paign slogan when Houston, then a senator from Texas, was prominently
mentioned as the presidential nominee of the nativist Know Nothing
Party.^48 As the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1846 to 1848, Whit-
man favored the vigorous prosecution of the (unsanctioned) war against
Mexico, attacked Horace Greeley and others who opposed the war on
moral grounds, boasted that the war was justly popular with the American
“common people,” and advocated the annexation of that part of Mexico
that lay north of the Rio Grande (southern Mexico apparently being too
full of Mexicans for its successful assimilation into white America). In
one editorial Whitman (who would later gain fame as a poet of compas-
sion) declared that he panted for the day when “the vengeance of a re-
tributive God should be meted out” to the Mexican soldiers who had, in
a confrontation, killed four American soldiers.^49 But section 34 of “Song
of Myself ” is ahistorical; it never identi¤es the locale in which the ac-
tion occurred or provides any details about the battle. Instead, it focuses
on the slaughter of the young American irregulars who are idealized as
native-born, white “American young men,” like those whom the poet ex-
tols in his unpublished political tract “The Eighteenth Presidency!” and
in “Song of the Broad-Axe” (both 1856), and, later, in his Civil War po-
etry and prose—and in the Whitman persona. Of these Texas volunteers
(only about a dozen were actually Texans), section 34 declares:
They were the glory of the race of rangers,
Matchless with horse, ri®e, a song, a supper or courtship,
Large, turbulent, brave, handsome, generous, proud, and
affectionate,
Bearded, sunburnt, dressed in the costume of hunters,
Not a single one over thirty years of ageThe 1855 version of the poem announces as its subject “the murder in
cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men” on a day marked by
a “jetblack sunrise”—a reference to the burning of the bodies of the slain
Americans after the battle. According to the poem’s exaggerated account,
apparently derived from the popular press, the “rangers,” surrounded by
an enemy army “nine times their number” and their ammunition ex-
hausted, negotiated an honorable surrender with the promise of safe con-
duct, but not until they had killed 900 enemy troops! (The entire Mexi-
can force numbered about 1,200.) The passage relates that they were
“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 57