Louisiana State Coat of Arms

The coat of arms appears on the state flag as a white image on a solid blue field, and on the state seal used for official documents. Unlike many state arms, Louisiana's design does not use a quartered shield with multiple historical symbols. It focuses entirely on one figure: a brown pelican standing in a nest, head bowed and turned left, above three chicks.

Three drops of blood fall from the pelican's breast toward the young birds below. A ribbon beneath the nest carries the state motto in blue letters on a white ground. The design has remained essentially unchanged, with one addition made in 2006: a state law now requires the three drops of blood to appear in every official use of the arms.

Before Louisiana became a state, the Territory of Orleans used a seal showing an eagle holding a laurel wreath, with fifteen stars representing the states of the Union. Governor William C. C. Claiborne, appointed by President Thomas Jefferson in 1803, had the eagle seal made for official use. The reason the pelican replaced it when Louisiana achieved statehood in 1812 is not recorded in official documents.

The pelican was not an unfamiliar symbol in Louisiana at that time. In 1793, the Catholic Diocese of Louisiana's first bishop chose the pelican in her piety as the principal image on the diocesan coat of arms. For Louisiana's largely Catholic population, the symbol carried a recognized religious meaning long before it appeared on the state seal.

By the mid-nineteenth century, several different versions of the pelican seal were in circulation across state offices, with no single authoritative design. In 1902, Governor William Henry Wright Heard directed the Secretary of State to adopt a standardized design. A legislative act that year established the official version: a pelican with its head turned to the left, standing in a nest with three young, in the act of tearing its breast. The words Union, Justice appeared above the pelican and Confidence below.

In April 2006, the Louisiana Legislature passed House Bill 833, signed as Act 92, which required three drops of blood to appear on the pelican in every official use of the state flag and seal. Before this law, many printed versions of the arms showed the pelican without visible blood.

The Louisiana coat of arms is built around one central figure: a pelican tearing her breast over three chicks. Every element of the design connects to that act.

The design asks the viewer to look at an act of sacrifice, not at flags, battles, or borders. The pelican gives her own blood rather than let her young starve. For Louisiana's early Catholic population, the image carried a specific religious weight: the pelican in her piety was a known Christian symbol tied to the Eucharist, where Christ's sacrifice was understood the same way.

By placing this image at the center of the state's official arms in 1812, Louisiana connected its public identity to that tradition. The motto — Union, Justice and Confidence — frames the image with civic language, turning a religious symbol into a statement about what the state values in its government.

The Territory of Orleans used an eagle seal from 1803 to 1812, approved under Governor William C. C. Claiborne. When Louisiana became a state in 1812, the eagle was replaced by the pelican, but the new design was never formally standardized. For the next ninety years, different state offices used different versions of the pelican image, with variations in the pelican's posture, the number of chicks, and whether blood drops appeared.

The 1902 legislative act under Governor Heard established the first legally uniform version. It is the earliest version that can be called official. The various pre-1902 pelican designs are documented as informal or working versions, not separate official arms.