Flag of Michigan

Cass’s coat of arms

The design on Michigan’s flag is older than the state. Lewis Cass, the longtime governor of Michigan Territory, designed a coat of arms and seal, and the 1835 constitutional convention adopted them on June 2, 1835, more than a year before statehood. The state flag is simply that coat of arms on a blue field.

Early flags

Several flags came before the present one. On February 22, 1837, a few weeks after statehood, Governor Stevens T. Mason presented a flag to the Brady Guard, a Detroit militia company. It was not an official state flag, but it is often called Michigan’s first: it showed the state arms with a soldier and a woman on one side and a portrait of Mason on the other. A fragment survives in the Capitol’s flag collection.

The first official state flag came at the end of the Civil War. Recommended by Adjutant General John Robertson and approved by Governor Henry Crapo, it showed the state coat of arms on blue on one side and the arms of the United States on the other. It was first flown on July 4, 1865, at the laying of the cornerstone of the soldiers’ monument at the national cemetery in Gettysburg.

In 1911 the legislature set the present design, in a law that took effect on August 1, 1911: a blue flag “charged with the arms of the state,” on both sides, with the US arms dropped.

What the arms show

• The elk and the moose. The two animals holding the shield, both native to Michigan.
• The man on the peninsula. On the shield, a man stands on a peninsula beside a lake at sunrise. His raised right hand stands for peace; the gun in his left shows that the state is ready to defend itself, as Michigan lies on an international border.
• Tuebor. Latin for “I will defend,” on the shield.
• The eagle. The crest, standing for the United States, holds an olive branch with 13 olives and three arrows.
• E Pluribus Unum. The national motto, “Out of many, one,” on a ribbon above.
• The state motto. Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice, “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you,” on a ribbon below.

The flag pledge

Michigan has an official pledge to its flag, written by Harold G. Coburn and adopted in 1972. It describes Michigan as “two beautiful peninsulas united by a bridge of steel,” a reference to the Mackinac Bridge. A 2016 bill to hold a contest for a new flag design did not pass, and the 1911 flag remains in use.