Notes

1. "Africa" also appeared in the National Anti-Slavery Standard of September 12, 1863, one week following its publication in the Anglo-African. The text of the poem is virtually identical in both printings; in line 13, the Standard offers "dusk," where the Anglo-African text may read "dark."
2. Abolitionist and poet (1821–1853). Born Maria White, she took part in Margaret Fuller's "Conversations" between 1839 and 1844, and was an active member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. She began to publish poetry in 1834 and married James Russell Lowell in 1844. "Africa," one of her many antislavery poems, appeared in the Anglo-African almost a decade after her death. The poem was first published in 1849, in the Liberty Bell—a gift book the Anti-Slavery Society produced for sale at its annual bazaar.
3. King of the Ethiopians and the son of Eos (goddess of the dawn). He was slain by Achilles during the Trojan War. Nineteenth-century classicist Charles Anthon wrote that a "famous statue [of Memnon, in Egypt] was said to utter, when it was struck by the first beams of the sun, a sound like the snapping asunder of a musical string" (Charles Anthon, A Classical Dictionary [New York: Harper, 1841], 820).
4. The New York Independent, established as a Congregationalist weekly in December 1848. The title's "independent" antislavery stance prevented it from capitalizing on an affiliation with subscribers of any one political persuasion, and "its extreme position with regard to the Fugitive Slave Law almost wrecked it in its second year" (Frank L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938], 2:369). In spite of this beginning, the Independent succeeded impressively and had over 35,000 subscribers by the time war broke (Mott, 371). As the war progressed, editorials political and secular nudged matters of religion, Congregationalist or otherwise, to the margins.
    
   The celebrity of Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) must have contributed to the Independent's success. "Star contributor" Beecher was named editor during 1861–65. Theodore Tilton, his assistant, directed editorial policy and took over the editorship in all but name when Beecher embarked for Europe in 1863; two years later, he was officially recognized as editor-in-chief. By the time war broke out, Tilton had established himself as one of the young stars of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He and William Lloyd Garrison became friends after National Anti-Slavery Standard editor Oliver Johnson introduced them in 1856; Garrison described Tilton as "a fine young man . . . . connected with the N. Y. Independent, who is beginning to take a vital interest in radical abolitionism" (The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison: From Disunionism to the Brink of War, 1850–1860, ed. Louis Ruchames [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975], 4:415). Johnson, Tilton, and Garrison were united by a common profession as well as shared antislavery convictions. During the war each reprinted items from the other's newspapers.
    
   The Anglo-African editors clashed with Tilton in the aftermath of the Draft Riots. The Independent published Robert Hamilton's appeal for subscriptions and donations, but to this Tilton appended a comment that challenged the need for a "distinctively 'African' paper": "Our countrymen of African lineage are not primarily and predominantly negroes, but MEN—most of them, we trust, Christians; and everything which tends to isolate and separate them—to render them exclusive, peculiar, clannish—is ill-considered" (Independent, July 30, 1863). His comments riled the Hamiltons, who published editorials defending the value of their newspaper. "Here is The Independent, a newspaper . . . of such high Abolition pretensions, as unblushingly to offer itself as a supplanter or substitute for our poor journal to our colored subscribers and purchasers," wrote "Humanity" (Anglo-African, August 8, 1863). How, a later editorial asked, could Tilton "expect us to trust any man simply because he publishes a paper in which is advocated anti-slavery sentiments?" (Anglo-African, September 19, 1863). The Anglo-African helped African Americans in their struggle to become "citizens of the United States," and its title was "truthful, ethnically speaking" (Anglo-African, September 19, 1863; Anglo-African, October 3, 1863). "Moreover, if we change our name, of what use could it be, unless all the nation should be stricken with color blindness?" (Anglo-African, October 3, 1863).