EVIE ABROAD PART I: "Hero of Two Worlds: Giuseppe Garibaldi"
Special Note: While Historic America tour guide and professional history nerd Evie Owens takes a semester abroad to study in Italy, she’ll be filing a series of articles connecting American history with her Italian surroundings. We’re entitling them “Evie Abroad”. Here’s part one …
Giuseppe Garibaldi ranks among the most important individuals in modern Italian history. His life was a complicated set of events, and his fame & impact were felt across cultures and continents.
Popular print showing Garibaldi wearing uniforms of 1848, 1859 & 1860 wars (Public Domain).
Born in Nice, the Italy of Garibaldi’s time was little more than a patchwork quilt of fractious kingdoms. As a young man, he became committed to the cause of Italian unification & independence. After an early plot to overthrow the government of Piedmont, he was sentenced to death and fled for South America. During his exile, he fought for rebel groups in both Brazil and Uruguay. Upon the election of Pope Pius IX, Garibaldi was inspired to return to his homeland and fight for Italian independence (again) alongside fellow revolutionary, Giuseppe Mazzini. Garibaldi and his legion of roughly 60 men campaigned in Milan and Rome. When their fortunes soured, Garibaldi (again) left Italy and fled to Staten Island, New York in exile.
In the 1850s, the irrepressible Garibaldi returned to Italy once more. In 1860, his forces defeated the troops of Napoleon III in Sicily, then made their way to Naples, winning a series of battles which culminated – finally – in the unification of an independent Italian state.
At the pinnacle of his power, Garibaldi returned to his farm, refusing any reward for his service. The Italian patriot Garibaldi – known as one of the ‘fathers of the fatherland’ – would go on to impact our own Civil War in the United States.
The monument to the 39th New York, "Garibaldi Guards”, at Gettysburg (Public Domain).
The US Civil War and the fight for Italian unification took place simultaneously in the early 1860s, making the twin figures of Lincoln and Garibaldi well-known across the world. The Italian revolutionary was so famous in America that the 39th New York Infantry – which fought in many critical battles such as Bull Run, Bolivar Heights, and Gettysburg and was heavily composed of Italian-American immigrants – was called the Garibaldi Guard. Garibaldi was even offered a position as a major general in the Union Army by Secretary of State William Seward. Garibaldi told the US Minister to Belgium that while he was very much interested in helping the Union, he felt he could only lead effectively if he was given overall command of the entire Union Army and (secondarily) if Lincoln committed to abolishing slavery. Still over a year away from issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, the ever-practical Lincoln demurred.
However, Garibaldi’s public support for the Union greatly increased popular support for the Union cause among Europeans; support which only grew stronger with the eventual issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Upon hearing of it, Garibaldi wrote to Lincoln, saying:
In the midst of your titanic struggle, permit me, as another among the free children of Columbus, to send you a word of greeting and admiration for the great work you have begun. Posterity will call you the great emancipator, a more enviable title than any crown could be, and greater than any merely mundane treasure. You are a true heir of the teaching given us by Christ and by John Brown. If an entire race of human beings, subjugated into slavery by human egoism, has been restored to human dignity, to civilization and human love, this is by your doing and at the price of the most noble lives in America.
It is America, the same country which taught liberty to our forefathers, which now opens another solemn epoch of human progress. And while your tremendous courage astonishes the world, we are sadly reminded how this old Europe, which also can boast a great cause of liberty to fight for, has not found the mind or heart to equal you.
Garibaldi’s opinions carried so much weigh that the contents from his letter were posted in an August, 1863 issue of the New York Times. Additionally, in 1864, the Times posted a letter that Garibaldi sent to a Swiss news source, where he discussed the importance of abolishing slavery in America and its wider impact.
While Garibaldi’s legacy is felt most closely in the unification and liberation of Italy, by the time of his death in 1882, he had become a heroic figure in both the old world and the new.