- Savage, Life beyond Death, 31.
- Many scholars have lauded Whitman as one who afforded dark-skinned
peoples equal respect with whites; he observed that his personal kindness to blacks
was part of his nature. But some crudely racist comments that he made the closing
days of his life, together with the admission that his expression of similar views in
the past had upset some of his friends, con¤rm his lingering anti-black prejudice. See
WWC, 8:439; WWC, 9:48–49. Like Carlyle and proslavery apologists—and many
Free Soilers—Whitman was chie®y concerned with the deleterious effect the blacks
might have upon the white population.
27.LGVar, 174; LG1856, 120. For the three-line verse quoted above, the 1860 edi-
tion reads:
I do not refuse you my hand,
I do not say one word against you.See Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1988), 77–93 (the quotation is from p. 90). On the prevailing racialist theories of the
day, see also John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scienti¤c Attitudes of Racial Infe-
riority 1859–1900 (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1971).
28.LGVar, 175.
29.UPP, 2:67; T. R. Rajahsekhariah, The Roots of Whitman’s Grass (Rutherford,
N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1970), 401; Conner, Cosmic Optimism, 121.
- Perry Miller’s introduction to Jonathan Edwards’s Images or Shadows of Di-
vine Things, 23; Edwards’s quotation appears on p. 130.
31.LG, 157; LGVar, 236. - James O. Wheatley, “Reincarnation—How It Stands, What It Entails: Re-
®ections on Paul Edwards’ Reincarnation,” The Journal of the American Society for Psy-
chical Research 91 ( July 1997), 230–231. - Lamont, Illusion of Immortality, 164–166. Davis is quoted in Braude, Radical
Spirits, 51. - On the possible postmortem retention of human faculties, see Arthur Flew,
“The Logic of Mortality,” in Death and Immortality in the Religions of the World,
ed. Badham and Badham, 179–180. - Moore, In Search of White Crows, 53. Moore declares that spiritualists, reject-
ing Calvinist teachings, derived many of their ideas of Heaven and Hell from Swe-
denborg, although they generally rejected any belief in Hell (56–58). - John Hick, “The Survival of the Disembodied Mind,” in Death and Eternal
Life, 265–269. All of the material in this paragraph is quoted or derived from this
source. In turn, Hick’s comments rely heavily, he says, on a paper by H. H. Price
called “Survival and the Idea of ‘Another World.’” - Perhaps this is what Edward Carpenter had in mind when he called Whit-
man “a savage in the happy hunting ground, with all his faculties restored”; see
Edward Carpenter, Edward Carpenter—1844–1920—Democratic Author and Poet
(London: Friends of Dr. Williams’s Library, 1970), 11 [pamphlet].
258 / Notes to Pages 114–120