New Jersey State Coat of Arms

New Jersey is one of the few U.S. states with a proper heraldic coat of arms: a full design with a shield, crest, supporters, and motto. It is separate from but closely related to the state seal, which uses the coat of arms centered on a circular disc.

The design shows a blue shield bearing three gold plows. Above the shield sits a knight's helmet, and above that is a horse's head. On the left stands the figure of Liberty, holding a staff topped with a Phrygian cap. On the right stands Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain, holding an upright cornucopia filled with fruit.

A ribbon at the base carries the motto 'Liberty and Prosperity' with the year 1776. The coat of arms appears in the center of New Jersey's buff-colored state flag. The buff background was adopted in 1965, tracing its color to the facing cloth worn on New Jersey soldiers' uniforms during the Revolutionary War in 1779.

In September 1776, the New Jersey Legislature appointed a joint committee to recommend a design for a state seal. The committee turned to Pierre Eugene du Simitière, a Swiss-born artist living in Philadelphia who was working on seal designs for several of the new American states.

Du Simitière completed his design in late 1776. When he presented the finished coat of arms to the Legislature in May 1777, the Legislature was meeting at the Indian King Tavern in Haddonfield, South Jersey, because British forces had occupied much of northern New Jersey. The Legislature adopted the design there.

Du Simitière had not followed the committee's brief exactly. He added a knight's helmet between the horse's head and the shield, an element the Legislature had not specified. The helmet represented state sovereignty in traditional heraldic language, and the Legislature kept it.

The design remained essentially unchanged for 150 years. In 1928, the Legislature passed Joint Resolution 8, which made several corrections to the standard version. Liberty's staff was moved from her left arm to her right hand, both female figures were turned to face forward rather than away from the shield, and Ceres's cornucopia was changed to stand upright rather than inverted. The year 1776 was written in Arabic numerals for the first time, replacing the Roman numerals used in the original.

The New Jersey coat of arms is a full heraldic achievement: shield, crest, supporters, and motto. Each element was chosen to represent a specific aspect of the new state's identity in 1777.

The design puts the state motto into visual form. Liberty on the left and Ceres on the right each represent one word: Liberty stands for freedom, and Ceres, the goddess of grain holding a cornucopia, represents prosperity. The three plows on the shield anchor both ideas to the land.

The knight's helmet above the shield states that New Jersey governs itself. The Phrygian cap on Liberty's staff was a specific colonial symbol: patriots wore it to signal their opposition to British rule. Both symbols carry the political context of 1777, when the design was created in the middle of the Revolutionary War.

The coat of arms has existed in two distinct forms: the original 1777 design and the standardized 1928 version. The core elements (shield with three plows, helmet, horse's head, Liberty, and Ceres) have remained the same in both.