Ohio History Journal

EDGAR C. REINKE

Meliorem Lapsa Locavit: An Intriguing

Puzzle Solved

Adorning the handsome facade of The Ohio State University's

William Oxley Thompson Library in Columbus are four central half-

columns of a piano nobile that encloses a shallow balcony in three

bays. Supporting the half-columns are four inscribed stone corbels,

each in the form of a shield. The figures on these shields depict re-

spectively from left to right the Great Seal of the United States, the

Great Seals of the Northwest Territory and Ohio, and the Academic

Seal of The Ohio State University. Because of its Latin motto it is the

second of the four seals with which we are here concerned.1

Dr. John T. Mount, shortly before his retirement as Vice President

of The Ohio State University last year, informed the writer in a letter

that "The Latin phrase, Meliorem Lapsa Locavit, . . . is part of the

seal of the Northwest Territory, . . . We have not found an explana-

tion of why the seal was chosen to appear on the front of the Library.

A Boston architectural firm, Allen and Collins, was selected by a pro-

fessional jury to design the Library," which was ready for occupan-

cy in December, 1912.2 Nor were the University's classicists, despite

diligent search years ago in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae and other

publications, reportedly able to locate the source or explain the

meaning of the baffling Latin motto.³

Edgar C. Reinke is Professor Emeritus of Classical Languages at Valparaiso Universi-

ty.

1. Since the four seals are of related significance in the history of Ohio, their selec-

tion and chronological arrangement side by side on the front of the Library are indeed

felicitous.

2. In his letter, dated June 10, 1983, Dr. Mount included a detailed description of

the Thompson Library and its construction, for which the writer is grateful. For sup-

plying him with needed information requested from his isolated site of retirement in

Florida he is likewise indebted to Mr. Mark Schultz of Columbus, Prof. Rosamond K.

Sprague of the University of South Carolina, and Prof. Mark P.O. Morford of The Ohio

State University.

3. According to oral information received from classicists at OSU; cf. the brief ac-

count, "Meliorem Lapsa Locavit Puzzles Latin Experts Also," in the OSU student-

newspaper, The Lantern, Monday, March 2, 1953.

70                                                   OHIO HISTORY

lapsa locavit, 'he has planted a better than the fallen,'-all combine forcibly

to express the idea that a wild and savage condition is to be superseded by a

higher and better civilization.⁵

It may be added that, with the exception of the coiled snake, the

seal with its Latin motto was adopted in a reconstructed version by

The "Old Northwest" Genealogical Society, appearing on the title

page of the Society's Quarterly periodical during its years of publica-

tion from 1898 until 1912.6

The present paper (1) finds the source of the Latin motto in the

Great Seal of South Carolina, (2) accounts, with reasonable certainty,

for its adoption into the seal of the Northwest Territory, (3) demon-

strates that the translation by Mr. English is doubly incorrect, and

(4) in an epilogue offers the enthusiastic tyro a moral cliche applicable

to all scholarship.

On April 2, 1776, more than a decade prior to the legislation of the

Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the General Assembly of the Pro-

vincial Congress of South Carolina authorized its president and

commander-in-chief, John Rutledge, to see to the making of a perma-

nent Great Seal of South Carolina.⁷ Accordingly, after the Declara-

tion of Independence, a design prepared by William Henry Drayton

(1742-79) of Charleston, a member of the Privy Council, was officially

accepted and submitted to an artist in Charleston for engraving.⁸

In his Memoirs of the American Revolution, a revision of his fa-

ther's Memoirs, John Drayton (1766-1822), Governor of South Caro-

lina and son of William Henry Drayton, describes the obverse side of

the seal as quoted:

ARMS. A Palmetto-tree growing on the sea-shore, erect; at its base, a torn-up

oak-tree, its branches lopped off, prostrate; both proper. Just below the

branches of the Palmetto, two shields, pendent; one of them, on the dexter

side is inscribed March 26-the other, on the sinister side July 4. Twelve

Spears, proper, are bound crosswise to the stem of the Palmetto, their points

raised; the band uniting them together, bearing the inscription QUIS SE-

PARABIT. Under the prostrate Oak, is inscribed Meliorem Lapsa Locavit;

below which, appears in large figures 1776. At the Summit of the Exergue,

5. Charles B. Galbreath, History of Ohio, 5 vols. (Chicago, 1925), 1:553, where the

author adds that the first mention of the seal's use is found in Gov. Arthur St. Clair's

Proclamation of July 26, 1788, as first governor of the Northwest Territory.

6. The Quarterly has been bound in fifteen volumes.

7. George Earlie Shankle, State Names, Flags, Seals, Songs, Birds, Flowers, and

Other Symbols (Westport, Conn., 1938; repr. 1970), 166.

8. John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution ..., 2 vols. (Charleston,

S.C., 1821), l:ix, 373, and 375.

72                                                    OHIO HISTORY

Island-to the Declaration of Independence-and, to the year, when the

Seal was ordered to be made.10

In view of the foregoing it should become readily apparent that the

symbol of a thriving tree sprung from the supine trunk of a dead oak

with Latin motto beneath was borrowed by the Northwest Ordi-

nance of 1787 and inserted into the Great Seal of its legislated North-

west Territory. At first blush this may seem preposterous. For who

would associate South Carolina with the framing of the Northwest

Ordinance? As a matter of fact, however, the authorship of the Ordi-

nance itself has still not been firmly established. Credit for devising

it, at least in part, has been assigned by their respective supporters to

the Rev. Manasseh Cutler and Gen. Rufus Putnam, both of Massa-

chusetts and Ohio, to Rufus King, lawyer and statesman from Massa-

chusetts and New York, to Thomas Jefferson as Governor of Virginia,

and particularly to Nathan Dane, legal expert from Massachusetts.

Daniel Webster in two of his speeches gave to Nathan Dane actually

the entire credit for framing the Ordinance. 11

That South Carolina was instrumental in the designing of the

Northwest Territory's Great Seal is further evidenced by a fortuitous

statement made by Dane in his multi-volume work, Abridgment of the

Laws, namely that in the authorship of the Ordinance he was "as-

sisted almost solely by Mr. C. Pinckney."¹² This startling revelation

singles out the Charlestonian Charles Pinckney (1758-1824), distin-

guished delegate at the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787,

later three-time Governor of South Carolina, and self-trained classi-

cist, as the likely connecting link between the two Great Seals.

The association of the South with the Northwest Territory can be

explained. For in Colonial times not only Massachusetts, Connecticut,

and New York, but also Virginia had laid claim to territory north of

the Ohio River, which they did not relinquish until 1784 or even a lit-

tle later. Moreover, after the War of Independence the leading fami-

lies of New England and South Carolina because of "geographical

10. Ibid., 374 ff. Note the stone shields that decorate the facade of the OSU Li-

brary.

11. Northwest Territory Celebration Commission. History of the Ordinance of 1787

and the Old Northwest Territory (Marietta, 0., 1937), 16-29. For the text of the Ordi-

nance, see U.S. Continental Congress, 1787 .... The Ordinance of 1787. An Ordinance

for the Government of the Territory of the United States Northwest of the River Ohio

(Boston, 1896), 11 pp.

12. Nathan Dane, Abridgment of the Laws, 9 vols. (Boston, 1823-29), 9:74-76; Rufus

King, First Fruits of the Northwest Ordinance (Boston, 1891), 409. Meant by Dane is

Charles Pinckney, not to be confused with his cousin, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney;

at the Federal Convention Charles Pinckney submitted a Plan for the Constitution that

Meliorem Lapsa Locavit                                             73

trade" maintained their close connections formed during the years of

military service; and in addition many of Gen. Nathaniel Greene's of-

ficers married rice heiresses of South Carolina.¹³

Let us now turn our attention more closely to the Latin motto itself.

Mr. English, it will be recollected, translated Meliorem Lapsa Loca-

vit as "he has planted a better than the fallen." Several decades lat-

er we find this version still accepted by Charles B. Galbreath in his

History of Ohio and by George Earlie Shankle in a volume concerning

State seals; yet Galbreath makes no mention of South Carolina, nor

does Shankle suggest any connection between the two Great Seals

other than the occurrence of the same motto in each. 14

Certainly any bright high-school boy or girl who has scanned and

recited as few as a score of lines from Vergil's Aeneid would possess

an ear sensitive enough quickly to see in the Latin inscription the con-

clusion of a dactylic hexameter. What is present here are the two

short syllables of the hexameter's third foot succeeded by a spon-

daic foot, then another dactyl, and at the end the required spondee:

meli-/orem/lapsa lo-/cavit.

The presence in the Great Seal of South Carolina of a verse-tag

coined most probably by William Henry Drayton might well be ex-

pected. For Drayton, the seal's authorized designer, like many of his

fellow Charlestonians, had studied abroad, first already at the early

age of eleven at Westminster School in London, from 1753-61, then

for nearly three years at Balliol College, Oxford.¹⁵ His education

therefore must have been steeped in Latin, if not also in Greek.

Drayton too was a member of the Charleston Library Society, found-

ed in 1748, an association dedicated to the study of the classical

thinkers and their significance to contemporary life.16 Further, the

Society's Ms. Journal of Proceedings heads its Historical Introduc-

tion likewise with a coined dactylic motto: . . .Et artes trans mare

had considerable influence in its final draft. "Charles Pinckney . . . was not only a

great statesman, but a learned lawyer and an accomplished classical scholar, [who] re-

ceived his entire education in Charleston," Edward McCrady, "Education in South

Carolina Prior to and during the Revolution," A Paper (Charleston, S.C., 1883), 19 f.

See also the article on Charles Pinckney in National Cyclopedia of American Biography,

vol. 12 (New York, 1904), 161 f. On the illustrious Pinckney family see George C.

Rogers, Jr., Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (Norman, Okla., c. 1969). In the

present writer's opinion Dane's quoted remark strengthens the role claimed by him in

the authorship of the Northwest Ordinance.

13. Ibid., 128 f.

14. On Galbreath and Shankle, see notes 5 and 7, respectively, above.

15. Drayton, op. cit., l:xiii.

16. See the writer's article, "A Classical Debate of the Charleston, South Carolina,

Library Society," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 61 (Second Quar-

ter, 1967): 87 f.

74                                                   OHIO HISTORY

currunt,17 ["The arts too speed across the sea"]. To be noticed are

the three initial dots of this verse-tag, which indicate that a first half

of the hexameter here too was neither necessary nor desired. The

Historical Introduction was composed in the main by the above-

mentioned South Carolinian John Rutledge, classically educated ju-

rist and celebrated political leader.18

The borrowed Latin motto in the Great Seal of the Northwest Ter-

ritory accordingly must also be construed as metrical. As for its trans-

lation by Mr. English, to whom are we to refer the pronoun "he" as

subject of locavit? To the Deity, with lower case "he"? This view,

however, would not only be arbitrary but would be faulted even

grammatically. For there can be no ablative of comparison since, as

metrically demonstrated, the final a of lapsa is short. And reflect that

in each seal the inscription appears immediately below the fallen

tree: in the one instance the tree symbolizes the timbers of the shat-

tered British ships, in the other the felled forest of the Ohio wilder-

ness; from the prostrate oak rises the superior palmetto, from Ohio's

wild trees of a lawless time the domesticated apple-tree laden with

fruit.

MELIOREM LAPSA LOCAVIT. Taking LAPSA as modifier of an

unexpressed, personified ARBOR as subject of LOCAVIT, thus trans-

late: "Having fallen, it has planted a better one."

Epilogue. About a dozen years ago, while strolling together across

the campus of The Ohio State University, Prof. Clarence A. Forbes,

OSU classicist and past president of the Classical Association of the

Middle West and South, directed the attention of the writer to the

Great Seal of the Northwest Territory with its Latin motto on the

front of the Thompson Library. Only quite recently did the writer

happen upon the motto a second time; though almost indiscernible

in very fine print, by straining it can be made out in the Great Seal of

South Carolina, which heads a chapter of a volume on the United

States Constitutional Convention published in 1982 by M.E. Brad-

ford.¹⁹ This incidental discovery prompted the investigation of the

elusive puzzle. Moral: Indocti discant et ament meminisse periti,²⁰

"The untaught may learn and experts love to remember."

17. Ibid., 87, n. 12, and 97 f. To be recalled here is the Vergilian verse-tag pointed

out in note 9, above.

18. See text to note 7, above.

19. M.E. Bradford, A Worthy Company: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United

States Constitution (Marlborough, N.H., 1982), 197.

20. Latin hexameter by Charles Henault (1685-1770), French historian and drama-

tist, who has here paraphrased Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism, line 741; Classi-

cal and Foreign Quotations, ed. W. Francis H. King (London, 1904), 137, no. 1066.