In 1776, amid the American Revolution, the Continental Congress issued paper Continental Currency designed in part by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the notes of February and later 1776 featured on one side a sundial with the Latin word Fugio (“I flee/fly”) above the exhortation “Mind Your Business,” a practical admonition—rooted in Franklin’s philosophy—to attend to one’s affairs as time flies, and on the reverse an emblem of thirteen interlinked rings representing the original colonies encircling the motto “We Are One,” symbolizing colonial unity under the authority of the American Congress; this same pair of motifs—Mind Your Business and the We Are One chain of rings—was later engraved by Franklin on the 1776 Continental Currency dollar coin patterns and then on the first official U.S. copper Fugio cent authorized by the Congress of the Confederation and struck in 1787, reinforcing this early republic message of industriousness and unity.
