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

6. ENDORSEMENT AND REFUSAL OF MAINSTREAM RADICALISM: Garrison’s and Mazzini’s Times for Action, 1854–1861

6 endorsement and refusal of mainstream radicalism Garrison’s and Mazzini’s Times for Action, 1854–1861 The late 1850s and early 1860s saw William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini confronting the monumental changes brought by the beginning of the American Civil War and the unification of Italy. To understand the significance of these changes, we need to place them in the context of the mid-nineteenth-century world, to which the two phenomena belong—both being at the same time military and nation-building operations, though on very different scales. The American Civil War was an event that marked a real watershed on a global scale, for a variety of different reasons, as much recent scholarship has shown. Its resonance and influence went far beyond the confines of the United States, or even the Americas, to reach Europe and eventually affect the entire Atlantic world. For this reason, several scholars have analyzed different aspects of the Civil War from a comparative perspective , making reference to contemporary events in Europe, including those occurring in Risorgimento Italy. As early as 1968, David Potter argued that the American Civil War “forged a bond between nationalism and liberalism when it appeared that the two might draw apart and move in opposite directions” after the defeat of the European 1848–49 revolutions; in the same article, Potter also implied that a particularly fitting case study to compare to the American Civil War would be Italy’s movement for national unification, precisely because its success was the most celebrated example of a victory of a liberal nationalist movement in nineteenth-century Europe.1 Stimulated by Potter’s observations and by subsequent historiographic developments, some American and European scholars, including transna6 Endorsement a nd R efusa l of M a instr ea m R a dica lism 141 tional U.S. historians Thomas Bender, Ian Tyrrell, and Carl Guarneri, have hinted, at one time or another, at possible comparisons between the American Civil War and Europe’s nineteenth-century nationalist movements. These scholars have shown the way toward a comparative reconsideration of the changes brought by the American Civil War and Europe’s nationalist movements in a perspective at once transnational and transcontinental. Thus, if we were to take a transcontinental dimension as the focus of a comparative study, following some of the above suggestions, we could very well say that 1848 simply preannounced the subsequent, much larger, continental upheavals in both North America and Europe. The American Civil War was certainly a phenomenon that changed the geopolitics of the American hemisphere on a continental scale. In the first half of the 1860s, the conflict at the heart of the Civil War was between two large nations extended over wide areas of North America. The conflict also affected neighboring countries , particularly Mexico. There, Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg, supported by French emperor Napoleon III, and Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez—Maximilian helped by southern U.S. Confederates and Juarez helped by northern U.S. Unionists—fought their own “civil war” for the control of the Mexican government roughly in the same years of the American conflict (1862–67). Comparable changes on a continental scale occurred in Europe in those years. Particularly, the final victory of the movement for national unification in Italy in 1861 and, later on, the unification of Germany in 1870, after a series of wars fought also in 1859 and 1866, permanently changed the arrangement of the European continent with the creation of two new and large countries that had not existed previously.2 Yet, if we were to write a comparative history of North America and Europe in the 1860s, we should also see the two continents very much in direct connection with each other, in clear transnational fashion, given that large contingents of volunteers came from various European countries to fight in the American Civil War. Virtually all the European nations whose rights to self-determination and independence, based on liberal principles, had undergone suppression in the wake of the reactionary wave following the failure of the 1848–49 revolutions—and also Italy, which by 1861 had become a nation in its own right—supplied groups of volunteers; although many of them joined the Confederate army, the majority fought in the battalions of the northern-based, antislavery Union government headed by Lincoln. In making this choice, the aspiring citizens of these suppressed 142 W illi a m...