Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy by Enrico Dal Lago (review)

Nineteenth-century United States and Italy pique the interest of historians for their curious similarities and coincidences. Both countries underwent the consolidation of their nation-states in the 1860s, Italy by accomplishing its unification process and the United States through a civil war that reasserted the preeminence of the federal government over the centrifugal forces of the slaveholding states. Moreover, both countries were confronted with their own Southern questions and the social and political factors underlying them. Specifically, in the same years (1861–65), the United States defeated the Confederacy, while the newborn Kingdom of Italy secured its annexation of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies by crushing the "Great Brigandage," namely those insurgencies targeting the new nation-state and its supporters.

These similarities are the driving force of Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy, in which Enrico Dal Lago analyzes why some nation-building processes like the Italian unification succeeded, while others, like the Confederate States of America, did not. He also investigates how these new polities coped with the internal dissent represented respectively by the Southern unionists and African American slaves on the one hand, and by the "brigands," consisting of Bourbon legitimists and insurgent peasants, on the other (6–7). By adopting a comparative approach, Dal Lago argues that two inner civil wars opposing the respective agrarian elites—slaveholding planters and the liberal landowners—and their agrarian subaltern classes took place, albeit with opposite outcomes. In America, the secessionist planters fatally underestimated the resistance of the unionist yeomen and slaves, while in the Italian South, the galantuomini (the liberal landowners) secured their hegemony by siding with the new state and repressing the peasants' rebellion (28–29, 397–99).

These conflicts originated, as the author remarks, from the restructuring of the world economy following the industrial revolution, which strained the relationship of these agrarian elites with their respective rural workers but, also, with their governments—the Union and the Bourbon Kingdom—to the point of an actual rebellion (28–29). Dal Lago does not hesitate to define both the planters' secession and the support of the galantuomini for the unification as "preemptive counterrevolutions," aiming at securing their socioeconomic status threatened by radical political transformations (23, 28–29). The first part of the book focuses on how the South Carolinian planters and the Sicilian landowners ignited the new processes of nation-building; then it broadens to investigate how the new nation-states claimed and maintained their legitimacy in the face of a growing dissent (61). Through the two case studies of Eastern Tennessee and the Terra di Lavoro, the author examines the emergence of the unionist and legitimist guerrillas and how the governmental repression engendered, although with opposite results, similar strategies of resistance (223).

Dal Lago identifies, however, the core of the anti-Confederate and anti-Italian resistance in the exploited agrarian masses constituted respectively by the slaves and the landless peasants. The two case studies of the slaves' and freedmen's resistance in the Lower Mississippi Valley and the brigand bands of the Upper Basilicata examined in the second part of the book reveal how these agrarian rebellions proved problematic to quell because of their nature of social conflicts over the ownership and use of lands. In Mississippi, the slaves accelerated the demise of slavery and claimed their rights to own and cultivate the land of their former masters. In Basilicata, the insurgent peasants targeted the landed estates, and it took the martial law and an increased cooperation between army and landowners to definitively crush the brigands. In both cases, the winners defended the property owners at the expense of the rural workers, and in the case of the former slaves, their crucial contribution in defeating the Confederacy. In short, as Dal Lago concludes, the common condition of landless peasantry shared by Southern Italian and African American rural...