Missouri State Coat of Arms

The central shield is split vertically into two halves. The left half carries the coat of arms of the United States: a bald eagle with a striped shield on its breast, holding an olive branch in one talon and arrows in the other. The right half carries Missouri's own arms: a grizzly bear standing upright on a blue field, with a silver crescent above it.

Placing the federal arms beside the state arms on a single shield at equal size was a deliberate statement. Wells designed the divided shield to show that Missouri's sovereignty and the nation's sovereignty are joined rather than ranked. No other state coat of arms makes that argument with this composition.

Two grizzly bears stand upright on either side of the shield, each resting a forepaw on it. They are the design's most recognizable feature and the origin of Missouri's early nickname, The Bear State. A third grizzly bear appears inside the shield as the main figure on Missouri's half of the divided design.

Their placement as heraldic supporters rather than as figures within the shield gives them a structural role. They frame the entire composition: the divided arms, the stars, the mottoes. Wells chose the grizzly bear to reflect the frontier character of Missouri as the westernmost state in the Union at the time of admission.

A silver crescent appears in two places on the coat of arms: above the bear on Missouri's half of the divided shield, and again in the crest above the helmet at the top of the design. In European heraldic tradition, the crescent signifies a newly established or growing entity.

Wells used the crescent to present Missouri as new and expanding at the western edge of the Union. In 1821, Missouri was the last state before the unorganized western territories began. The crescent acknowledged a frontier that still lay ahead.

A helmet sits above the divided shield, topped by a crescent as the crest. In classical heraldry, a helmet above a shield indicates the rank and status of the bearer. Wells explained that the helmet signifies Missouri as a state of the Union, not a kingdom or independent power.

The Latin motto Salus populi suprema lex esto runs in the outer ring of the coat of arms. It means Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law. The phrase is a direct quotation from Cicero's De Legibus, written around 50 BCE, making Missouri the only U.S. state with an official motto taken directly from Cicero.

The motto had already been written into Missouri's 1820 state constitution before Wells began designing the seal. John Locke had used the same Cicero phrase as the epigraph for his Second Treatise of Government, the text that shaped the Declaration of Independence. Wells chose it knowing its full philosophical lineage.

A second motto, United We Stand, Divided We Fall, appears on a scroll at the base of the design. The saying originated in the Revolutionary War era and was widely understood as a statement of American unity. Below the scroll, the Roman numeral MDCCCXX records the year 1820: when Missouri's constitution was adopted, not the year of admission or the year the seal was approved.

Missouri entered the Union through a sectional compromise that balanced slave and free states. Placing a unity motto at the base of the coat of arms at that moment was not merely ceremonial. The phrase about standing and falling together sat directly below a design that joined federal and state arms on equal footing.

Twenty-four stars appear in the outer ring of the coat of arms. They represent the number of states in the Union when Missouri was admitted on August 10, 1821. Missouri was the 24th state. The stars function as a timestamp built into the design, recording the exact size of the nation at the moment Missouri joined it.