Garibaldi's thrilling deeds " unfolding day-by-day through 1860 on the front page of every major US newspaper, alongside stories detailing America's own dissolution" stood as both an inspiration and a rebuke. "What a sight we must be to other peoples,"  "Just as morning breaks over Italy with sunshine and singing, this evil cloud comes up in our heaven."
Americans loved that Garibaldi, like the Roman Cincinnatus and like their own George Washington, had nobly stepped aside once the great work was complete, returning to his humble farm. They could take special pride in knowing that this Italian founding father had spent more than three years as a resident of their own country, in exile after the failed uprising of 1848; Garibaldi had lived on Staten Island and worked in a candle factory.

While, thousands of miles away, the votes to elect Abraham Lincoln as president were being counted, Giuseppe Garibaldi had returned to his farm on this small, rocky islet off the Sardinian coast. He had turned down a full general's commission, a dukedom, landed estates and the heavy golden neck chain of the Order of the Annunziata bringing home with him instead a few small bags of coffee and sugar, some seeds for the garden and a crate of macaroni. Suitably enough, the steamship that had brought him from Naples to Caprera on Nov. 9 was called the Washington.

Most books and documentaries about the American Civil War frame it as a saga that unfolded alongside a few legendary streams in Virginia and Tennessee, and across some hilltops in Georgia and Pennsylvania. But in fact, the war's full story spans oceans and continents. The 19th-century United States was neither as isolated from world politics nor as impervious to overseas events as it is often described. For instance, Garibaldi, the hero of Italian liberation and unification, played a significant role " as an inspiration, though eventually almost as a direct participant " in our own country's simultaneous struggle.

On this particular day, Dec. 5, a young woman in New York named Jane Stuart Woolsey sat by the window, composing a letter to a friend. Outside, newsboys were hawking extras with the full text of President James Buchanan's freshly released message to Congress about the secession crisis, a masterpiece of executive dithering and equivocation. But despite their shrill cries, Woolsey's mind was four thousand miles away. "Garibaldi  ! The word is a monument and a triumphal song," she wrote. "I should like to have one of the turnips from that island farm of Caprera. Now, when the -deeds are so few and the men so many"  it is surely a great thing to find a noble deed to do, and to do it!?
Millions of Woolsey's  USA countrymen shared her enthusiasm for the man who, starting out with a volunteer army of just a thousand men or so ? Garibaldi?s famous Thousand, also known as the Red Shirts ? had landed in Sicily and swept up the Italian peninsula. Within a few months, they had destroyed the corrupt old Bourbon despotism, uniting most of Italy as a single nation for the first time in modern history, ruled by the constitutional monarch King Victor Emmanuel. 

Americans loved that Garibaldi, like the Roman Cincinnatus and like their own George Washington, had nobly stepped aside once the great work was complete, returning to his humble farm. They could take special pride in knowing that this Italian founding father had spent more than three years as a resident of their own country, in exile after the failed uprising of 1848; Garibaldi had lived on Staten Island and worked in a candle factory.

Yet Garibaldi's thrilling deeds " unfolding day-by-day through 1860 on the front page of almost every newspaper, alongside stories detailing America's own dissolution" stood as both an inspiration and a rebuke. "What a sight we must be to other peoples," Woosley's letter continued. "Just as morning breaks over Italy with sunshine and singing, this evil cloud comes up in our heaven."

Many Northerners, in particular, hailed the "Union of the Italian People" "as The Times called it " for managing to combine the ideals of liberation and national unity under the same banner, a task at which they themselves seemed to be spectacularly failing. From San Francisco to Philadelphia, they held meetings and concerts to raise money for Garibaldi's campaign; New Yorkers formed a "Million Rifles Fund" and contributed an estimated $100,000. In a letter to The Times, the Red Shirts " commander expressed his thanks for the support of Italians" "sacred task - our union". It did not pass unnoticed, either, that Garibaldi was a northern Italian who had led his army across the peninsula's benighted south; in a telling analogy, the Times referred to Genoa's inhabitants as "the Yankees of Italy."

Abolitionists saw in Garibaldi a kind of Mediterranean John Brown. When William Cullen Bryant, America's most revered literary figure, published a new poem hailing the newly liberated inhabitants of Italy's medieval fiefdoms  "Slaves but yestereve were they,/Freemen with the dawning day" - it did not require much exegesis to realize that he was also thinking about bondsmen closer to home. Frederick Douglass, in his Dec. 3 speech in Boston, predicted that if the South seceded, "I believe a Garibaldi would arise who would march into those States with a thousand men, and summon to his standard sixty thousand, if necessary, to accomplish the freedom of the slave."

Nor was it only extreme radicals like Douglass who had begun yearning for a Garibaldian cause to which they could pledge their lives. In October 1860, at a pro-Lincoln rally in San Francisco, a Republican senator "and old friend of the soon-to-be president " stood before a large crowd and declared:

Everywhere abroad, the great ideas of personal liberty spread, increase, fructify. Here " ours is the exception! In this home of the exile, in this land of constitutional liberty, it is left for us to teach the world that slavery marches in solemn procession! that under the American stars slavery has protection, and the name of freedom must be faintly breathed " the songs of freedom be faintly sung! Garibaldi, Victor Emanuel, hosts of good men are praying, fighting, dying on scaffolds, in dungeons, oftener yet on battle fields for freedom: and yet while this great procession marches under the arches of liberty, we alone shrink back trembling and afraid when freedom is but mentioned!

Less than a year later, the man who spoke those words, E.D. Baker, would lie dead on a bluff above the Potomac, fallen at the head of his regiment in a battle for the Union.

Related  Civil War Timeline     Visit the Timeline ?
Sources: Christopher Hibbert, "Garibaldi and His Enemies"; Denis Mack Smith, "Garibaldi" , Lucy Riall, "Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero"; 

Adam Goodheart is the author of the forthcoming book "1861: The Civil War Awakening" 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/
12/04/hero-of-two-worlds/?emc=eta1
 
 
 
 

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