Great Seal of the State of New York

Liberty stands on the left side of the seal, holding a pole topped with a Phrygian cap. The Phrygian cap was worn by freed slaves in ancient Rome and became a standard symbol of liberation in 18th-century revolutionary culture, appearing throughout American and French founding-era imagery.

At Liberty's feet lies a discarded crown. It represents the British monarchy that New York and the other colonies had just rejected. The crown is placed beneath her feet rather than simply absent from the design, making the rejection active and explicit rather than passive.

Justice stands on the right side of the seal, blindfolded, holding scales in one hand and a sword in the other. The blindfold represents impartiality: law applied without regard to the rank or identity of the parties. The scales represent the weighing of evidence and argument.

The sword in Justice's hand represents the authority to enforce legal decisions. The combination of scales and sword expresses that law must be both fair in its judgment and capable of carrying that judgment out.

The central shield shows a New York landscape divided into two halves. The upper portion depicts the Hudson Highland mountains with a sun rising behind them. The lower portion shows two ships under sail on the Hudson River, representing the commercial traffic that moved through New York's primary waterway.

The shield's use of actual New York geography set the seal apart from most contemporaries. Allegorical figures were standard in state seal design; a recognizable landscape was not. The Hudson River was New York's economic backbone in 1777, and its presence on the shield tied the seal to the material life of the state.

A bald eagle with spread wings perches on top of a globe above the central shield. The eagle was widely used in founding-era American symbolism, appearing on state seals and official documents throughout the 1770s. New York's 1777 use of the eagle predates the finalization of the Great Seal of the United States, which was not adopted by Congress until 1782.

The globe beneath the eagle's talons places New York's founding within a broader world context. New York in 1777 was already one of the most active commercial ports in North America, with trade connections extending across the Atlantic.

Excelsior is Latin for ever upward or higher still. It has long been New York's state motto and appears on the white ribbon beneath the shield. In 2020, the state added E Pluribus Unum, the national motto meaning 'Out of many, one,' beneath Excelsior on the same ribbon.

The updated ribbon now combines two ideas: upward striving and political union. Excelsior gained wide cultural familiarity in 1841 when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used it as the title of a poem, while E Pluribus Unum ties the seal more explicitly to the United States as a whole.