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"UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL"

"UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL," a favorite toast, in varying forms, of political orators from Benjamin Franklin to Abraham Lincoln. It gained currency after John Dickinson's "Liberty Song" was published on 18 July 1768, in the Boston Gazette. The work contained the lines:

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

The slogan regained widespread usage three-quarters of a century later when the popular writer George Pope Morris's "The Flag of the Union" appeared. The poem quoted the sentiment as given above, from the motto of Kentucky, which had been adopted in 1792. Gaining new currency during times of national crisis, the phrase was most recently a popular slogan after the attacks upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Furtwangler, Albert. American Silhouettes: Rhetorical Identities of the Founders. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987.

Irving Dilliard/L. T.

See also Liberty, Concept of; Nationalism; 9/11 Attack.