William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini

Abolition, Democracy, and Radical Reform

Enrico Dal Lago

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780807152089
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini, two of the foremost radicals of the nineteenth century, lived during a time of profound economic, social, and political transformation in America and Europe. Both born in 1805, but into dissimilar family backgrounds, the American Garrison and Italian Mazzini led entirely different lives -- one as a citizen of a democratic republic, the other as an exile proscribed by most European monarchies. Using a comparative analysis, Enrico Dal Lago suggests that Garrison and Mazzini nonetheless represent a connection between the egalitarian ideologies of American abolitionism and Italian democratic nationalism.
Focusing on Garrison's and Mazzini's activities and transnational links within their own milieus and in the wider international arena, Dal Lago shows why two nineteenth-century progressives and revolutionaries considered liberation from enslavement and liberation from national oppression as two sides of the same coin. At different points in their lives, both Garrison and Mazzini demonstrated this belief by concurrently supporting the abolition of slavery in the United States and the national revolutions in Italy. The two meetings Garrison and Mazzini had, in 1846 and in 1867, served to reinforce their sense that they somehow worked together toward the achievement of liberty not just in the United States and Italy, but also in the Atlantic and Euro-American world as a whole. In the end, the abolition of American slavery led to Garrison's consecration, while the new Italian kingdom forced Mazzini into exile. Despite these different outcomes, Garrison and Mazzini both attracted legions of devoted followers who believed these men personified the radical causes of the nations to which they belonged.

1

EARLY ATTEMPTS AT DEMOCRATIZATION

The Making of Two Radical Leaders, 1805–1830

The world in which William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini were born, in 1805, was a world in turmoil: it was an epoch that Robert Palmer appropriately described fifty years ago as the “Age of Democratic Revolution” and that recent scholarship, following Palmer’s lead, has treated fruitfully in comparative perspective. Starting in the late eighteenth century, from one side of the Atlantic to the other, revolutionary movements shook the foundations of the old European and colonial American orders, with indelible repercussions on the struggles to abolish slavery and to liberate oppressed nationalities. Long before they became the two life causes of Garrison and Mazzini, the abolition of slavery and liberation from national oppression reached the height of their popularity, as a result of the increasing democratization of society brought about by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Those revolutions were consequences both of the spread of Enlightenment ideas about human rights’ inalienability and universality and of incipient romantic notions about individuals’ and peoples’ entitlement to self-fulfillment.¹

By 1805 the successful conclusion of the Haitian revolution in the former slaveholding French colony of Saint Domingue and the 1804 formation of the free Haitian republic had come at the end of a process of dissolution of the old system of colonial slavery in the New World; it was a period that had seen the implementation of antislavery measures all over the Americas, especially in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary North America. The Haitian revolution had become not only a positive paradigm for a possible world without slaves, but also a negative paradigm for what the world would become if whites did not proceed to abolish slavery before being forced to do so. In Europe, the Napoleonic Empire was at its height by 1805, spread as it was over the breadth and length of Europe, as a result of an almost continuous state of war between expansionist Napoleonic France and Europe’s reactionary powers, supported especially by Britain. The Napoleonic Empire had had a fundamental role in spreading to other European countries French revolutionary ideas—the same ideas that had sparked the initial revolt and then the Haitian revolution in Saint Domingue. However, the spread of revolutionary ideas by force of arms had prompted in response a surge of protonationalist movements in those same European countries, including Italy—and that fact led to unforeseen and devastating consequences for the French armies of occupation.²

If this was the situation in 1805, in the following ten to fifteen years, the period of early youth for Garrison and Mazzini, the revolutionary thrust died out and a renewed version of the “Old Order” seemed to grip the entire Euro-American world. Despite the momentous abolition of the Atlantic slave trade implemented by the British Empire in 1807 and by the U.S. Congress in 1808, the end of Saint Domingue’s economic hegemony in the Caribbean had led to a restructuring of the entire slave system in the New World and to the rise of a new, aggressively capitalist and more exploitative “second slavery” in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil. At the same time, with the Congress of Vienna, Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo, and the creation of the “Holy Alliance” between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1815, even though French occupation ended throughout Europe, the national aspirations of several European peoples were sacrificed in favor of the restoration of former polities headed by reactionary rulers. This happened in both Italy and Germany, and both were divided into multiple dynastic states. The world in which Garrison and Mazzini made their early acquaintance with the issues that occupied them for their lifetimes—slavery and national oppression—was thus a world in which conservatism and reaction, as opposed to reform and revolution, were the norm; and yet the legacy of the immense changes resulting from the revolutionary period on both sides of the Atlantic had not been lost but was dormant underneath a veneer of order and immobility.³

In fact, from 1816 on, there were telling signs of change in the Americas and Europe, either open or hidden, in regard to opposition to slavery and national oppression. In the British Empire in particular, abolitionists, led by William Wilberforce, had become progressively stronger in Parliament and—also helped by the public uproar caused by large-scale slave rebellions in the West Indian colonies of Barbados (1816) and Demerara (1823)—had managed to build consensus around the issue of gradual emancipation. By 1823 they had founded the Society for Mitigating and Gradually Abolishing Slavery throughout the British Dominion, which came to be known as the Anti-Slavery Society (ASS), headed by Thomas Fowell Buxton, while British prime minister George Canning had called for “ameliorative measures” regarding slavery in the British colonies. By contrast, in continental Europe, opposition to the policy of Restoration and its reactionary violation of the principle of nationality coalesced around the creation of secret societies, given the presence of police regimes in most European countries. In the period 1816–25, the influence of possibly the largest among these secret societies, the Carboneria, reached its peak, having gathered thousands of adherents among the young middle class both in Italy and in other countries such as Spain, where it was at the origin of the 1820–21 constitutional revolution, and in France, where, led by university student Philip-Joseph-Benjamin Bouchez, it was instrumental in revolutionary conspiracies against the restored Bourbon king Louis XVIII.⁴

If we place these developments within their Atlantic context, we will notice that they appear to be elements of a long wave of movements that, at the beginning of the postrevolutionary period, shook the foundations of the restored Old Order throughout the Atlantic. This wave culminated with the ten-year struggle for Greek independence (1821–30) from the Ottoman Empire and with the successful Latin American revolutions, which in the early 1820s defeated the Spanish Empire and birthed several countries in Central and South America. Significantly, secret societies played a leading role in both the Greek and the Latin American struggles, and those struggles mostly led to the foundation of new nations. More significant still is that there was also an antislavery element within the Latin American revolutionary movements: the most famous revolutionary hero there, Simon Bolivar, acquired the nickname “The Liberator” both as a redeemer of peoples or nations and as a supposed liberator from slavery. In fact, at the 1819 Congress of Angostura, Bolivar pleaded with the Creole elite to do away with what he called the “dark mantle of barbarous and profane slavery.” Despite his later ambiguous attitude toward the issue, Bolivar became a model and a paradigm for both Garrison and Mazzini; thus, the example of Bolivar’s rhetoric shows well how, by the 1820s, the common language spoken by radicals and revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic identified liberation from national oppression with liberation from slavery as if the two were intimately linked struggles for the common benefit of humankind.⁵

Religious Influence and Ethical Commitment in Garrison and Mazzini

Born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Garrison and Mazzini took their first steps in the postrevolutionary and Restoration Euro-American world. In that world, as they knew it in the United States and Italy, religion played a very important role in the daily life of the people. On one hand, each of the two men was subject to the influence of his own family environment, and in both cases the mother played a crucial role in the religious education of her son. On the other hand, particular religious movements and strains, which reached the peak of their activity in the 1820s and 1830s, contributed crucially to forming the character and the worldview of both Garrison and Mazzini in their youth. Specifically, in Protestant New England, and particularly in Massachusetts, where Garrison grew up, evangelical Christianity—through two consecutive reform movements, the latter of which was the Second Great Awakening—had increasingly assumed a militant tone, calling on believers to purge their sins in this life, so as to amend their personal relationship with God. Italy was dominated by the Catholic Church, and yet, in the city of Genoa, where Mazzini was born, the influence of Jansenism was particularly strong and had contributed to the spread of ideas close to those of Protestant Christianity, including the paramount importance of a personal relationship with God.

The influence of these parallel varieties of Christianity had an incalculable weight on the formation of Garrison’s and Mazzini’s young minds and left indelible traces that, in time, combined with other influences no less important to stir the course of the two youths toward their life causes. Both Garrison and Mazzini had early experiences of acquaintance with oppression, though in different forms; Garrison experienced it directly when working as an apprentice and growing up in poverty, while Mazzini experienced it indirectly through his meeting with a political exile and patriot who was reduced to poverty. As Garrison and Mazzini came of age, the combination of religious influences with libertarian ideals marked the thought of both to such an extent that, though in different contexts and in different ways, they became similarly convinced of an ethical “mission” that they had been called to fulfill: the extirpation of slavery in Garrison’s case, the liberation from national oppression in Mazzini’s case. And as their two missions became ethical to them in an almost absolute sense, with highly religious tones attached, their commitment to what became their life causes grew to be equally absolute and uncompromising.

The United States in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the setting of William Lloyd Garrison’s youth, was a country undergoing tremendous transformation. In the North, in particular, the changes that accompanied the spread of the “market revolution”—that is, early industrialization and the workers’ exploitation it generated, expansion of communication and transportation, and the spread of mass culture and popular publications—influenced almost every aspect of social life. Understandably, people struggled to make sense of these momentous transformations and of the improvements and strains they had brought for individuals and families. As this happened, several morally committed individuals dedicated themselves to showing Americans the contradictions of the society in which they lived and called for a variety of social reforms. From the beginning, the reformist impulse became associated with religious principles; as a consequence, reform movements—the most important being the temperance movement, which fought against alcohol consumption—sprang up, claiming to fulfill American society’s urgent need for moral change and acting as much for religious as for economic reasons.⁶

In New England, and especially in Massachusetts, where early industrialization was more pronounced than elsewhere and thus had led to earlier and more substantial changes, the reformist impulse was especially strong. Together with the temperance movement, already in the early nineteenth century religious associations had appeared, calling for moral reform through a stricter adherence to Christian principles. The most important of these associations was the New England Tract Society, which in 1825 converged into the American Tract Society, based in New York, whose wealthiest sponsors were future abolitionists Arthur and Lewis Tappan. Both springing from and causing the reformist ferment was a wave of evangelical revivalism—the Second Great Awakening (the First Great Awakening had occurred in the eighteenth century)—that swept across the United States with particularly radical effects in New England and in the region between the state of New York and the Great Lakes area, the “burned-over district,” in the 1820s. In this region, charismatic preaching, spontaneous mass meetings, and voluntary conversions involved thousands of people in an ecstatic experience of faith that, like a spreading fire, enveloped everybody it encountered on its path. At its heart, the revivalist message was one of radical opposition to the more conservative established church; people were taught that they could personally experience God through charismatic services and by achieving a moral redemption that focused, first and foremost, on abandoning their sinful way of living and the particular established social norms that caused it. As Robert Abzug has explained, responding to America’s religious crisis, evangelical revivalism provided a powerful cosmological view, filled with millennialism and alternative to the dominant religious tenets, within which reform activities were as much a sign of religious as of social protest.⁷

Thus, as Methodist and Baptist preachers embraced enthusiastically and in increasing numbers the practices and messages of the new evangelical wave, through their work they became instrumental in laying the foundations for an overall change in attitude in the public that ultimately favored the spread of an abolitionist movement—the most radical expression of both religious and social protest in nineteenth-century America. Famous preachers such as Charles G. Finney and Lyman Beecher urged individuals to abandon their sinful lives and obtain redemption through radical changes that would lead to a substantial moral improvement in the society they lived in. They focused their attacks on the slave system that oppressed the South as the main moral problem and the biggest sin from which American people ought to free themselves—since, the preachers believed, they had the capacity to free themselves if they were persuaded to do so—in order to start on their path toward redemption and thus salvation. Thus, both evangelical ministers and evangelical converts who were touched by the revivalist wave constituted an extremely important influence on the abolitionist movement. Moreover, several abolitionist leaders were educated in New England by those same evangelical preachers, who gave them a strong sense of moral and religious commitment and a will to fight moral degradation and the evil that sins brought with them. And slavery, doubtless, represented the greatest sin of all.⁸

The family William Lloyd Garrison was born into in Massachusetts was one of many whose members had, in different ways and degrees of intensity, a personal experience of the evangelical revivalism that sprang from the Second Great Awakening. His mother, Frances Maria (Fanny), had a very strong influence on young Garrison in religious matters. After the death of her eldest daughter Caroline and her husband Abijah’s departure from the family household, in 1808 Fanny was left alone to provide for the remaining three children, James, Lloyd, and Elizabeth, in the small seaport of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Doubtless, Fanny’s deep “belief in the redemptive power of Jesus, expressed in a consuming Baptist piety,” in the words of James B. Stewart, was her way of fighting against life’s difficulties, but there was more to it than that. Following a rather common pattern among the “new-born” Christians who joined the huge camp meetings and gatherings addressed by the great evangelical preachers, Fanny was converted from a strict, conservative Anglicanism, of which her father was a typical representative, to a revivalist and even revolutionary Baptist faith, and as a consequence, she was banished from her family. From that moment on, Fanny’s life moved firmly within the boundaries set by the two main and opposite evangelical concepts of sin and redemption.⁹

After failing to redeem her husband—a seafarer with too much of an aptitude for drinking and good company—from his sins, Fanny set about to prevent her children from falling into their father’s ways; in the process she provided young Garrison with the strongest possible moral example of living, an example that was decisive in forming Garrison’s uncompromising stance against the sin of slavery. Even when Fanny, unable to support all her children, moved to Lynn with her eldest son James in 1812, she made sure that Garrison would continue to have a proper Christian education; she left him with the strongly religious family of Ezekiel Bartlett, the deacon of her church. For three years young Garrison was schooled in the scriptures and in sermons and hymns, and he kept the role model of his mother constantly in mind; the force of his mother’s influence may have been even stronger now, because he missed her and longed to be with her and to have his behavior approved by her. Young Garrison learned well the importance of conscience, piety, and the redeeming power of Christian love, as well as the devastating power of sin, which, it seemed to him, had irremediably affected his brother James. Then in 1815–16, Fanny was briefly able to live again with all her children, first in Lynn and then in Baltimore, where it quickly appeared that the conflict between Garrison’s dissolute brother James and his mother was escalating. After working first as a shoemaker and then as a cabinetmaker, Garrison decided to leave, at only eleven, to escape Baltimore and return to Newburyport, with Fanny’s blessing and a growing sense of his own moral role in a world in which the Christian God he had learned to love and respect seemed to him an increasingly crucial influence.¹⁰

Garrison would not see his mother again. Fanny died in 1823, following the death of his younger sister Elizabeth and seven years after his departure from Baltimore. During those years, Garrison worked as an apprentice to Ephraim W. Allen at the Newburyport Herald and discovered his talent and passion for what became his life activity: journalism. By 1823, although he was only eighteen, and although his education was largely self-taught, Garrison was already writing pieces under different names, commenting on politics in both the United States and Europe and appearing, at this date, a man of staunch Federalist principles and unquestionable morality. Recent scholarship has assigned a great deal of importance to Garrison’s time at the Herald, and there is little doubt that Allen’s particular combination of Federalism and antislavery sentiment must have made a deep impression on the young apprentice. In this connection, Matthew Mason has argued that “Garrison’s Federalist heritage stands as but one example, for many white abolitionists besides Garrison had deep roots in New England Federalism and the religious and political culture for which it stood.” Thus, it is entirely possible, as both Mason and Mark Arkin have maintained, that the influence of Federalism on abolitionism—and particularly on the New England brand of abolitionism typified by Garrison—might still be little understood and might reveal a particularly important factor to investigate and take into account.¹¹

Moreover, as Caleb McDaniel has shown, it was largely as a result of his period of apprenticeship at the Herald that Garrison gained his appreciation for viewing the news from the angle that Allen had adopted for his paper—one that emphasized the struggles for freedom throughout the Euro-American world. The Herald reported at length about both the Latin American wars of independence from Spain, in which Simon Bolivar played a particularly significant role, the Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire, and Italy’s 1820–21 revolutions against the peninsula’s autocratic regimes. In McDaniel’s words, “these reports charged Garrison’s imagination with the idea that a new age of liberty was underway.” If in Latin America the opponent to the peoples’ liberty was the Spanish Empire, in Europe the great reactionary power was represented by the “Holy Alliance” of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. In the first articles he published, signed “An Old Bachelor,” or simply “A.O.B.,” starting in 1822, Garrison showed that he already interpreted the events happening in his lifetime as if they proved the existence of a global struggle between those he called in an 1823 article “the friends of reform throughout Europe and America” and the forces of reaction, determined to suppress the people’s demands for freedom.¹²

As Garrison moved through these crucial experiences during his apprenticeship years at the Herald, he kept looking for his mother’s approval and, through her, for God’s moral approval of his actions. In May 1823, Garrison wrote Fanny: “Thus you perceive, my dear mother, that my leisure moments have been usefully and wisely employed;—usefully, because it is beneficial in cultivating the seeds of improvement in my breast, expanding the intellectual powers and faculties of my mind; wisely, because it has kept me from wasting time in that dull, senseless, insipid manner, which generally characterizes giddy youths.” As a result of the crucial influence of his mother, you...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Garrisonian Abolitionism, Mazzinian Democratic Nationalism, and Transnational Comparisons
• 1. Early Attempts at Democratization: The Making of Two Radical Leaders, 1805–1830
• 2. Exercises in Media Proselytism: Journalism and Revolutionary Apostolate, 1831–1833
• 3. Working Toward Global Middle-Class Inclusiveness: The Fight for Freedom from Local to Federal, 1833–1837
• 4. Confronting Ideological Inertias: Garrisonians, Mazzinians, and Their Enemies, 1838–1846
• 5. Baptisms of Fire for New Social Ideas: Political Defeat, Radical Intransigence, and Internationalism, 1846–1853
• 6. Endorsement and Refusal of Mainstream Radicalism: Garrison’s and Mazzini’s Times for Action, 1854–1861
• 7. Political Stalemate Between Opposite Extremisms: Garrison’s Compromise and Mazzini’s Defeat, 1862–1870
• Conclusion: Different Ends and Parallel Fame of Two Iconic Radicals
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index