United We Stand: a short history of the motto.

The earliest documented use of the motto in American public writing comes from John Dickinson, the Pennsylvania lawyer and Founding Father later known as the “Penman of the Revolution.” In July 1768, Dickinson published a patriotic ballad titled “The Liberty Song” in the Boston Gazette. It was the first widely-circulated patriotic song written by an American, and it was meant to rally the colonies against British rule.

The fourth verse contains the line that would echo through American history for the next two centuries:

Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all!
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.

Dickinson set the lyrics to “Heart of Oak,” a popular British naval march of the period — using the familiar tune to make the song instantly singable in colonial taverns and town squares. The choice was deliberate: rebellion wrapped in a melody people already knew. The phrase “united we stand, divided we fall” spread quickly through the colonies and entered the American political vocabulary.

Kentucky entered the Union on June 1, 1792. A little over six months later, on December 20, 1792, the first Kentucky General Assembly adopted the official seal of the Commonwealth, including the state motto: United we stand, divided we fall. The phrase has been the official non-Latin state motto of Kentucky ever since, formally codified in 1942.

Kentucky’s first governor, Isaac Shelby, was particularly fond of Dickinson’s stanza from “The Liberty Song” and is credited with promoting the line as the young state’s defining principle. The motto reflected the practical reality of frontier Kentucky in the 1790s: small settlements scattered across difficult terrain, surviving by cooperation rather than isolation.

The phrase also appears on the Missouri state flag, written around the central seal — though Missouri’s official state motto is the Latin Salus populi suprema lex esto(“The welfare of the people shall be the supreme law”).

In March 1799, the aging Patrick Henry — by then in failing health — gave what would be his final public speech. Speaking in Charlotte Court House, Virginia, he denounced the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which had been drafted secretly by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to oppose the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Witnesses described Henry as physically weak, swaying as he spoke, hands clasped together. His words still carried weight:

Let us trust God, and our better judgment to set us right hereafter. United we stand, divided we fall. Let us not split into factions which must destroy that union upon which our existence hangs.

At the end of his oration, Henry collapsed into the arms of bystanders and was carried to a nearby tavern. He died two months later, on June 6, 1799, never having delivered another public address. The phrase he used — already three decades old by then — had taken on the weight of a deathbed warning.

During his 1858 Illinois Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech that would echo Dickinson’s motto in a darker key. Accepting the Republican nomination on June 16, 1858, Lincoln drew on the Gospel of Matthew rather than “The Liberty Song”:

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

Lincoln lost that Senate race. But the speech — and the argument that the United States could not survive division indefinitely — became one of the most quoted passages in American political history. By the time Lincoln won the presidency two years later, “united we stand, divided we fall” and “a house divided” had become rhetorical companions, both deployed to argue that the union itself was at stake.

During the Civil War, the phrase became a rallying cry for the Union cause, appearing on broadsides, recruitment posters, and regimental banners. Its meaning was direct: the United States, as a single federal entity, could not be allowed to divide.

The phrase’s second life began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when American labor organizers adopted it as a slogan for solidarity. In coal mining towns, textile mills, and railroad yards, “united we stand, divided we fall” appeared on union banners and strike pamphlets. It meant something specific in that context: workers who organized together had bargaining power; workers who negotiated alone could be picked off one at a time.

This labor usage gave the phrase its modern populist edge. The same words that had served Founding Fathers and Civil War presidents now served working people fighting for the eight-hour day, for safer workplaces, and for the right to organize at all. The motto crossed political lines in a way most slogans never do.

In July 1942, seven months after the United States entered World War II, magazines across the country coordinated to feature the American flag on their covers. Adopting the slogan “United We Stand,” some five hundred publications waved the stars and stripes simultaneously to promote national unity, sell war bonds, and celebrate Independence Day under wartime conditions.

The campaign was a remarkable exercise in voluntary coordination. Magazines that competed fiercely in normal times — fashion publications, business journals, mechanics periodicals, even pulps — all agreed to run essentially the same cover image in the same month. For the magazine industry, it was a way to demonstrate loyalty to the war effort. For the federal government, it was an opportunity to push the war bond message into nearly every American home.

That same year, on August 5, 1942, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands addressed the United States Congress. Speaking as the head of a government in exile after the Nazi occupation of her country, she echoed the slogan to invoke not just American patriotism but the shared cause of the Allied nations: “United we stand, and united we will achieve victory.”

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History later assembled an exhibition of the original 1942 magazine covers, marking the campaign’s sixtieth anniversary in 2002.

In the weeks following the September 11 attacks, the phrase “United We Stand” reemerged across the country — on bumper stickers, store windows, billboards, t-shirts, and license plates. The phrase had not been in heavy public rotation since the Cold War; it returned almost overnight.

In 2002, the South Carolina Department of Public Safety issued a special “United We Stand” license plate, designed by Troy Wingard. Several other states followed with similar commemorative plates. The phrase had completed a full historical circuit — from Dickinson’s tavern song to Kentucky’s state motto to a state-issued license plate marking a national tragedy.