William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini: Abolition, Democracy, and Radical Reform

1. EARLY ATTEMPTS AT DEMOCRATIZATION: The Making of Two Radical Leaders, 1805–1830

1 early attempts at democratization The Making of Two Radical Leaders, 1805–1830 The world in which William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini were born, in 1805, was a world in turmoil: it was an epoch that Robert Palmer appropriately described fifty years ago as the “Age of Democratic Revolution ” and that recent scholarship, following Palmer’s lead, has treated fruitfully in comparative perspective. Starting in the late eighteenth century, from one side of the Atlantic to the other, revolutionary movements shook the foundations of the old European and colonial American orders, with indelible repercussions on the struggles to abolish slavery and to liberate oppressed nationalities. Long before they became the two life causes of Garrison and Mazzini, the abolition of slavery and liberation from national oppression reached the height of their popularity, as a result of the increasing democratization of society brought about by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Those revolutions were consequences both of the spread of Enlightenment ideas about human rights’ inalienability and universality and of incipient romantic notions about individuals’ and peoples’ entitlement to self-fulfillment.1 By 1805 the successful conclusion of the Haitian revolution in the former slaveholding French colony of Saint Domingue and the 1804 formation of the free Haitian republic had come at the end of a process of dissolution of the old system of colonial slavery in the New World; it was a period that had seen the implementation of antislavery measures all over the Americas, especially in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary North America. The Haitian revolution had become not only a positive paradigm for a possible world without slaves, but also a negative paradigm for what the world would 16 W illi a m Ll oyd Ga r r ison a nd Giuseppe M a zzini become if whites did not proceed to abolish slavery before being forced to do so. In Europe, the Napoleonic Empire was at its height by 1805, spread as it was over the breadth and length of Europe, as a result of an almost continuous state of war between expansionist Napoleonic France and Europe ’s reactionary powers, supported especially by Britain. The Napoleonic Empire had had a fundamental role in spreading to other European countries French revolutionary ideas—the same ideas that had sparked the initial revolt and then the Haitian revolution in Saint Domingue. However, the spread of revolutionary ideas by force of arms had prompted in response a surge of protonationalist movements in those same European countries, including Italy—and that fact led to unforeseen and devastating consequences for the French armies of occupation.2 If this was the situation in 1805, in the following ten to fifteen years, the period of early youth for Garrison and Mazzini, the revolutionary thrust died out and a renewed version of the “Old Order” seemed to grip the entire Euro-American world. Despite the momentous abolition of the Atlantic slave trade implemented by the British Empire in 1807 and by the U.S. Congress in 1808, the end of Saint Domingue’s economic hegemony in the Caribbean had led to a restructuring of the entire slave system in the New World and to the rise of a new, aggressively capitalist and more exploitative “second slavery” in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil. At the same time, with the Congress of Vienna, Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo, and the creation of the “Holy Alliance” between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1815, even though French occupation ended throughout Europe, the national aspirations of several European peoples were sacrificed in favor of the restoration of former polities headed by reactionary rulers. This happened in both Italy and Germany, and both were divided into multiple dynastic states. The world in which Garrison and Mazzini made their early acquaintance with the issues that occupied them for their lifetimes—slavery and national oppression—was thus a world in which conservatism and reaction, as opposed to reform and revolution, were the norm; and yet the legacy of the immense changes resulting from the revolutionary period on both sides of the Atlantic had not been lost but was dormant underneath a veneer of order and immobility.3 In fact, from 1816 on, there were telling signs of change in the Americas and Europe, either open or hidden, in regard to opposition to slavery and national oppression. In the British Empire in particular, abolitionists, led Ea r ly At temp...