British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism 1805-2005
Abstract
The relevance of Mazzini's ideas of insurgency to the American Sectional Crisis of the 1850s
T. Roberts, Ankara
Today scholars have reached something of a consensus on Mazzini's influence in the United States during and after the European revolutions of 1848. Older as well as recent assessments by Joseph Rossi, Howard Marraro, and Enrico Dal Lago have found that Mazzini's influence lay largely in his romantic inspiration of American reformers including William Lloyd Garrison and Margaret Fuller. Such American radicals joined Mazzini in the 1840s in hoping that a transatlantic impulse could unite Americans and Europeans to recognize the respective problems of Negro slavery and despotic monarchy. Mazzini joined such American admirers in advocating resistance to these twin forms of oppression. However, with the defeats of the 1848 revolutions in Europe and the failure of the United States to rid itself of slavery by peaceful means, such a liberal vision was shown to be naïve. Mazzini's relevance to actual political change diminished further during the 1860s, scholars such as Raymond Grew have argued, when "the era of Mazzini was really over," as Italy moved towards unification under a constitutional monarchy, and the United States fell into violent civil war. Perhaps a corrective could be offered to this interpretation, especially in the context of the political crises of the 1850s in the United States. That decade saw the traditional party system collapse under the weight of the question whether slavery should expand. The sectional crisis erupted in Kansas, where white men's blood was spilled over the slavery issue for the first time in American history, and ended at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, where John Brown led a doomed attempt to arm slaves.
It is in this context that I wish to place Mazzini, whose writings on the importance of popular insurrection and guerrilla warfare, as Spencer Di Scala has observed, have been undervalued by historians. It is true that under Count Cavour, Italian unification progressed along a path in violation of Mazzinianism: loss of faith in the practicality of indigenous revolution, acceptance of support for unification from France, a great power outside the Italian nation, and acceptance of monarchism over republicanism. But if we revisit key episodes of organized violence in America during the 1850s, we can see the relevance there, ironically, of Mazzini's writings on insurgency. In particular I am interested in the influence of Mazzini's concept that guerrillas were necessary to rouse the nation to insurrection, but were accountable to the nation; that insurrection was appropriate for nations yoked to a foreign power; and that insurrection could consecrate the soil and fasten heroic deeds in the popular memory in order to arouse the nation. These ideas were essential to American antislavery radicals' ideology and actions in the 1850s. Such an approach will suggest an under-appreciated aspect of Mazzini's influence in America, invite a reassessment of the American sectional crisis of the 1850s for its transatlantic dimensions, and propose a sobering but important dimension to the historical path of the spread of democratic nationalism.