War & Peace Quote by Martin Van Buren

Van Buren’s sentence is bureaucratic calm with a strategic edge: it treats the expansion of military power as a matter of administrative housekeeping, already “nearly carried into effect,” as if the only remaining task is to file the paperwork. That’s the intent. He’s normalizing a significant shift in federal capacity by framing it as orderly and almost complete. “Increasing and organizing” is the key pairing: growth sounds potentially alarming; organization sounds prudent, managerial, responsible.

The subtext is reassurance aimed at multiple audiences who didn’t trust standing armies and didn’t want the presidency to look trigger-happy. Early American political culture carried a deep suspicion of permanent military establishments as engines of tyranny. Van Buren answers that anxiety not with patriotic fireworks but with a progress report. The Army isn’t merely larger; it’s “usefully employed.” Utility becomes the moral alibi.

Context matters. Van Buren’s presidency sits in the long shadow of Andrew Jackson’s forceful executive style and in the thick of violent expansion on the frontier, including the aftermath and administration of Indian removal. “Extensively… employed” likely signals forts, policing, logistics, and the enforcement of federal policy in contested spaces, where “useful” can mean coercive. The line’s restraint is the point: by avoiding mention of enemies, bloodshed, or controversy, it converts political conflict into institutional competence.

It works rhetorically because it makes power sound boring. Van Buren offers a nation wary of militarization the one thing that most reliably disarms scrutiny: an update that reads like accountability while quietly ratifying the premise that a stronger, more active army is not exceptional, but simply the government doing its job.