In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Preface This book is about two prominent nineteenth-century radicals, one American , the other Italian: William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini. Both were born in 1805, but from different family backgrounds—one poor, the other privileged—in different parts of the Euro-American world. They lived entirely different lives, Garrison as a citizen of an American democratic republic , Mazzini as an exile proscribed by most European monarchies. Their lives covered parallel chronological spans, which embraced the majority of the nineteenth century—a time of profound economic, social, and political transformations in both America and Europe—and in that period they both made their mark, though in different ways and contexts. In fact, Garrison’s and Mazzini’s lives are particularly representative of two specific egalitarian ideologies, American abolitionism and Italian democratic nationalism. The two figures came to be practically identified with the causes related to those ideologies, the struggle for the abolition of slavery and the creation of an Italian democratic nation. A comparative biographical study of Garrison and Mazzini, therefore, is as much a study of American abolitionists and Italian democratic nationalists , and of the American and Italian nineteenth-century contexts to which the two belonged, as it is a study of their lives and achievements. Nineteenth -century America and Italy were profoundly divided societies, but for different reasons. In the American case, the flourishing slave system of the antebellum U.S. South, based primarily on cotton production and export to the textile mills of Britain and New England, was tightly tied to the incipient Industrial Revolution, and yet it was at odds with the republican ideals on which the United States was founded and with the religious conscience of many evangelical Christians. Italy at the time was not a nation; the Italian national territory had been carved into multiple dynastic states, most of them absolute monarchies and some of them ruled by foreign powers. This situation was increasingly in conflict with the ever-growing popularity of national sentiment within large sections of the elites and of the educated middle class, both of whom longed for better opportunities of political par- viii Pr eface ticipation within more liberal forms of rule. In the United States, the single most important divisive national issue was the power of the slave system in the South; in Italy the single most important divisive national issue was the fragmentation of the nation into small states ruled by absolute systems of power.1 It is within these contexts that we must see the parallel novelties represented by the creation of movements carrying radical messages such as the immediate abolition of slavery in the United States and the creation of a democratic nation in Italy. Garrison and Mazzini were hardly the only ones who put forward these messages, but they were the ones who worked more tirelessly than anybody else, throughout their lives, toward the achievement of the two objectives of an American nation free from slavery and of a unified Italian republic free from foreign rule. Initially unaware of the parallels in the passionate single-mindedness they showed in the dedication to their life causes, Garrison and Mazzini gradually began to see there was much common ground in what was, effectively, in both cases a struggle for national freedom, whether from slavery or from foreign oppression. By the time they met in London, in 1846—both forty-one years old—they had developed a mutual admiration based on this common ground, and from then on, they shared a long-lasting friendship. Garrison wrote the introduction to a collection of some of Mazzini’s autobiographical writings shortly after Mazzini’s death, in 1872, and there he explained simply and straightforwardly the reason for this unusual friendship: “We cherished the same hostility to every form of tyranny.”2 I believe we cannot consider it coincidental that Garrison and Mazzini found such a profound affinity—one that was based first, but not solely, on hostility to tyranny—and that, when they actually met, this affinity developed into enduring friendship and collaboration. Parallels between the two men, between the ways they lived their lives and between the general principles to which they committed themselves, are numerous and are also relatively easy to draw. A short treatment of some of the most striking parallels and, indeed, similarities between Garrison’s and Mazzini’s lives has to focus on their absolute, uncompromising, and enduring commitment to the abolition of American slavery in both Garrison’s case and to the creation...

Share