Abstract
In recent years, thanks to the work of transnational scholars such as Thomas Bender, Ian Tyrrell, and Carl Guarneri, the American Civil War has acquired a very definite place in the ever-growing literature on nineteenth-century nation-building in the Euro-American world.1 Yet, as early as the 1960s, David Potter claimed that the main contributions of the American Civil War to nineteenth-century world history and the two features that made it a unique case study for historical comparison were that “it turned the tide which had been running against nationalism for forty years” and that “it forged a bond between nationalism and liberalism at a time when it appeared that the two might draw apart and move in opposite directions” after the defeat of the 1848 European revolutions.2 Potter referred specifically to the ideology represented by Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party as a high tide of a type of liberal nationalism with a great deal in common with mid-nineteenth-century European liberal nationalist movements. Significantly, within the European context, the most celebrated of such movements was the one for Italian national Unification—the Risorgimento—which resulted in the victory of liberal principles with the creation of an Italian constitutional monarchy in 1861, masterminded by Camillo Cavour. Thus, we can say that, from this particular perspective, the Risorgimento would make an ideal case study for comparison with the American Civil War.3
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Notes
See Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006), 116–181;
Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States in Global Perspective since1789 (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 84–93;
and Carl Guarneri, America in the World: United States History in Global Context (New York: McGraw Hill, 2007), 148–165.
David M. Potter, “Civil War,” in C. Van Woodward, ed., The Comparative Approach to American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 138.
See also Timothy Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2009).
On comparison between the American Civil War and the Italian Risorgimento, see Enrico Dal Lago, American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond: The U.S. “Peculiar Institution” in International Perspective (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 145–172.
See Glauco Licata, “Il messaggio di Lincoln e la prospettiva dei patrioti italiani,” Il Risorgimento 17 (1965), 73–90;
Raimondo Luraghi, La Guerra Civile Americana (Turin: Einaudi, 1966);
Enzo Tagliacozzo, “Lincoln e il Risorgimento” in A. Lombardo et al., Italia e Stati Uniti nell’età del Risorgimento e della Guerra Civile (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969), 313–335;
and Eugenio Biagini, “The Principle of Humanity: Lincoln in Germany and Italy, 1859–1865,” in Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton, eds., The Global Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 76–94.
Raimondo Luraghi, Pensiero e azione economica del Conte di Cavour (Turin: Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento, 1961);
Rosario Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, 3 vols. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1969–1984);
Luciano Cafagna, Cavour (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999).
Gabor S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978);
Olivier Frayssé, Lincoln, Land, and Labor, 1809–1860 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
See, for example, the early chapters in David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Random House, 1995);
in Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdsman Publishing, 1999);
in Richard Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (New York: Vintage, 2003):
and in Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010).
On Lincoln’s early life, see Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln before Washington: New Perspectives on the Illinois Years (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997);
Douglas L. Wilson, Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Knopf, 1998);
and Kenneth J. Winkle, The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln (Dallas, TX: Taylor, 2001).
An important study on Lincoln’s early years for this purpose is Don Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), since its first chapter is a thorough analysis of the economic context of Lincoln’s adoptive state of Illinois in the 1850s.
Daniel Walker Howe, ‘What Hath God Wrought’: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 567.
Foner, The Fiery Trial, 83. On economic changes and the market revolution in the Midwest, particularly in Illinois, see especially John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986);
Bernard H. Sieracki, “Order and Opportunity: The Development of the Illinois Railroad and Warehouse Commission,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2008;
and Andrew R. L. Cayton and Peter S. Onuf, The Midwest and the Nation (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1990).
Lucy Riall, Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 105.
On proto-industrialization and economic development in nineteenth-century Piedmont and northwestern Italy, see specifically Guido Quazza, L’industria laniera e cotoniera in Piemonte dal 1831 al 1861 (Turin: Museo nazionale del Risorgimento, 1961);
Franco Ramella, Terra e telai. Sistema di parentela e manifattura nel Biellese dell’Ottocento (Turin: Einaudi, 1983);
Luciano Cafagna, Dualismo e sviluppo nella storia d’Italia (Venice: Marsilio, 1989);
and Franco Bonelli, “Il capitalismo italiano. Linee generali di interpretazione” in Ruggero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, eds, Storia d’Italia, Annali 1: Dal feudalesimo al capitalismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1978).
In general, on the market revolution in the United States, see especially Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);
Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997);
and John Lauritz Larson, The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
On proto-industrialization in Europe and Italy, see Sheilagh C. Ogilvie and Markus Cerman, eds., European Proto-industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
and John S. Cohen and Giovanni Federico, The Growth of the Italian Economy, 1820–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
On proto-industrialization in Spain and Brazil, see especially Julie Marfany, “Is It Still Helpful to Talk about Proto-industrialization? Some Suggestions from a Catalan Case Study,” Economic History Review 63:4 (2010), 942–973;
and Douglas C. Libby, “Proto-industrialization in a Slave Society: The Case of Minas Gerais,” Journal of Latin American Studies 23:1 (1991), 1–35.
On Clay’s “American System,” see especially Harry L. Watson, “Introduction: Old Hickory, Prince Hal, and the World of the Early Republic,” in Harry L. Watson, ed., Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay: Democracy and Development in Antebellum America (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998), 1–118.
On the Moderate Liberals’ economic program, see Luciano Cafagna, “Libertà del mercato e modernizzazione economica in Cavour,” in Umberto Levra, ed., Cavour, l’Italia e l’Europa (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), 113–128.
On southern settlers in nineteenth-century Illinois, see Nicole Etcheson, The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787–1861 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996);
and Douglas M. Meyer, Making the Heartland Quilt: A Geographical History of Settlement and Migration in Early Nineteenth-Century Illinois (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 19.
See Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln, 44–52; and Robert Gudmstead, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011).
On these issues, see especially Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
See Catherine Clinton, “Abraham Lincoln: The Family that Made Him, the Family He Made” in Eric Foner, ed., Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World (New York: Norton, 2008), 253–256.
See Kenneth J. Winkle, The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln (Dallas, TX: Taylor Trade, 2001), 112–120.
See Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Press, 1977).
See David H. Donald, Lincoln (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 94–142.
Abraham Lincoln quoted in Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln, 31; Guelzo, Abram Lincoln, 36. See also Paul Simon, Lincoln’s Preparation for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965).
See James Ramage, Kentucky Rising: Democracy, Slavery, and Culture from Early Republic to the Civil War (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 17–60.
Foner, The Fiery Trial, 41. See also Robert Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).
On some of these issues, see especially Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978);
see also Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York: Norton, 1993).
Foner, The Fiery Trial, 34. See also John Ashworth, Agrarians and Aristocrats: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 255.
Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs, 137. See also John R. Van Atta, “Western Lands and the Political Economy of Henry Clay’s American System,” Journal of the Early Republic 21:4 (2001), 633–655.
See Paul Simon, Lincoln’s Preparation for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965).
Michael C. Meyer, William L. Sherman, and Susan M. Deeds, The Course of Mexican History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 311.
See also Michael P. Costeloe, The Central Republic in Mexico, 1835–1846: Hombres de Bien in the Age of Santa Anna (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
See especially Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 66–96;
and Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
Mark E. Neely, “Lincoln’s Lyceum Speech and the Origins of a Modern Myth,” in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Joseph R. Fornieri, eds., Lincoln’s American Dream: Clashing Political Perspectives (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), 171–173.
See also Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 111.
See Adriano Viarengo, Cavour (Rome: Salerno, 2010), 19–50.
On the Piedmontese aristocracy, see Anthony L. Cardoza, Aristocrats in Bourgeois Italy: The Piedmontese Nobility, 1861–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Rosario Romeo, Vita di Cavour (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1985), 13.
Giuseppe Talamo, “La formazione di Cavour. La rivoluzione di Luglio e i primi anni trenta,” in A. Mango, ed., L’età della Restaurazione e i moti del 1821 (Savigliano: L’Artistica Editrice, 1992), 245.
See especially Romeo, Vita di Cavour, 78–82, 112–119; and Pierangelo Gentile, “L’amministrazione delle tenute di famiglia,” in Silvia Cavicchioli, ed., Camilla Cavour e l’agricoltura (Turin: Carocci, 2011), 21–64.
See also Carlo Pischedda, Camilla Cavour. La famiglia e il patrimonio (Vercelli: Società storica vercellese, 1997).
See Marta Petrusewicz, “Agromania: Innovatori agricoli alla periferia dell’Ottocento,” in Piero Bevilacqua, ed., Storia dell’agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea, vol. 3: Mercati e Istituzioni (Venice: Marisilio, 1991), 295–343.
On northern Italian landowners in particular, see Alberto M. Banti, “I proprietari terrieri nell’Italia centro-settentrionale,” in Piero Bevilacqua, ed., Storia dell’agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea, vol. 2: Uomini e Classi (Venice: Marsilio, 1990), 45–103.
On Spanish commercial agriculture, see Carlos Lopez Fernandez and Pedro Marset Campos, “La agricoltura cientifica en la prensa del siglo XIX a traves de los autores autoctonos,” Dynamis 17 (1997), 239–258;
and Eloy Fernandez Clemente, “La enseñanza de la agricoltura en la España del siglo XIX,” Agricoltura y Sociedad 56 (1990), 113–141.
On silk and Catalan proto-industrialization, see Llorenç Ferrer, “The Diverse Growth of 18th-Century Catalonia: Proto-industrialization?” Catalan Historical Review 5 (2012), 67–84.
See Carl Levy, “Lords and Peasants” in Stefan Berger, ed., A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1789–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 75–98.
Camillo Cavour, Thoughts on Ireland: Its Present and Future (London, 1868) [originally published as: “Considerations sur l’état actuel de l’Irlande et sur son avenir,” Bibliotheque universelle de Geneve 49 (1844), 5–47, 201–254].
See also Enrico Dal Lago, “Count Cavour’s 1844 Thoughts on Ireland: Liberal Politics and Agrarian Reform through Anglo-Italian Eyes” in Niall Whelehan, ed., Transnational Perspective on Modern Irish History (London: Routledge, 2014), 88–105; Romeo, Vita di Cavour, 131–134;
and Nicholas Mansergh, The Irish Question, 1840–1921: A Commentary on Anglo-Irish Relations and on Social and Political Forces in Ireland in the Age of Reform and Revolution (London, 1965), 88–102.
Kristin Hoganson, “Meat in the Middle: Converging Borderlands in the U.S. Midwest, 1865–1900,” Journal of American History 98:4 (2012), 1042.
See the essays in Cavicchioli, ed., Camillo Cavour e l’agricoltura; and Enrico Dal Lago, “Society, Economy, and Politics in Restoration Italy: Toward a Regional Synthesis,” Historical Journal 45 (2002), 182–183.
Cardoza, Aristocrats in Bourgeois Italy, 50. See also Rosario Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, vol. 1: 1810–1842 (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1968), 690–716.
Cavour’s quote is in Narciso Nada, “Istruzione e cultura agraria nel Piemonte preunitario,” in Giuliana Biagioli and Rossano Pazzagli. eds., Agricoltura come manifattura. Istruzione agraria, professionalizzazione e sviluppo agricolo nell’Ottocento (Florence: Olschki, 2004), 290.
Camillo Cavour, “Considerazioni sulla poca convenienza di stabilire poderi-modello in Piemonte,” Gazzetta dell’Associazione Agraria 22 (1843), 186–194.
See particularly Ramella, Terra e telai, and Guido Pescosolido, “Economia, società e territorio” in Piero Craveri, ed., L’Italia al tempo di Cavour (Turin: Centro Studi Piemontese, 2012), 15–46.
On the Whigs and the political implications of the Wilmot Proviso, see James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 153–189;
and Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980).
See Foner, The Fiery Trial, 51–62; and John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol. I: Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 160–161.
Michael P. Johnson, “Work,” in Michael P. Johnson, ed., Abraham Lincoln, Slavery and the Civil War: Selected Writings and Speeches (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s 2001), 33.
Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 64–66.
On nineteenth-century national consolidation and nation-building, see especially Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14;
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983);
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983);
and Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Daniel W. Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 268.
William G. Thomas, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 40.
Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln, 169. See also Sandra K. Lueckenhoff, “A. Lincoln, a Corporate Attorney, and the Illinois Central Railroad,” Missouri Law Review 61 (1996), 393–428;
and Charles Leroy Brown, “Lincoln and the Illinois Central Railroad,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 36 (1943), 121–163.
Thomas, The Iron Way, 39. See also Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011); and, particularly for the competing visions of railroads and modernization North and South,
John Majewski, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
See Maria Malatesta, Le aristocrazie terriere nell’Europa contemporanea (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1998).
Lincoln’s quotation is in Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, 209. See also Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation on Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Marco Meriggi, “Liberali/Liberalismo” in Alberto M. Banti et al., eds., Atlante culturale del Risorgimento. Lessico del linguaggio politico dal Settecento all’Unità (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2011). 112.
Camillo Cavour, “Difesa e osservazioni allo Statuto Albertino,” Il Risorgimento, March 10, 1848, quoted in Adriano viarengo, ed., Camillo Benso di Cavour: Autoritratto. Lettere, diari, scritti e discorsi (Milan: Rizzoli, 2010), 522.
See Alfonso Scirocco, L’Italia del Risorgimento (1796–1870) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 353–354.
Rosario Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, vol. II: 1842–1854 (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1977), 686. See also Georges Vilorgeux, “L’immagine di Cavour in Francia,” in Levra, ed., Cavour, l’Italia e l’Europa, 201–224.
Pescosolido, “Economia, società e territorio,” 39. As Giuseppe Talamo has reminded us, largely as result of Cavour’s wide-ranging economic initiatives, which included also a major enlargement of the industrial port of Genoa—one of the largest in the western Mediterranean— “starting from 1850 until 1853, the Piedmontese economy went through a strong cycle of expansion”; see Talamo, Cavour, 66. See also Frank M. Murtaugh, Cavour and the Economic Modernization of the Kingdom of Sardinia (New York: Garland Publishers, 1991).
Camillo Cavour, “Cavour on Railroads and National Independence,” in Denis Mack Smith, ed., The Making of Italy, 1796–1866 (London: Macmillan, 1988), 109.
See A. Schram, Railroads and the Formation of the Italian State in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 32–33.
Cavour’s quote is in Gilles Pecout, Naissance de l’Italie contemporaine (1770–1922) (Paris: Editions Nathan, 1997), 92.
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© 2015 Enrico Dal Lago
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Dal Lago, E. (2015). Economic Progress, Markets, and Railroads in Lincoln’s and Cavour’s Early Careers. In: The Age of Lincoln and Cavour. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490124_4
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