Last week, the Salem City Seal was an agenda item for a meeting of our City Council: apparently there are concerns about its representation and plans for its replacement. I don’t know much more than that, as I wasn’t able to attend the Council meeting or any of the previous subcommittee meetings that have brought us to this point. The Council sent the matter to another subcommittee, I believe, so hopefully a public process of deliberation will ensue. I do think it is appropriate and even useful for a community to reconsider past representations on seals, statues, and other expressions of collective heritage or identity, as long as those conversations are public, so I’m hoping to contextualize this discussion a bit. I’m also kind of curious about the history and reception of our city seal myself, as it always struck me as rather unusual. So I spent a few hours this past weekend digging into some primary and secondary sources—certainly not long enough! What follows is certainly an impressionistic history and a work in progress, but first, here IT is:

So as you can see, there are some variations of this image. The first seal is the official one, which I have taken from the city’s website, and it is accompanied by this description:

The City Seal was adopted as the insignia of the City in March 1839, three years after Salem was incorporated as a City and 213 years after its founding. The Seal depicts a ship under full sail approaching a coastal land in the East Indies. A native inhabitant in traditional garb stands in the middle, surrounded by plants of the region. A dove sits atop the scene, with an olive branch in its mouth. The City motto, “Divitis Indiae usque ad ultimum sinum” – “To the farthest port of the rich East” – is below. The Seal is ringed by the incorporation dates of both the Town of Salem, 1626, and the City of Salem, 1836.

The second seal is also from City Hall: I think it’s the watercolor image produced by Salem artist Ross Turner but the city’s art inventory is not very descriptive. An article in the Beverly Citizen from the spring of 1888 informs us that “Mr. Ross Turner, the artist, has made an interesting and handsome study of the city seal of Salem, designed half a century ago by Colonel George Peobody, who is still living. Mr. Turner adheres to the original design, which has suffered a great deal at the hands of engravers and others.” The third and fourth images are from a pediment carved for the President of State Street Bank which came up at auction a few years ago and the last is from a really fun book, Town and City Seals of Massachusetts by Allan Forbes and Ralph Eastman, which was published in 1950. If you browse through this last book, it’s immediately apparent how unusual the Salem seal is: it’s the only one recognizing a foreign identity and region as integral to the history of the city/town. Every other seal has a recognizable landmark or person or industry from that place—there are quite a few ships but Salem’s is the only one on the other side of the globe! I think it’s one of the oldest seals in the book, too: Massachusetts called for every town and city to come up with a seal only in 1899, when Salem’s was recognized as “ancient.”

The designer of the original seal in the 1830s was George Peabody, son of the wealthiest pepper trader in Salem, Joseph Peabody, and a city alderman. There were deliberations before its acceptance and commission, LOTS of deliberations due to “diversity of opinion”: you can read all about them in the March 1866 volume of the Historical Collections of the Essex Institute. There seems to have been universal agreement that the seal was to represent two things: Salem’s unrivalled prosperity and Salem as City of Peace. Given Peabody’s background, it’s understandable that he chose to depict the personage of a distinctly East Indian man from the Aceh province of Sumatra rather than a more generic “Eastern” figure: this region was the source of the pepper which had enabled Salem’s commercial ascendancy. Joseph Peabody alone is credited with 61 voyages (6.3% ot the total trade)  to Sumatra alone from 1802-1844, and 100 voyages (or 10%) with his son-in-law John Lowell Gardner): this was the family business. The pepper trade was also Salem’s major business between 1799 and 1846, with 179 ships engaged on multiple voyages. The 1866 account of the Salem seal’s approval concluded that “it was her shipping, fitly typified by this design, carrying the fame of her merchants as well as the flag of the country into unknown  areas, that made her name in the first half of this century, a synonym for commercial honor, enterprise and success, throughout the other hemisphere as well as this.”  The second theme of the seal, peace, symbolized by the dove bearing an olive branch, is a bit more of a tough sell in this specific historical context, given the fact that the 1830s was the decade which saw two U.S. military interventions in Sumatra in retaliation for native attacks on American shipping. The connection between peace and commercial prosperity was often emphasized in early nineteenth century newspaper accounts as it was very clear to everyone that Salem’s era of prosperity began after the American Revolution. The pepper trade had been a dangerous one from its beginnings at the turn of the century, but the 1831 attack on the Salem ship Friendship certainly brought things to a head with the first Sumatram intervention, often referred to as the “Battle of Qualah Battoo” (now Kuala Batee) in the following year. The broadside below (from the Phillips Library’s digitized collection) is representative of the “war fever” of the era, but it was printed in Portland, Maine rather than Salem. The Salem accounts are a little less “patriotic” and a lot more detailed: they note the precise number and names of those who were killed or wounded (five and six rather than “all”), everything that was taken, and call for restitution.

George Peabody’s seal was designed a mere four or five years after this engagement, and both his family and his city wanted to continue this valuable trade. When I look at this solitary Sumatran, I tend to identify him with Peabody family friend Po Adam, a local dignitary who warned the Americans about the coming attack on the Friendship and helped them recover their ship. This was a sacrifice on his part: he wrote to Joseph Peabody afterwards that his acts had earned him the “hatred and vengeance of my misguided countrymen” and that “the last of my property was set on fire and destroyed, and now, for having been the steadfast friend of the Americans, I am not only destitute, but an object of derision.” This identification is only conjecture on my part, but the original figure on the Salem seal was certainly more respectful recreation than stereotypical figure. The connection between Sumatra and Salem endured through the nineteenth century into the twentieth, even into the twenty-first. It was referenced in regard to the new (well not really) heritage trail or “yellow line” just a few years ago, and much more significantly after the terrible 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, when relief efforts on the North Shore were organized in deference to the “old ties” between Massachusetts and Sumatra. Almost 20 years later, it seems like these ties are broken, or about to be.