Before the Civil War, the large population of Free People of Color in Creole New Orleans developed a tradition of protest against the injustice they faced. Creoles of Color took up the romantic ideals and republican politics that had long been growing in the city in such institutions as Armand Lanusse’s literary society and the spiritualist religious movement. In the decade before the war, Joseph Barthet, a French emigre to New Orleans, published the newspaper Le Spiritualiste in which the communications between spirits of the dead and New Orleans mediums were printed. The messages revealed by these mediums, some of whom like Constant Reynes were Creoles of Color, were critical of the conservative catholic clergy of New Orleans and endorsed abolitionist publications. The fall of New Orleans to the Union army in April1862 was quickly followed by the appearance in September of that year of L’Union , a French-language newspaper owned and edited by free people of color. L’Union and its editor Paul Trevigne took up the cause of the Republican abolitionists and argued for the liberty and equality of the black south. In the issue of L’Union displayed here, the funeral of André Caillou is described in detail. Caillou, a prominent Creole of Color and a hero of the Battle of Port Hudson, had been an officer in the “Native Guards,” a military unit made up of free men of color. Caillou’s body was accompanied to the cemetery by a grand parade of admirers and representatives of the many benevolent societies and brotherhoods of free-black New-Orleans. Shortly after L’Union folded in July 1864, Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez a Paris-trained doctor and prominent Creole of color, launched the bilingual paper La Tribune de la Nouvelle Orleans, the first daily newspaper published by African-Americans in the United States.
 

See: Caryn Cossé Bell. Revolution Romanticism and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in New Orleans, 1718-1868. (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1997).

Case 18 Gallery:

Newspaper. Le Spiritualiste de la Nouvelle-Orléans. (New Orleans: Jos. Barthet, 1857-58).
[Hill La Rare BF 1002 S6 Vol 11]

Newspaper. Le Spiritualiste de la Nouvelle-Orléans. (New Orleans: Jos. Barthet, 1857-58).
[Hill La Rare BF 1002 S6 Vol 11]

Engraving. “Dr. L. Roudanez, patriote créole, fondateur et propriétaire de la Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orléans.” in Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire. Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes. (Montréal: Arbour & Dupont, 1911).
[Hill Louisiana Rare F380 C9 D47 C.2]

Newspaper. La Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orléans. November 27, 1864.
[Hill Louisiana 140-1]

Newspaper. L'Union July, 30, 1863.
[Hill Louisiana Map case]