Louis Charles Roudanez

He returned to the U.S. and enrolled in medical school for a second degree at Dartmouth College (some sources erroneously write Cornell University).

[4] In 1862, after the US Army defeated Confederate forces and captured New Orleans, Roudanez founded L'Union, a newspaper primarily serving the Creole or free people of color of Louisiana.

Both newspapers were published at 527 Conti Street in the French Quarter, where Roudanez installed a printing press acquired from New York in 1864.

Postwar political rivalries rose with Northern Republicans leading Reconstruction efforts in the South (who were referred to derisively as carpetbaggers).

Described as "Mulattoes" by northerners, he and most free people of color before the war spoke French as their first language, were raised Catholic, and were of mixed-race heritage.

The free people of color had developed as a separate class between the white Creole French and the mass of enslaved African Americans, who were emancipated as freedmen.

They believed that Republicans from the North, described derisively as carpetbaggers, competed against them and tried to divide them from freedmen, who constituted the overwhelming proportion of the Black majority population in the state.

Warmoth watered down and vetoed civil rights legislation and was eventually run out of office over allegations of corruption.