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Four Additional Regiments

About This Item

  • Title: Four Additional Regiments
  • Date: 9 December 1857
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.01324
  • Source: Brooklyn Daily Times, 9 December 1857: 2. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm scan of the original issue. Microfilm of original issue held at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the journalism, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This piece is unsigned, as was the case for most of Whitman's journalism. However, this editorial is part of a series of texts that deal with a coherent theme that has been identified by the Whitman Archive journalism team as likely authored by Whitman. This decision is based on a combination of historical and (auto)biographical accounts, similarity to contemporary Whitman writings, a history of scholarly attribution, extant clippings retained by Whitman, computational stylometric analysis, and, in some cases, manuscript evidence in Whitman’s hand.
  • Contributors to digital file: Thara Michaelis Cassandra Jannel Simms Stefan Schöberlein Karie Cobb
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Four Additional Regiments." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 16 July 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.01324.xml (TEI)
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FOUR ADDITIONAL REGIMENTS.—

The President1 calls for four additional regiments so that we may the more speedily and effectually flog the Mormons. Would’nt it be cheaper to pay these gentlemen with Oriental tastes in regard to matrimony to emigrate? Four additional regiments! The time was when 6,000 men served us, but now the expense of supporting the army alone nearly equals the entire expense on government account of some of the earlier administrations—John Q. Adams’s,2 for example. In the course of time at the rate things are progressing we shall have as large a standing army as some of the European despotisms. Strange it is, that while Russia and Austria, and France should be devising means for reducing their armies we should be talking about increasing ours.

Notes:

1. James Buchanan (1791–1868) was the fifteenth President of the United States (1857–1861). Late in life Whitman still considered Buchanan "perhaps the weakest of the President tribe—the very unablest" (With Walt Whitman in Camden, Monday, November 5, 1888). For more information on Whitman and his disdain for Buchanon, see also Bernard Hirschorn, ""To a President" (1860)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]

2. John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), was the sixth President of the United States, serving from 1825 to 1829. In an unpublished obituary for the New Orleans Daily Crescent, Whitman described Adams as "a virtuous man—a learned man" but "not a man of the People" ("The People and John Quincy Adams," Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress). [back]

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