Notes

1. A barren but strategically important island twelve miles off the Mississippi coast, occupied by Union army regiments from December 1861. Fort Massachusetts dominated the island's western end. A prison was established there in 1862; initially for Union and Confederate soldiers and Confederate sympathizers, it served as a Confederate prisoner of war camp after October 1864 (David C. Rankin, ed., Diary of a Christian Soldier: Rufus Kinsley and the Civil War [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 42). Union regiments served on Ship Island throughout the war—most of them for short periods of time. The Second Regiment of Louisiana Native Guards (later the Second Regiment Corps D'Afrique, then the Seventy-Fourth United States Colored Troops) stayed there for over two years, from January 1863 until fall 1865. One of their main duties was to guard the prisoners.
2. Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. A correspondent who wrote under the pen name "Aleph" provided the Christian Recorder with Cincinnati correspondence between May 1862 and October 1863; it is, however, unlikely that the same writer produced "Ode to Freedom and Unity." Given that there was little on Ship Island to entice most civilians, Aleph was probably a soldier, prisoner, or an interested visitor.
3. L'Union was established as a French-language biweekly in September 1862, by a group of free Afro-Creoles based in New Orleans. The Christian Recorder described it as an "Anti-Slavery paper" that "addresses itself, in particular, to the French people of color, to whom it appeals in stirring articles, to join the Union troops and aid them in the establishment of a 'Republican system without stain, of a democracy without fetters'" (November 15, 1862, [3]). Historian David Rankin qualifies the Recorder's emphasis on abolition: "L'Union had championed the abolition of slavery, but the paper was above all concerned with the special interests of the free colored caste, which was predominantly middle class, French speaking, light colored, free born, and Catholic. Indeed, L'Union feared that the crusade against slavery might totally eclipse the free colored campaign for political equality" (David C. Rankin, introduction to My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civil War Era, by Jean-Charles Houzeau, trans. Gerard F. Denault [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984], 34).
    
   Paul Trévigne (1825–1908) served as the title's editor. Its inaugural editorial comprised a rallying cry addressed to "friends of Progress": "The hour has come for the struggle of the great humanitarian principles against a vile and sordid interest which gives birth to pride, ambition, hypocrisy, and lying, and silences the conscience, that voice of the heavens which cries endlessly to man: 'You were born for liberty and happiness! Do not deceive yourself in this and do not deceive your brother!'" (September 27, 1862, quoted by Rankin, 20). Planters threatened to attack the newspaper's office. L'Union became a triweekly in December 1862. In July 1863 L'Union urged its readers to volunteer in response to Confederate advances. From July 9, 1863 until its closure in mid July 1864, the title was published in French and English (20). In July 1864 Louis Charles Roudanez bought L'Union; two days after its closure, he launched the New Orleans Tribune.