Abstract
In a series of his notebook entries from the mid-1850s, Walt Whitman carries on a personal debate concerning questions of liberty, race, and slavery. Having decided to leave aside the practical reasons for opposing slavery ("Will it pay?"), he introduces what he considers the deeper argument at stake—the philosophical question of racial and social inferiority: The learned think the unlearned an inferior race. The merchant thinks his bookkeepers and clerks and sundry degrees below him; they in turn think the porter and carmen common; and they the laborer that brings in coal, and the stevedores that haul the great burdens with them. (Whitman [1854?] 1978, III: 762)
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