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Anthony Zeni (March 28, 1813 – October 17, 1864) was born in a cotton plantation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Anthony was a Southerner who fought for the causes that the Northern States espoused as an abolitionist. Mr Zeni is remembered today for the epitaph on his tombstone: “…born a Southerner, died a Northerner.”

Born into a system that fed and educated him, Anthony Zeni, a graduate of West Point Academy, chose to fight against the Confederate States during the American Civil War. His years at the Academy, his recollections of inhumane treatments of the slaves in the plantations near his home, and his allegiance to the American flag and the Union that it represented, convinced him that the North was right – that slavery was, indeed, an evil and oppressive institution.

In 1835, a year after he graduated from the Academy, Anthony Zeni joined The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper established by William Lloyd Garrison, a social reformer and abolitionist.  It was through the years Anthony worked for The Liberator that Zeni, according to one of his editorials published in 1842, became “a Northerner in spirit”. Not content with writing editorials though, Mr Zeni joined the radical abolitionist group led by John Brown in 1857. Anthony Zeni later fought in the Civil War and died during the Battle of Fort Pillow in Henning, Tennessee.

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