace-forward direction.

The Bald Eagle's Recovery Story

By the 1960s the bald eagle had nearly vanished from the lower 48 states. The pesticide DDT, introduced for agricultural use in the 1940s, built up in fish — the eagle's primary food — and caused the birds' eggshells to thin so severely that adult eagles cracked them while incubating. The US Fish and Wildlife Service counted fewer than 450 nesting pairs in the continental United States in 1963. DDT was banned in 1972, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 gave the bald eagle legal protection. By 2006 the population had recovered to over 9,000 nesting pairs, and the bald eagle was removed from the endangered species list in 2007. That recovery is one of the most celebrated wildlife conservation successes in American history and gives the national symbol a second meaning: resilience.