America’s Garibaldi

Between 1848 and 1870, when the United States faced perilous challenges to its survival as a republic, Italy’s valiant struggle for independence and unity offered Americans a distant mirror in which to assess their own national aspirations. In 1848, while revolutions were convulsing Italy from Palermo to Rome with a zeal for reform and human progress, the United States was concluding a war of conquest against Mexico. Early in 1848, while Italians were experiencing the “springtime of nations,” as contemporaries called it, the U.S. Congress was debating whether to seize “All Mexico” or only the northern half of their defeated neighbor’s territory. ¹ Twelve years later, in 1860, as the U.S. South threatened to secede from the Union, the American press was fascinated with stories of Giuseppe Garibaldi and his army, “The Thousand” (I Mille), as they invaded Sicily and conquered southern Italy in the name of l’Italia unita. The next year, even while a newly united Kingdom of Italy was being proclaimed, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as president of a nation that, in March 1861, was fast on its way to becoming the dis-United States of America.