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The American minister to France, Silas Deane, complained of the
informality and impropriety of the representatives of the sovereignty of
a nation being without a seal with which to authenticate their official
acts, but the subject was treated with indifference. On January 23,
1777, a committee appointed to examine the files of Congress, William
Ellery of Rhode Island, chairman, selected certain papers which it
thought required the consideration of Congress—among them the “Report on
a Device for a public seal”[18]—but it was not until March 25, 1780,
that the report was taken up again, when James Lovell of Massachusetts,
John Morin Scott of Virginia, and William Churchill Houston of New
Jersey were appointed a committee to report a design for a great seal,
and to them was referred the report of the first committee. The chairman
of the committee and the most important member was Lovell. He was a
Boston school-teacher and a graduate of Harvard College. Being
imprisoned by the British after the battle of Bunker Hill, he was later
exchanged and entered Congress in December, 1776, where he served till
1782, being for a long time on the Committee of Foreign Affairs. While
serving on this committee he must have received Deane’s complaint that
Congress had no seal. Lovell was regarded as a man of great learning,
but was extremely eccentric in his manners and speech.[19] The committee
reported May 10:
The Com̃ittee to whom was referred on the 25^{th} of March last the
report of a former Com̃ittee on the Device of a Great Seal for the
United States in Congress assembled, beg Leave to report the following
Description.