Notes

1. One of William Blake's (1757–1827) "Songs of Innocence." Blake was an engraver, visionary artist, and poet.
    
   "The Little Black Boy" first appeared in Blake's 1789 illuminated book, Songs of Innocence, produced in a very limited run. The poem was available to a wide audience for the first time in 1839, twelve years after Blake's death, with the first commercial edition of Songs of Innocence and Experience. According to Marcus Wood, "The Little Black Boy" appeared in the National Anti-Slavery Standard for the first time in 1842, along with other selections from Songs of Innocence and Experience (Marcus Wood, ed., The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthology, 1764–1865 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 142). The poem was included in Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake, "Pictor Ignotus," a work that renewed interest in Blake in 1863. (Gilchrist's Life of William Blake was published posthumously in two volumes under the direction of his wife, Anne Gilchrist, and with the assistance of William Michael Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.)
   
2. Reprinting "The Little Black Boy" from the New York Evening Post, the National Anti-Slavery Standard included the letter to the editor of the former publication, introducing the work. The letter sets up the rationale for reprinting the poem in both instances.
    
   The New York Evening Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801. William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) began to write for the title in 1826, having struggled to make a living as a poet; by 1830 he was the Post's editor-in-chief, and the daily's financial prospects looked good (Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism [New York: Russell and Russell, 1968], 134-136). Committed to Free Soil principles, Bryant severed the Post's connection with the Democratic Party in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and backed the fledgling Republican Party in 1856. He threw his weight behind Lincoln's presidential campaign in 1860. Although the Post remained staunchly Republican throughout the war, Bryant did not shrink from criticizing Lincoln's policies. The Post "shared with the Tribune the advocacy of what came to be called the 'radical' Republican doctrines during the Civil War—namely, emancipation, the need of strong and swift military measures, and the removal of pro-slavery and Democratic leaders from the government and army" (Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through Twenty Years, 1690–1940 [New York: Macmillan, 1941], 5:344).
   
3. Within the context of the American Civil War, C. B. C.'s comment that "black folks are proving their brotherhood so convincingly" likely refers to African American enlistment and military service. This reference suggests that C. B. C. read Blake's poem as a parable of interracial brotherhood.
4. Pen name used by Mary Abigail Dodge (1833–1896). An ambitious writer as well as a New England reformer, Dodge established herself in literary networks associated with the antislavery movement. She made frequent contributions to the Atlantic Monthly in 1863–64.
    
   The Atlantic Monthly issue for April 1864 carried "Pictor Ignotus" ("unknown painter"). Dodge took her title and most of the article's material from Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake (1863). Her essay-review touches on Blake's radical politics ("he had been an advocate of the French Revolution, an associate of Price, Priestly, Godwin, and Tom Paine"); ultimately, she was more interested in Blake as mystic and mystery.
   
5. Unidentified.
6. The word "mourning" here is either a typographical error or a creative revision. Blake's version of the poem reads "morning."