Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity

1. Of American Mentors and Foreign Pupils: The Cultural Work of Republican Pedagogy

the only great republican nation With anxious eyes and hoping heart we have stood Watching for light upon your struggling way, Ye older nations, who have heard the sound That liberty is possible to man. The fitful gleams we saw are over now; Your people seem unworthy of the boon; They turn to their idols yet again, And we are still alone the Nation Free The great Republic waiting for its peers! Well, be it so so we shall stand still stand, A mighty people, with no king but God! —American Whig Review, 1852 1Of American Mentors and Foreign Pupils The Cultural Work of Republican Pedagogy In his autobiography, Reminiscences, written at the end of a long career as a lawyer and politician, James A. Hamilton recorded extensively his trip to Italy in 1848. The memoir reproduces a letter he wrote from Rome to an unidentified New York friend describing the most recent political events, namely that the king of Sardinia, the grand duke of Tuscany, and the king of the Two Sicilies had been compelled by popular uprisings to grant to their subjects constitutions providing for the establishment of legislative chambers elected through limited suffrage. Although Hamilton sympathized with the Italians’ struggle to obtain representative { 15 } governments, he understood it as motivated not by the historical evolution of Italy and the resentment against foreign domination of a people who had a tradition of independence and republicanism, but by the institutions of the United States. In his words, “the political reforms of this old world, so numerous and so rapidly advancing, are due to our example. ‘The spirit of ’76’ is the pillar of light by day and of fire by night to all mankind.” If he deemed the Italians had been prompted to fight for freedom by the inspiring presence of republicanism in America, Hamilton was skeptical that they possessed the civic virtue necessary to establish and maintain a democracy. In fact, he confided to his correspondent his belief that “the masses, from their ignorance, their habitual servility, and their blind con- fidence in their priesthood, . . . are not only entirely unfitted to govern themselves, but incapable of knowing what good government is.” In spite of his doubts about the political competence of the Italians, Hamilton’s letter closes on a positive if indefinite note. “I entertain an abiding confidence ,” he wrote, “that the ‘spirit of ’76,’ which proclaimed freedom and happiness to all mankind, will work out its high mission here and elsewhere , in its appointed time.”1 Hamilton’s letter to his New York acquaintance thus amounts to a declaration that although the insurrections against the absolute governments established in Italy in the post-Napoleonic era were inspired by the experience of the United States, the Italians lacked at least for the time being the civic education essential to successfully imitate their American antecedents. Liberty was destined to triumph in Italy, too, but only eventually. This chapter examines American narratives of Italy’s nineteenth-century liberal struggles, which, like Hamilton’s letter, describe them as both ideologically indebted to the republican exemplum provided by the United States and bound to fail because of the Italians’ civic deficiencies. The question I address is that of the cultural function of these negative representations of the process of nation formation in Italy as an abortive offspring of American republicanism for the articulation of America’s national identity .2 In other words, I ask what image of the United States emerged from the confrontation with the process of nation formation in Italy, or what vision of “America” was created in the accounts of the Risorgimento authored by the diplomats, travelers, writers, and artists who represented it in their work. The discourse on Italy became the site of an empowering definition of America in terms of the country’s alleged influence over the political { 16 } chapter one development of transatlantic territories and its status as the only extant republic. To represent the Italian revolutions as prompted by the existence of democracy in America postulated for the United States an area of cultural influence beyond the nation’s geographic boundaries. Specifically, it created the illusion of an American global ideological empire parallel to the territorial one that was being created through expansion in the North American continent. The representation of Italians as incompetent disciples of the American revolutionist so often found in American accounts...