Missouri State Coat of Arms

The Missouri coat of arms is the central heraldic design of the Great Seal of Missouri. It appears on the state flag, official state documents, and government buildings. The design is unusually complex for an American state coat of arms: a divided shield, two grizzly bear supporters, a helmet above, a crescent in the crest, and two separate mottoes below.

The coat of arms was authorized by the Missouri General Assembly and approved on January 11, 1822, less than five months after Missouri became the 24th state on August 10, 1821. Missouri's 1820 state constitution had already set the motto that would appear on the seal before the seal itself was designed.

Missouri adopted its first state constitution in 1820, before Congress formally admitted the state. That constitution included the motto Salus populi suprema lex esto, a Latin phrase from Cicero meaning Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law. Missouri became the 24th state on August 10, 1821, after the Missouri Compromise of 1820 resolved a congressional deadlock by admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state simultaneously.

In late 1821, the Missouri General Assembly commissioned a coat of arms and seal. The task went to Judge Robert William Wells, a circuit judge born in Maryland in 1795 who had moved to Missouri Territory in 1818. Wells brought deep classical learning to the commission and began work immediately.

Wells designed a divided shield joining federal and state arms, placed two grizzly bears as supporters, embedded the 1820 constitutional motto in the outer ring, and added a second motto at the base. The General Assembly approved the design on January 11, 1822.

Twenty-five years later, in 1847, Wells wrote a detailed explanation of every element he had chosen. He addressed the motto directly, explaining that the foundation of state government rests on the public good and that he wanted citizens to understand this principle when viewing the seal. His written explanation is one of the fullest accounts any designer has left of an American state coat of arms.

The Missouri coat of arms is built around a divided shield supported by two grizzly bears, with a helmeted crest above and two mottoes below. Each element was chosen by Judge Wells for a specific heraldic or philosophical reason.

The divided shield is the argument at the center of the coat of arms. By placing the U.S. arms and Missouri's arms side by side at equal size, Wells made a visual claim about the relationship between state and federal sovereignty: they belong together, neither above the other. This claim was made in 1822, four decades before the Civil War would put it to the test.

The Cicero motto and the unity scroll create a philosophical frame around that argument. Salus populi suprema lex esto places government's purpose in the welfare of all citizens. United We Stand, Divided We Fall connects that purpose to the survival of the nation as a whole. Together, they define both what government is for and what holds it together.

The three grizzly bears place Missouri in a specific landscape. In 1821, Missouri was a frontier state. Grizzly bears still lived in the region. The bears on the seal captured that identity at a particular moment: a state at the edge of the known, committed to the Union, carrying a Latin motto from ancient Rome.

Missouri Territory existed from 1812 to 1821 and used a territorial seal during that period, but no formally adopted coat of arms preceded the 1822 design. The design Wells created in 1822 has remained the basis of Missouri's coat of arms and Great Seal without replacement.

What does survive are nineteenth-century printed renderings of the same statutory design. These are useful for showing how the arms were drawn in older reference works even though the underlying legal design did not change.