THE STATE MOTTO OF NORTH CAROLINA:
"Esse Quam Videri" 

by Patrick Killough  [07/28/1999]

North Carolina's Colonial Motto

On July 4, 1776 North Carolina joined 12 other colonies in declaring itself a sovereign member of an alliance of 13 independent nations. It had done the same thing all by itself in the Mecklenburg Declarations 14 months earlier. Before that it was a  province of Britain. The colony’s obscure Latin motto was QUAE SERA TAMEN RESPEXIT. This was from Vergil’s First Eclogue, verse 27. In Vergil’s pastoral poem two shepherds meet and talk about their flocks and amours. One is excited that a god led him to visit the great, indeed the incomparable, city of Rome. And what great cause inspired you to look upon Rome, asked Meliboeus. Tityrus then replied:

Libertas, quae sera tamen respexit inertem/
....et longo post tempore venit. 
“It was freedom. It arrived late in my life. It found me sluggish.”
To me our colonial motto conjures up a hokey Yankee Doodle bumpkin dazzled after an arduous round-trip ocean voyage . He has beheld London, the source of colonial freedom. He is now back home in our mountains and plains. If there is more to our first motto than that, then let an industrious student of Latin and American history at Asheville High School research what it was meant to convey. 

The State's Motto

North Carolina in 1776 abandoned its first motto while not yet adopting a second.  Decades passed. Then in 1896 Judge Walter Clark drew up a bill and presented it to his friend Senator Jacob Battle. The proposed new motto was ESSE QUAM VIDERI (“to be rather than to seem”) and would be displayed on a field bearing the date 20 MAY,1775.

20 MAY, 1775 recalled the Mecklenburg Declarations, the first British colonial proclamation of independence. It would have been unthinkable after the successful American revolution to revive a colonial motto which implied that liberty had come very late to a sluggish North Carolina.  For Liberty came first to North Carolina. That is reality. That is not appearance and is one reason why ESSE QUAM VIDERI is an appropriate motto. “To be rather than to seem,” that is what North Carolina is meant for.

Judge Walter Clark’s bill was passed unanimously and unaltered by an enthusiastic North Carolina House of Delegates. Clark went on to become the Old North State’s Chief Justice. In 1910 he wrote a short essay, “Our State Motto and its Origin,” which was dug out for me by the amiable regional archivist and colleagues based in Biltmore Village, Asheville.

To Be versus To Seem

Phrases exalting “to be” over “to seem” are very old in Western literature. Judge Clark’s essay finds one in Aeschylus’s play “Seven Against Thebes.” Plutarch tells us that when the audience heard Aeschylus’s phrase, “He wants to be great, not seem great,” all eyes fell upon Aristides the Just, present among them. Socrates, too, contrasted his efforts to teach the truth with that of the sophists who contented themselves with teaching the mere likeness of truth.

But it was left to the great Roman orator and statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero to toss off the sentence whence comes our State’s motto. In his essay on friendship (de amicitia, Ch. 98), Cicero argues that true friendship is rooted in virtue. That is, evil  men cannot make good friends. Yet when it comes to virtue, most people yearn to appear good but are not willing to do what it takes to be good. 

“Virtute enim ipsa non tam multi praediti 
ESSE QUAM VIDERI 
volunt.”


Three British noble houses display ESSE QUAM VIDERI on their coat of arms. So does one North Carolina college and a society at Wake Forest University. Recently, I filled in a crossword puzzle which read “..........quam videri,” (North Carolina State Motto). Chief Justice Walter Clark picked a winning motto.  It is short. It expresses a very old Greco-Roman ideal. It is widely known for saying something vital about the Old North State.

-OOO-

for John Locke Society