Through Whitman's manuscript notebooks, we can also trace more closely the evolution of the name Lucifer in "The Sleepers." Lucifer, of course, is another name for Satan. According to a nineteenth-century Webster's dictionary like the one Whitman used, "Lucifer" referred to "the planet Venus, when appearing as the morning star," and it also referred in the biblical book of Isaiah to a fallen king of Babylon ("how art thou fallen from heaven, Lucifer, son of the morning"), a reference that led to the mistaken notion that Lucifer was the fallen angel from heaven, Satan. We saw earlier that "Lucifer" also referred to an early friction-match for starting fire. At one time or another, Whitman seemed to use the term to mean all of these things. As late as 1880, he was jotting in his notebook, "Other names of Venus Phosphor Vesper, (at evening) Lucifer (at morning)" (NUPM, 1084). By this time, Lucifer had settled for Whitman into a harmless name for the morning star. But earlier in his life, when he was first conceiving of Leaves of Grass, he more powerfully associated Lucifer with rebellion, defining him as the ultimate rebel, whose resistance to the all-powerful God was something Whitman admired. In a notebook written in the 1850s, around the time he was developing the Lucifer section of his poem, Whitman wrote the following lines:

Here Whitman catalogues the names of gods from various religions, and Lucifer is juxtaposed to Satan, in a list of figures of hindrance, obstruction, and revolt. In another notebook from around the same time, Whitman adds to Lucifer a touch of the slave, a blackness and a physicality that perhaps marks the beginning of the development of the slave character he would call Lucifer in "The Sleepers." Note how Whitman again closely identifies with this Lucifer:

As Whitman continues to work these images into poetic lines, he writes a passage in a notebook that for the first time combines the "curse" of the other early notebooks with the Lucifer-figure Whitman has become enamored with:

Finally, in an important notebook known as "Poem Incarnating the Mind," kept during the year or so before Leaves of Grass was published, Whitman works out the first draft of what would become the powerful passage in "Song of Myself" about the fugitive slave and Whitman's identification with him, a passage culminating in the line, "I am the hunted slave." It is striking to note that wrapped in the very origins of this passage is Lucifer again; it is clear that the Lucifer section of "The Sleepers" and the "the hounded slave" section of "Song of Myself" had a single origin, one focused on slavery, rebellion, and identification with suffering. Lucifer was originally directly tied to the "hunted slave" and the "rebel" with his neck in a noose. Whitman cancelled the Lucifer-line, no doubt to move it and develop it as a quite different passage on slavery in "The Sleepers."

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