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

INTRODUCTION: Garrisonian Abolitionism, Mazzinian Democratic Nationalism, and Transnational Comparisons

introduction Garrisonian Abolitionism, Mazzinian Democratic Nationalism, and Transnational Comparisons Nineteenth-century American abolitionism and Italian democratic nationalism were radical movements put forward by activist minorities who hoped to decisively influence the public opinions of their respective countries. Both movements used the enormous power of the press to reach their aims, but Italian democrats were far more prone than American abolitionists to make widespread use of violence. Both were also diverse movements within which different ideas and currents existed, but each movement had a single general aim that bound those currents together, although the differences in strategies and tactics determined permanent divisions. For American abolitionists , the aim was the immediate abolition of slavery in the United States; for Italian democrats, it was the establishment of a free Italian republic. Between the 1830s and 1860, in the decades that preceded the American Civil War and Italian national unification, American abolitionists and Italian democrats established themselves as the proponents of the two most radical solutions to the two crucial problems of the existence of slavery in the United States and national oppression in Italy. Even though scholars have not usually put nineteenth-century American abolitionism and Italian democratic nationalism in relation with each other, there is much to learn from comparing them and discovering their similarities and differences. Such a comparison must start with the two historical characters who were foremost within the two movements: William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini. It is of paramount importance to remember that, despite being often identified with American abolitionism and Italian democratic 2 W illi a m Ll oyd Ga r r ison a nd Giuseppe M a zzini nationalism, Garrison and Mazzini represented very much their own versions of the two movements, while their followers, the Garrisonians and the Mazzinians, were particular groups within those movements. And yet, Garrison and Mazzini and their followers were the most convinced advocates of the universal character of their battles, which they saw as struggles that asserted the resilience of liberty against all forms of tyranny, including slavery and national oppression. Thus, as they acted within the American abolitionist movement and the Italian democratic movement, Garrison and Mazzini also acted within wider, Atlantic and Euro-American contexts as proponents of the universal rights of humankind. Though long aware of the importance of the international dimension in Garrison’s and Mazzini’s ideas and activities, only recently have scholars begun to analyze the implications of this dimension for American abolitionism and Italian democratic nationalism . The two movements have come to be seen as parts of a much wider nineteenth-century Euro-American world of radical reform and revolutionary action—a world in which the transnational debate on the relationship between democracy, nation-building, and slavery was fervent on both sides of the Atlantic.1 To understand the wider context in which the two men operated, Garrison as a representative of American abolitionism and Mazzini as a representative of Italian democratic nationalism, it is useful to utilize the socioeconomic framework of the “second slavery,” as it has been described by Dale Tomich and other scholars. According to Tomich and Michael Zeuske, “the concept of second slavery calls attention to the world-historical processes that transformed the Atlantic world between the 1780s and 1888,” and specifically the mass “redeployment of slave labor as a productive force” in those areas, such as the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil, where cash crops provided a crucial link with the world market, fulfilling the needs of the growing Industrial Revolution in Britain and the market revolution in the northeastern United States. At the same time, those same world-historical processes led, first, to the making of movements of opposition to slavery aiming at either gradual or immediate slave emancipation, and then to the eventual demise of slave systems in the entire Atlantic world. The era of the “second slavery,” in fact, was also an era of abolition, which started with the Haitian revolution (1791–1804) and ended with the emancipation of slaves in the United States (1863–65) and then in Cuba and Brazil (1886–88). It was also an era Introduc tion 3 when abolitionist networks characterized a transnational sphere of activity populated by radical antislavery agitators on both sides of the Atlantic.2 We can usefully compare the momentous changes related to the rise and fall of the “second slavery” with the equally momentous and contemporaneous changes that stemmed from...