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⁴ [Norton, Charles Eliot], “Leaves of Grass,” Putnam's Monthly 6 (1855): 321Google Scholar. While Norton wrote that he admired the “original perception of nature,” “manly brawn,” and “epic directness” of Whitman, in a letter to James Russell Lowell he privately confessed, “One cannot leave it about for chance readers.” He added that he “would be sorry to know that any woman had looked into it past the title-page. I have got a copy for you, for there are things in it you will admire.” Charles Eliot Norton to James Russell Lowell, 23 September 1855, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 1: 135. “‘No, no,’ Lowell replied, ‘the kind of thing you described won't do.’” James Russell Lowell to Charles Eliot Norton, 12 October 1855, Letters of James Russell Lowell, ed. Charles Eliot Norton, 3 vols. (1904; repr., New York: AMS 1966), 1:242.

⁵ Griswold, Rufus M., New York Criterion, November 10, 1855, in Walt Whitman, the Critical Heritage, ed. Hindus, Milton (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 31Google Scholar; Traubel, Horace, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 4 vols. (1905–1906; repr., New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961)Google Scholar, 1:127.

⁶ Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 1:51. On the relationship between Whitman and Emerson, see Reynolds, David S., Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995), 194Google Scholar.

⁷ John Burroughs Diary, December 1871, quoted in Barrus, Clara, Whitman and Burroughs: Comrades (1931; repr., Fort Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1968), 64Google Scholar.

⁸ Allen, Gay Wilson, The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 174Google Scholar; Lannon Smith, F., “The American Reception of Leaves of Grass: 1855–1882,” Walt Whitman Review 22 (1979): 153Google Scholar.

⁹ Whitman, Walt to James R. Osgood, 8 May 1881, The Correspondence of Walt Whitman, ed. Miller, Edwin Haviland, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977)Google Scholar, 3:224.

¹⁰ “Walt Whitman. A Poet's Supper to his Printers and Proof Readers.” [Camden Post], [18 October 1881], Walt Whitman—A Series of Twenty-Three Newspaper Items with Notes by the Post. Excerpts from the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana located in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library Duke University.

¹¹ Stevens, Oliver to James Osgood, 1 March 1882, The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman, ed. Bucke, Richard Maurice, Harned, Thomas B., and Traubel, Horace L., 10 vols. (1902; repr., Brosse Pointe, MI: Scholarly Press, 1968)Google Scholar, 8:289–90.

¹² James Osgood to Walt Whitman, 4 March 1882, Complete Writings, 8:289; Walt Whitman to James Osgood, 7 March 1882, Complete Writings, 8:290; James Osgood to Walt Whitman, 21 March 1882, Complete Writings, 8:293–94; Walt Whitman to James Osgood, [23] March 1882, Complete Writings, 8:294; James Osgood to Walt Whitman, [29 March] 1881, Complete Writings, 8:295; Walt Whitman to James Osgood, March 1882, Complete Writings, 8:294; James Osgood to Walt Whitman, [10 April] 1882, Complete Writings, 8:296; Walt Whitman to James Osgood, 12 April 1882, Complete Writings, 8:296–97.

¹³ Chainey, George, “Keep Off the Grass,” This World, June 17, 1882, 8Google Scholar, Container 22, Reel 13, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress.

¹⁴ Advertisement, “Republished! The Suppressed Book!” Liberty, 22 July 1882, 2.

¹⁵ Heywood, Ezra H., “An Open Letter to Walt Whitman,” Leaf Literature, Princeton, MA: Published by Angela T. Heywood, 1882Google Scholar, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

¹⁶ Parker, Alison M., Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873–1933 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 4Google Scholar.

¹⁷ For representative examples of historical studies that interpret the moral reform movement as opponents to free speech rights, see Haney, Robert W., Comstockery in America: Patterns of Censorship and Control (Boston: Beacon Hill, 1960)Google Scholar; Gertzman, Jay A., Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A number of Whitman scholars also express a whiggish interpretation of the Leaves of Grass controversy. Allen, Solitary Singer, 494–500; Andriano, Joseph, “Societies for the Suppression of Vice,” Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. LeMaster, J. R. and Kummings, Donald D. (New York: Garland, 1998), 649Google Scholar; Callow, Philip, A Life of Walt Whitman: From Noon to Starry Night (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), 353–54Google Scholar; Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, 530–45; Loving, Jerome, Walt Whitman's Champion: William Douglas O'Connor (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1978), 405–20Google Scholar; Asselineau, Roger, The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Personality (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), 237–51Google Scholar. For status anxiety and social control interpretations, see Boyer, Paul, Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (New York: Scribners, 1968)Google Scholar; Kendrick, Walter M., The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking Press, 1987)Google Scholar. As elite defenders of family and cultural status, Beisel, Nicola, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Donovan, Brian, White Slave Crusaders: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887–1917 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006)Google Scholar. As an anti-feminist movement, see Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Bates, Anna Louise, Weeder in the Garden of the Lord: Anthony Comstock's Life and Career (Landham, Md.: University Press of America, 1995)Google Scholar. As protofeminists, Parker, Purifying America; Wheeler, Leigh Ann, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)Google Scholar. On the historiography of reform movements, see Hunt, Alan, “Anxiety about Social Explanation: Some Anxieties about Anxiety,” Journal of Social History 32 (1999): 509–28CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Dennis, Donna I., “Obscenity Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Law and Society 27 (2002): 369–81Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Hutchison, William R., Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, 6, 8, 30–83. On moral reform movements, see Hunt, Alan, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Fuller, Wayne E., Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Foster, Gaines M., Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ The term “Protestant establishment” and its synonyms are used in a descriptive, not normative, sense. Hutchison, William R., “Preface: From Protestant to Pluralist America;” “Protestantism as Establishment,” in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960, ed. Hutchison, William R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), vii–xiGoogle Scholar, 3–17.

²⁰ Trumbull, Charles G., Anthony Comstock, Fighter: Some Impressions of a Lifetime of Adventure in Conflict with the Powers of Evil (New York: Fleming, 1913), 51Google Scholar; Comstock, Anthony, “The Suppression of Vice,” North American Review 135 (1882): 484Google Scholar.

²¹ Comstock, Anthony, Frauds Exposed, or How the People Are Deceived and Robbed, and Youth Corrupted; Being a Full Exposure of Various Schemes Operated Through the Mails, and Unearthed by the Author in a Seven Years' Service as a Special Agent of the Post Office Department and Secretary and Chief Agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (1880; repr., Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1969), 391Google Scholar.

²² Appendix to the Congressional Globe: Containing Speeches, Reports, and the Laws of the Third Session Forty-Second Congress (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Congressional Globe, 1873): 297. At one level, the Comstock Act built upon previous legislation. The first federal law against obscene literature was the Tariff Act of 1842, which gave authority to customs officials to seize obscene material. During the Civil War, Congress had passed a law in 1865 against mailing obscene literature. In comparison to these two laws, the Comstock Act was more far-reaching in its scope. Moreover, as Hal Sears observes, the law neither defined obscenity nor specified “whether it intended to be solely a criminal statute (that is, concerned with seizing objectionable matter only as a contingency of the arrest of a violator) or whether it aimed to establish a civil post-office censorship separate from any criminal provisions of the law.” Sears, Hal, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 71Google Scholar.

²³ Comstock, Frauds Exposed, 425.

²⁴ Comstock, “Suppression of Vice,” 484–89. On Comstock's background, the founding of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and the 1873 Comstock Act, see Trumbull, Anthony Comstock, 43–99; Johnson, Richard Christian, “Anthony Comstock: Reform, Vice, and the American Way” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1973), 45–72Google Scholar; Bremner, Robert H., “Introduction,” in Traps for the Young, by Comstock, Anthony, ed. Robert H. Bremner (1883; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1967), vii–xivGoogle Scholar; Bates, Weeder in the Garden of the Lord, 49–97.

²⁵ Woodhull, Victoria Claflin, “And the Truth Shall Make You Free.” A Speech on the Principles of Social Freedom, Delivered in Steinway Hall, Nov. 20, 1871 and Music Hall, Boston, Jan. 3, 1872 (New York: Woodhull, Claflin & Co., 1872), 23Google Scholar.

²⁶ “Arrest of Woodhull and Claflin for Slander of Henry Ward Beecher,” Boston Evening Transcript, November 4, 1872, 4.

²⁷ After the trial, Woodhull went on a lecture tour. A few years later she sailed for England, renounced free love, and married a British aristocrat. For an excellent analysis of the life and thought of Victoria Claflin Woodhull, see Frisken, Amanda, Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

²⁸ Woodhull, Victoria Claflin, “Moral Cowardice and Modern Hypocrisy; or, Four Weeks in Ludlow Street Jail, the Suppressed Boston Speech of Victoria Woodhull,” Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, December 8, 1872, 3–7Google Scholar, quoted in Blatt, Martin Henry, Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 80Google Scholar. On the history of the free love movement and its battles with moral reformers, see Sears, , Sex Radicals, 3–149Google Scholar.

²⁹ Ezra Heywood, The Word, January 1876, 2. See also, for example, Heywood, Ezra, “Intelligent Motherhood,” The Word, December 1872, 1Google Scholar; Heywood, Ezra, Editorial, The Word, February 1873, 3Google Scholar; Heywood, Ezra, “Free Love League,” The Word, May 1876, 2Google Scholar; Heywood, Angela T., “Woman's Love: Its Relations to Man and Society,” The Word, June 1876, 1Google Scholar; Heywood, Ezra, “Free Love League,” The Word, July 1877, 3Google Scholar.

³⁰ Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 100–41; Sears, Sex Radicals, 153–82.

³¹ Heywood, Angela T., “Men's Laws and Love's Laws,” The Word, September 1876, 1Google Scholar.

³² Heywood, Ezra, Cupid's Yokes: The Binding Forces of Conjugal Love. An Essay to Consider some Moral and Physiological Phases of Love and Marriage, Wherein is Asserted the Natural Right and Necessity of Sexual Self-Government (Princeton, Mass.: Co-operative Publishing, 1877)Google Scholar, 3, 12.

³³ Ezra Heywood, letter to the editor, Boston Commonwealth, reprinted in The Word, December 1877, 3.

³⁴ Heywood, Ezra, “Trial and Verdict,” The Word, February 1878, 2Google Scholar. See also “Mr. E. H. Heywood's Case,” Boston Globe, January 25, 1878, 3.

³⁵ “Free Love League,” The Word, July 1878, 2.

³⁶ Editorial Notes, The Word, July 1878, 2; “Society for the Suppression of Vice,” Boston Evening Transcript, May 29, 1878, 2. For at least three years, Allen had been raising funds for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice from wealthy Bostonians. Frederick B. Allen, 21 January 1875, “The Suppression of Obscene Literature,” [circular], Rutherford B. Hayes Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio.

³⁷ New England Watch and Ward Society, Sixty-Sixth Annual Report of The New England Watch and Ward Society, For the Year 1943–1944 (Boston: Office of the Society, 1944), 6–8 (hereafter cited as Annual Report WWS, [year]).

³⁸ Allen, Frederick Lewis, Frederick Baylies Allen: A Memoir (Cambridge, Mass.: Privately Printed at the Riverside Press, 1929), 75–80Google Scholar; New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, Annual Report of the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice (Boston: n.p., [1883]), 3 (hereafter cited as Annual Report NESSV, [year]).

³⁹ Annual Report WWS, 1893–94, 30.

⁴⁰ Porter, Noah, Books and Reading; or, What Books Shall I read and How Shall I read Them?, 4th ed. (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., 1870)Google Scholar, 62, 72, 59–60, 89, 90; Porter, , “Fiction: Its Capacity to Amuse, Instruct, and Elevate,” Our Continent, February 15, 1882, 9Google Scholar. On Victorian literary culture, see May, Henry F., The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of our Own Time, 1912–1917 (1959; repr., New York: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 30–51Google Scholar; Bradbury, Malcolm, The Modern American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 1–19Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Annual Report WWS, 1908–1909, 29–35; Parker, Purifying America, 21–22.

⁴² Porter, Noah, The Elements of Moral Science, Theoretical and Practical (New York: Scribner, 1887)Google Scholar, 22, 325–26, 333. On Porter as well as nineteenth-century moral philosophy, see Kuklick, Bruce, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 58–74Google Scholar; Kuklick, Bruce, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edward to John Dewey (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 128–45Google Scholar; Meyer, D. H., The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Robinson, Ezekiel G., Principles and Practice of Morality: Ethical Principles Discussed and Applied (Boston: Silver, Rogers, and Co., 1888), 200Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Seelye, Julius H., ed., A System of Morals, by Hickok, Laurens P. (Boston: Ginn and Company, [1880], 1896), 51Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 199, no. 1. According to Seelye, “God, in nature, has surrounded” the sexual passion “by the many checks and safeguards of the native modesty and previous estimate of virtue in the pure, the public disgrace and self-reproach which attaches to the impure, the most inveterate and loathsome diseases which follow in its train, and the debasing of every refined sensibility which follows on the loss of sexual virtue.” Seelye, A System of Morals, 51.

⁴⁶ Porter, Elements of Moral Science, 470.

⁴⁷ Porter, Books and Reading, 90; Porter, Elements of Moral Science, 336, 487.

⁴⁸ Porter, Elements of Moral Science, 437, 438. See also, Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 244, 249–50.

⁴⁹ Porter, Elements of Moral Science, 493–94.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 488, 397, 487, 396, 491. On the organic view of society of Porter and other moral philosophers, see Stevenson, Louise L., Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 129–30Google Scholar; Howe, Daniel Walker, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar, 126, 128.

⁵¹ Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 205.

⁵² Hart, D. G., “Mainstream Protestantism, ‘Conservative’ Religion, and Civic Society,” in Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, ed. Heclo, Hugh and McClay, Wilfred M. (Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 199–203Google Scholar.

⁵³ Ezra Heywood, Social Ethics: An Essay to Show that, Since the Right of Private Judgment Must be Respected in Morals, as well as in Religion, Free Rum, the Conceded Right of Choice in Beverages, and Required Power to Decline Intoxicants Promotes Rational Sobriety and Assures Temperance (Princeton, Mass.: Co-operative Publishing, n.d.), 5. One of the chief reasons that the state “must be made unnecessary,” Benjamin R. Tucker argued in the initial issue of his periodical, Liberty, was that the state “stifles thought.” Tucker, Benjamin R., “Our Purpose,” Liberty, August 6, 1881, 1Google Scholar. On Tucker and individualist anarchy, see McElroy, Wendy, The Debates of Liberty: An Overview of Individual Anarchism, 1881–1908 (Landam, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003)Google Scholar; Coughlin, Michael E. and Hamilton, Charles H., eds., Benjamin R. Tucker and The Champions of Liberty: A Centenary Anthology (St. Paul, Minn.: Michael E. Coughlin and Charles H. Hamilton Publishers, 1975)Google Scholar. On Heywood's view of society, see also Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 56.

⁵⁴ Heywood, letter to the editor, 3.

⁵⁵ Porter, Elements of Moral Science, 438.

⁵⁶ Seelye, A System of Morals, 139, 173–74, 174, emphasis added, 175.

⁵⁷ For example, William Jewett Tucker, who was president of the New England Society in the early 1890s, was tried for heresy in the 1886 at Andover Seminary. His acquittal signaled the victory of the New Theology over Edwardsean Calvinism in the Congregational Church. Phillips Brooks's 1891 election as Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts likewise marked the triumph of the Broad Church theology in that denomination. Williams, Daniel Day, The Andover Liberals: A Study in American Theology (New York: King's Crown Press, 1941)Google Scholar; Harp, Gillis, Brahmin Prophet: Philips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003)Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Hutchison, William R., The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (1976; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 2Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Gordon, George A., The New Epoch for Faith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902)Google Scholar, 17, 361, 36–41.

⁶⁰ Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America, 134.

⁶¹ Annual Report WWS, 1897–98, 41–42.

⁶² Annual Report WWS, 1914–15, 5, 21; Annual Report WWS, 1923–24, 6.

⁶³ The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, founded in 1872, is just one example. Gilfoyle, Timothy J., City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: Norton, 1992), 185–91Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Parker, Purifying America, 5–6, 35–36; Geller, Evelyn, Forbidden Books in American Public Libraries, 1876–1939: A Study in Cultural Change (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 28Google Scholar; Crafts, Wilbur F., Patriotic Studies of a Quarter Century of Moral Legislation in Congress for Men's Leagues, Young People's Societies and Civic Clubs including Extracts from Bills, Acts and Documents of United States Congress Relating to Moral and Social Reforms, 1888–1911 (Washington, D.C.: International Reform Bureau, 1911)Google Scholar; Foster, Moral Reconstruction.

⁶⁵ Annual Report WWS, 1897–98, 41.

⁶⁶ Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America, 61.

⁶⁷ Annual Report NESSV, 1879–80, 3; Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Journal of the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 1880 (Boston: Rand, Avery and Co., 1880), 418Google Scholar; Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Journal of the Senate, for the Year 1880 (Boston: Rand, Avery and Co., 1880), 214Google Scholar; Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Acts and Resolves Passed by the General Court of Massachusetts, in the Years 1880–81 (Boston: Rand, Avery, and Co., 1881), 64Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ United States v. Heywood, Circuit Court, Federal Records, vol. 78, 1877–78, 695–96, District Court of the United States of America, for District of Massachusetts, National Archives at Boston, Waltham, Mass.

⁶⁹ Proceedings of the Indignation Meeting Held in Faneuil Hall, Thursday Evening, August 1, 1878, to Protest Against the Injury Done to the Freedom of the Press by the Conviction and Imprisonment of Ezra H. Heywood (Boston: Benj, R. Tucker, 1878); “Free Speech: Great Meeting in Faneuil Hall,” Boston Globe, August 2, 1878, 1; “The Heywood Indignation Meeting,” Boston Evening Transcript, August 2, 1878, 2.

⁷⁰ “The Pardon,” The Word, December 1878, 2; “Heywood Pardoned,” Boston Globe, December 20, 1878, 4; “Heywood at Liberty,” Boston Globe, January 4, 1879, 4.

⁷¹ Hayes, Rutherford B., Hayes: The Diary of a President 1875–1881: Covering the Disputed Election, the End of Reconstruction, and the Beginning of Civil Service, ed. Harry Williams, T. (New York: David McKay, 1964), 184–85Google Scholar. This victory inspired free lovers to seek a pardon for another convicted free love activist and editor of the The Truth Seeker, D. M. Bennett, who had been arrested by Comstock. A judge had sentenced Bennett to thirteen months in prison and fined him three hundred dollars in June 1879. This time the anti-pardon campaign, which gathered the signatures of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Talbot, Unitarian theologian James Freeman Clarke, and a number of leaders in the New England Society, won. “The Opposition,” The Word, September 1879, 2; “Free Speech, Free Mails,” The Word, October 1879, 2; Robert G. Ingersoll to Rutherford B. Hayes, 2 July 1879, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio; Anthony Comstock to Rutherford B. Hayes, 7 July 1879, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio. On Hayes and the controversy over Heywood and Bennett, see Hoogenboom, Ari, Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior & President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 383–86Google Scholar; Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 118–19; Sears, Sex Radicals, 166–68, 171–72.

⁷² “Mrs. Hayes' Censorship of the Press,” The Word, March 1880, 2.

⁷³ Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 1:150–51. Despite his objections to expurgation, Whitman had a hand in, or at least approved, four different expurgated editions of Leaves of Grass. Falsom, Ed, “Leaves of Grass, Junior: Whitman's Compromise with Discriminating Tastes,” American Literature 63 (1991): 641–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁴ William D. O'Conner to Richard M. Bucke, 29 April 1882, Container 53, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress.

⁷⁵ William D. O'Conner to Walt Whitman, 17 April 1883, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 4:193.

⁷⁶ Bucke, R. M., letter to the editor, Springfield Republican, May 23, 1882, 1Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ O'Connor, William D., letter to the editor, New York Tribune, May 25, 1882, 3Google Scholar; Chadwick, John W.. letter to the editor, New York Tribune, May 25, 1882, 7Google Scholar; O'Connor, William D., letter to the editor, New York Tribune, June 18, 1882Google Scholar; O'Connor, William D., “Mr. Comstock as Cato the Censor,” New York Tribune, August 27, 1882, 5Google Scholar. O'Connor's most notable contribution to American literature was his 1866 apologia of Whitman in the wake of his dismissal from the Department of the Interior in 1865, The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication (New York: Bunce and Huntington, 1866). On O'Connor's role in defending Whitman's Leaves of Grass in 1882, see Loving, Walt Whitman's Champion, 123–38.

⁷⁸ Loving, Walt Whitman's Champion, 132.

⁷⁹ Griswold, New York Criterion, November 10, 1855, in Walt Whitman, ed. Hindus, 31.

⁸⁰ Whitman, Walt, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Grier, Edward F., 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, 2:798, quoted in Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, 456.

⁸¹ Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, 207–210, 222, 225, 461; Schurr, William H., “Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: The Making of a Sexual Revolution,” Soundings 74 (1991): 126Google Scholar; Kuebrich, David, Minor Prophecy: Walt Whitman's New American Religion (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001), 139Google Scholar; Graham, Rosemary, “The Prostitute in the Garden: Walt Whitman, Fanny Hill, and the Fantasy of Female Pleasure,” ELH: English Literary History 64 (1997): 484–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸² Whitman, Walt, “A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads,” November Boughs (1888)Google Scholar, reprinted in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, ed. David McKay (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1900), 556–57.

⁸³ Sprague, Homer B., “Societies for the Suppression of Vice,” Education 3 (1882): 74Google Scholar. At the height of the Leaves of Grass controversy, one moral reformer wrote: “The passions are normally and gradually developed in man as in the lower animals; but the brutes are under no restraint. Instinct, impulse, and opportunity determine their actions. Yet, as passion strengthens, it stimulates the imagination. Marriage, only, affords legitimate gratification. Lust, indulged in thought or deep apart from love, is moral impurity; sexual love with lust, apart from wedlock, is the spirit of adultery. This is the strain placed by God, human nature, and law, upon man.” Buckley, J. M., “The Suppression of Vice,” North American Review 134 (1882): 495–96Google Scholar.

⁸⁴ Porter, Elements of Moral Science, 478.

⁸⁵ James E. Miller, Jr. “Children of Adam (1860),” Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, 115.

⁸⁶ Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 387.

⁸⁷ Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, 230.

⁸⁸ Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 101–03; Maire Mullins, “A Woman Waits for Me (1856),” Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, 794–95.

⁸⁹ O'Connor, The Good Gray Poet, reprinted in Loving, Walt Whitman's Champion, 202.

⁹⁰ Heywood, Ezra H., “The Outlook,” The Word, August 1878, 3Google Scholar.

⁹¹ Tucker, “Our Purpose,” 1.

⁹² Tucker, Benjamin R., “Mr. Chainey's Gospel,” Liberty, November 12, 1881, 2Google Scholar.

⁹³ Kuebrich, Minor Prophecy, 21. Whitman once described Leaves of Grass to Traubel as a “New Bible.” Complete Writings, 9:6. According to Kuebrich, the role of religion in Leaves of Grass is best understood not as one theme among others but constituting “a coherent world view that informs the other themes and integrates them with one another.” As such, he notes, Leaves of Grass is designed “to emancipate the human subject and promote his or her development. After announcing himself as a saving prophet in ‘Song of Myself,’ Whitman immediately leads the reader through two sequences: ‘Children of Adam,’ designed to sanctify the body and liberate heterosexual passion; and ‘Calamus,’ designed to liberate men from emotional repression, call for new levels of male intimacy, and united the soul with God… . he presents a vision of a loving God who not only provides for evolutionary and historical progress but also personal immortality and the soul's ongoing development in the afterlife.” Kuebrich, Minor Prophecy, 10; Kuebrich, “Religion,” Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, 583.

⁹⁴ Whitman, , Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982)Google Scholar, 1332, quoted in Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, 238. Whitman once told Traubel that “the negative virtues of the churches are the most menacing, to me the most abhorrent, of all professed virtues… . The morals of the churches: they might be morals if they were not something else: I have always looked about to discover a word to describe the situation: how Jesus and the churches have got divorced: how the institution has destroyed the spirit.” Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 1:97–98.

⁹⁵ Heywood, letter to the editor, 3.

⁹⁶ “Morality and Purity Cranks,” Liberty, August 9, 1883, 5.

⁹⁷ Tucker, Benjamin R., “Leaves of Grass,” Liberty, November 26, 1881, 3Google Scholar.

⁹⁸ Walt Whitman to John Burroughs, 28 April 1882, Correspondence, 3:274.

⁹⁹ Whitman, Walt, “A Memorandum at a Venture,” North American Review 134 (1882): 546–48Google Scholar. To Whitman's dismay he could not shake the association with erotic literature. Apparently people wrote Whitman letters or sent him writings that were obscene. He got one such letter and showed it to Traubel and said: “It has always been a puzzle to me why people think that because I wrote Children of Adam, Leaves of Grass, I must perforce be interested in all the literature of rape, all the pornograph [sic] of vile minds. I have not only been made a target by those who disposed me but a victim of violent interpretation by those who condoned me. You know the sort of stuff that's sent to me here.” Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 4:119.

¹⁰⁰ “New Publications,” New York Tribune, November 19, 1881, 6. Like Whitman's contemporaries, Whitman scholars today continue to disagree over whether Whitman offered a true alternative to both erotic and Victorian literature. David Reynolds, for instance, argues that Whitman offered a “chaste alternative” and “a new objectivity to the exploration of human sexuality” when compared to the erotic writing of his day. Beneath the American Renaissance (New York: Knopf, 1988), 223; Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, 298. Rosemary Graham, by contrast, argues that “Whitman's best erotic writing owes a substantial debt to pornography,” especially the eighteenth-century British erotic classic, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or as it is better known, Fanny Hill. “The Prostitute in the Garden,” 569–97. On the sexuality of Whitman's poetry, see also Kaplan, Justin, Walt Whitman: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 44–47, 327–28, 330Google Scholar; Erkkila, Betsy, Whitman: The Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 308–23Google Scholar; Allen, Solitary Singer, 64; Zweig, Paul, Whitman: The Making of a Poet (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 12Google Scholar; Schurr, “Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass,” 101–28.

¹⁰¹ “The Suppression of Walt Whitman,” Literary World, June 3, 1882, 180; “Leaves of Grass,” Editorial, Boston Globe, May 28, 1882, 6.

¹⁰² Chainey, “Keep Off the Grass,” 3, 4, 6–7, 8. Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 142–60.

¹⁰³ George Chainey to William D. O'Connor, 27 June 1882, Container 22, reel 13, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress; George Chainey to Walt Whitman, 27 July 1882, Container 194, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress; Boston Daily Advertiser, June 20, 1882; and “‘The Late Attack on Walt Whitman's Book.’ From the Philadelphia Press,” n.p., two newspaper clippings included in George Chainey to William D. O'Connor, 11 July 1882. Excerpts from the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana located in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library Duke University.

¹⁰⁴ Benjamin R. Tucker to William D. O'Conner, 9 July 1882, Container 63, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress.

¹⁰⁵ Walt Whitman to William D. O'Connor, 9 July 1882, Correspondence, 3:296.

¹⁰⁶ William D. O'Connor to Walt Whitman, 20 July 1882, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 2:60.

¹⁰⁷ William D. O'Connor to Walt Whitman, 29 June 1882, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 3:50.

¹⁰⁸ James M. Marr to Postmaster, Boston, 1 July 1882, Container 22, reel 13, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress.

¹⁰⁹ George Chainey to William D. O'Connor, 11 July 1882. Excerpts from the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana located in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library Duke University.

¹¹⁰ Tucker, Benjamin R., “Obscenity and the State,” Liberty, May 27, 1882, 2Google Scholar.

¹¹¹ Tucker, Benjamin R., “On Picket Duty,” Liberty, July 22, 1882, 1Google Scholar.

¹¹² Benjamin R. Tucker to William D. O'Conner, 4 July 1882, Container 63, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress; William D. O'Connor to Benjamin R. Tucker 6 July 1882, Container 22, reel 13, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress; Tucker to O'Conner, 9 July 1882.

¹¹³ Tucker, Benjamin R. to Walt Whitman, 25 May 1882, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 2:253–54Google Scholar.

¹¹⁴ Tucker, Benjamin R., “On Picket Duty,” Liberty, August 19, 1882, 1Google Scholar.

¹¹⁵ “The Sovereignty of Liberty,” The Word, August 1882, 2. See also, “Inspiration Versus Censorship,” The Word, July 1882, 2.

¹¹⁶ Walt Whitman, “To A Common Prostitute,” The Word—Extra (1882), Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Heywood, “An Open Letter to Walt Whitman.”

¹¹⁷ “The Latest United States Assault,” The Word, December 1882, 2.

¹¹⁸ Walt Whitman to William D. O'Connor, 12 November 1882, Correspondence, 3:314.

¹¹⁹ Heywood, Ezra, “Trial of the Case, UY.S.G. v. E.H.H,” The Word, January 1883, 2Google Scholar; Heywood, Angela T., “The Woman's View of It—No. 2,” The Word, February 1883, 2–3Google Scholar; Heywood, Ezra, “Citizen Right vs. Class-Rule Assault,” The Word, March 1883, 2Google Scholar.

¹²⁰ Heywood, Ezra, “Citizen Right Vindicated,” The Word, May 1883, 2Google Scholar; Tucker, Benjamin R., “On Picket Duty,” Liberty, June 9, 1883, 1Google Scholar; Tucker, Benjamin R., “The Value of the Heywood Victory,” Liberty, June 9, 1883, 3Google Scholar; Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 144–46.

¹²¹ O'Connor, William D. to Walt Whitman, 17 April 1883, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 4:90–91Google Scholar; Whitman, Walt to William D. O'Connor, 14 April 1883, Correspondence, 3:338–39Google Scholar.

¹²² Whitman, to O'Connor, 12 November 1882, Correspondence, 3: 314Google Scholar.

¹²³ Whitman, “A Memorandum at a Venture,” 548. For other evidence of Whitman's critic of free love views of marriage, see Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, 223–24.

¹²⁴ Whitman, Walt to William D. O'Connor, 29 March 1883, Correspondence, 3:335Google Scholar.

¹²⁵ O'Connor, William D. to Walt Whitman, 27 October 1882, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 4:323Google Scholar. On the day of Heywood's trial, O'Connor wrote Whitman, “To-day is the day set for Heywood's trial, and cold shivers run over me as I think of it. I can't help some sympathy for the devilish fool, despite the mischief he is likely to do to us.” O'Connor, William D. to Walt Whitman, 27 March 1883, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 3:566Google Scholar.

¹²⁶ Goodheart, Lawrence B., “The Ambiguity of Individualism: the National Liberal League's Challenge to the Comstock Law,” in American Chameleon: Individualism in Trans-National Context, ed. Curry, Richard O. and Goodheart, Lawrence B. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991), 133–50Google Scholar, quotations are on 145. At the National Liberal League meeting in 1878 just before he resigned, Ingersoll said: “I believe that the family is the unit of good government, and that every good government is simply an aggregation of good families. I therefore not only believe in perfect civil and religious liberty, but I believe in the one man loving the one woman.” Ingersoll, Robert, “Convention of the National Liberal League,” The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, 12 vols. (New York: Dresden, 1909), 12:233–35Google Scholar. On Abbot and the controversy within National Liberal League over free love, see Ahlstrom, Sydney and Mullin, Robert Bruce, The Scientific Theist: A Life of Francis Ellingwood Abbot (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1987), 11–27Google Scholar.

¹²⁷ Whitman, to O'Connor, 12 November 1882, Correspondence, 3:315Google Scholar.

¹²⁸ O'Connor, William D. to Walt Whitman, 1 April 1883, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 2:260Google Scholar.

¹²⁹ According to Reynolds, the Leaves of Grass edition produced by the Philadelphia publisher Rees, Welsh and Company quickly went through five printings by the end of 1883. In December of that year, Whitman received a royalty check for more than $1,200. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, 543–44.

¹³⁰ Kennedy, William S., The Fight of a Book for the World (West Yarmouth, Mass.: Stonecraft Press, 1926), 115Google Scholar.

¹³¹ Willard, Charles B., Whitman's American Fame: The Growth of His Reputation in America After 1892 (Providence, R.I.: Brown University, 1950), 26Google Scholar.

¹³² Bloom, Harold, “Bloom on Walt Whitman,” in Walt Whitman, Classic Critical Views, ed. Bloom, Harold (New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2007)Google Scholar. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin=CCVWW001&SingleRecord=True (accessed March 22, 2009).

¹³³ Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 147–81.

¹³⁴ Annual Report WWS, 1896–97, 20; Annual Report WWS, 1917–18, 22.

¹³⁵ A. E. G. “Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass,” The Word, January 1889, 2.

¹³⁶ “Boston Discusses Its Censorship Problem,” Publishers' Weekly, May 28, 1927, 2118–20; Annual Report WWS, 1915–16, 32.

¹³⁷ Ballou, Ellen B., The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin's Formative Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 548–59Google Scholar.

¹³⁸ Letter from Theron C. Leland, 29 July 1878, Proceedings of the Indignation Meeting Held in Faneuil Hall, 62.