Abstract
Reviewed by: Mark A. Lause, University of Cincinnati, USA
Enrico Dal Lago’s William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini clearly grew from his earlier Agrarian Elites (2005), which compared the landowning beneficiaries of systems of bound labour in America and Southern Italy, and his American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond (2013), which sought to locate African slavery in the southern US in a global context. This approach certainly provides new perspectives that may offer vital new insights, though these early labour systems grew from distinct circumstances, which may impose clear limits on the value of these comparisons.
Dal Lago offers a comparison of two vitally important individual figures, active over decades. He does so to explore the transnational efforts to foster a series of ideas innately critical of the status quo. Through these years, concepts of republicanism, nationalism and liberty wove a matrix of assumptions and values, to which the author regularly refers. What makes the discussion so difficult is that, in the early nineteenth century, people used a word such as ‘republican’ to mean anything from something explicitly anti-capitalist to the idea that gentlemen should order their workers to be flogged less often.
Both Garrrison (1805–1879) and Mazzini (1805–1872) formulated radical critiques of their societies, fostered those changes through the press, and attempted organizations to promulgate their views. Dal Lago does an excellent job of sketching their efforts and impact without glossing over the immense differences in their societies, their movements and their individual careers. He justifies his choice of these two individuals based on their ‘transnational links’, which he traces mostly through London.
However, connections between elements of the abolitionist movement and the European revolutionary organizations were stronger than his evidence. For example, African Americans organized their Prince Hall freemasons and other fraternal orders under conditions every bit as repressive as the Italians under French or Austrian occupation. Their efforts to subvert slavery with ‘the Underground Railroad’ had a tremendous impact and screams for a comparative approach.
Mazzini himself sent the British Garibaldian, Hugh Forbes, to raise money and organize the thousands of Italian émigrés in the US in the wake of 1848–1849.For a while, Giuseppe Garibaldi took up residence briefly in Staten Island. Over the next few years, Forbes organized a coalition of various national groups that included the antislavery party of the day, the Free Democrats. Affiliated with the International Association of 1855–1859, their primary activity in New York had been the defence of tyrannicide, personified in Felice Orsini’s 1858 attempt on the life of Napoleon III. Abolitionists subsequently recruited Forbes to serve as the military advisor to John Brown, though the two never agreed on the Harpers Ferry raid.
Many of Dal Lago’s links turn on the strange association he calls ‘Young America’, as analogous to Mazzini’s ‘Young Europe’. In fact, ‘Young America’ referred to several political currents in the US, including the land reformers praised by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto. Dal Lago focuses on the expansionist literary current in the Democratic Party, particularly George Nicholas Sanders, the American consul designate to London. He failed to be confirmed when he hosted a large gathering of European revolutionaries including Mazzini (150–1). Interestingly, the expansionist and Southern Rights Democrat, Sanders’ version of Orsini’s deed inspired his involvement with John Wilkes Booth and the plans to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
All these points argue less for a ‘parallel’ experience, than for a regular expression of similar ideas. What is missing from most of these discussions is the sense that Mazzini and Garrison, and their nineteenth-century comrades, generally understood their goals in terms of power. The meaning of what they sought changed in the 1860s and 1870s.From that point on, the institutions of government effectively subsumed the soul of nationalism as a popular, almost utopian vision. Republicanism came to mean not so much the idea of a representative power structure, as merely electoral rituals in which mass votes chose between preselected alternatives. Scholars tend to follow suit and discuss these things less in terms of people obtaining power and more in terms of their protection against the arbitrary abuse of power by monarchists, slaveholders or unregulated capitalism.
However, it is power that makes social systems and elites relatively coherent and more easily comparable. In contrast, the movements they face tend, by definition, to be very amorphous and much more complicated to compare. Dal Lago did not make his job any easier by focusing on two individuals. He has found a fruitful subject, on which we hope this book will not be his last word.