Illinois State Coat of Arms

The coat of arms appears on the Illinois state seal, used on official documents, government correspondence, and public buildings. The Legislature adopted the current design in 1869, replacing a simpler version that had been in use since the 1830s.

Illinois is one of the few states whose official seal contains a deliberate hidden protest — the upside-down word 'Sovereignty' — that was placed there by its designer and never officially corrected. The seal has been in continuous use since 1869 with the inverted text intact.

Illinois became a state on December 3, 1818. Its first official seal, adopted in 1819, was effectively a copy of the Great Seal of the United States. A revised version in 1839 made minor changes to the eagle and stars but kept the same basic arrangement. By the 1860s, the seal had been stamped so many times it had worn down badly.

Sharon Tyndale, who served as Illinois Secretary of State from 1865 to 1869, decided the seal needed a complete redesign. In January 1867, he persuaded Senator Allen C. Fuller to sponsor a bill authorizing a new design. Tyndale wanted to change the motto from 'State Sovereignty, National Union' to 'National Union, State Sovereignty' — a pointed shift in emphasis following the Civil War. The Legislature rejected the change on March 7, 1867, and ordered him to keep the original wording.

Tyndale complied with the letter of the Legislature's order but found a way to register his disagreement. He printed the word 'Sovereignty' upside down on the motto banner. The new seal was completed in 1868 and officially adopted by the Legislature in 1869. The inverted 'Sovereignty' was either not noticed or not challenged, and it has remained on every version of the Illinois seal since.

Sharon Tyndale did not live long after the seal's adoption. He was assassinated outside his home in Springfield on April 29, 1871. His killer was never identified.

The Illinois coat of arms is built around a bald eagle, a shield, a motto banner, a rock, and a landscape of sun, water, and prairie. Most of the design references either American federal symbols or the physical geography of Illinois.

Most of the design follows the conventions of American state heraldry: eagle, shield, stripes, stars, rising sun. Illinois borrowed directly from the Great Seal of the United States in its first two seal designs and kept many of those elements when Tyndale redesigned it in 1868.

What makes the Illinois seal different from almost every other state seal in the country is what Tyndale added: the upside-down 'Sovereignty.' It is one of the rare cases in American official history where a government document contains a deliberate political protest concealed within the official imagery.

The motto 'State Sovereignty, National Union' was contentious after the Civil War. Tyndale believed the Union's survival was more important than the concept of state sovereignty, and he encoded that belief into the seal that Illinois still uses today.

Illinois went through several seal designs before the current one. The territorial seal, created in 1809 when Illinois was still a territory, was modeled closely on the Great Seal of the United States. The first state seal adopted in 1819 was nearly identical to the federal seal.

A second state seal, adopted in 1839, made modest changes — the eagle's wings were reduced and the number of stars was adjusted — but the design remained derivative of the federal seal. The 1869 design by Sharon Tyndale was the first to give Illinois a genuinely distinct visual identity.