Abstract
In the previous chapter, we looked at one of two possible ways to compare the American Civil War and southern Italy’s Great Brigandage, the civil war that followed Italian national unification—namely, through the emphasis on the north-south divide and the related idea of a secession of the southern part of the country from the national polity based in the north. The comparative perspective in Chapter 5 worked mainly from the northern point of view, and therefore the policies of northern statesmen—Lincoln and the Republicans in the United States and Cavour and his successors in the parliamentary Right in Italy—were the focus of the study, with important additional elements represented by significant transnational connections between American and Italian politicians and by the presence of British observers. In this chapter I focus primarily on the southern regions and emphasize the specific nature of the “inner civil wars” within the Confederacy and the Mezzogiorno.1 In this chapter, the comparative perspective will serve to highlight both the similarities and the differences between the civil wars as internecine struggles that, for different reasons and on different scales, pitched southerners against southerners in the two regions in the period 1861–65.
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Notes
On the concept of “inner civil war” with specific reference to the Confederacy, see David Williams, Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War (New York: Norton, 2008).
For an analogous concept with reference to post-unification southern Italy, see especially John Davis, “The South and the Risorgimento: Histories and Counter-Histories,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 19:1 (2014), 53–61.
See Don H. Doyle, Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003),
and Don H. Doyle, ed., Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America’s Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010);
Enrico Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005);
Timothy Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009);
Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011);
and Andre Fleche, The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
See Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Banger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14;
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991);
and Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).
Among the most important studies that have applied the ideas of the above scholars to Confederate and Italian nationalisms, see especially Drew Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988);
Ann Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009);
Alberto Mario Banti, Il Risorgimento italiano (Rome: Laterza, 2008);
and Lucy J. Riall, Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation-State (New York: Palgrave, 2009).
See, for the most important recent studies that have highlighted this dimension, Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010),
and Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South (New York: Random House, 2013),
on the Confederate South; and Salvatore Lupo, L’unificazione italiana. Mezzogiorno, rivoluzione, guerra civile (Rome: Donzelli, 2011),
and Carmine Pinto, “Tempo di guerra. Conflitti, patrottismi e tradizioni politiche nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia (1859–66),” Meridiana 76 (2013), 57–84, on southern Italy.
The concept of revolution is at the heart of two of the most important recent studies on the Confederacy and the Mezzogiorno in 1861–65: Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie, and Lupo, L’unificazione italiana. On these issues, see also Enrico Dal Lago, “States of Rebellion: Civil War, Rural Unrest, and the Agrarian Question in the American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno, 1861–1865,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47:2 (2005), 403–432.
See Edward Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Origins of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008);
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);
Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the World Wide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109 (2004), 1405–1438.
See also Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011).
See Dale Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and the World Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), 56–74;
Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske, “Introduction, The Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World-Economy, and Comparative Microhistories,” Review 31:2 (2008), 91–100.
See also Anthony Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75:3 (2009), 627–650;
and Enrico Dal Lago, American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond: The U.S. Peculiar Institution in International Perspective (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 63–92.
See Rebecca Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005);
Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 95:1 (1990), 75–98;
Michael L. Bush, Servitude in Modern Times (Cambridge: Polity, 2000);
and Peter Kolchin, “Some Controversial Questions Concerning Nineteenth-Century Abolition from Slavery and Serfdom,” in Michael L. Bush, ed., Slavery and Serfdom: Studies in Legal Bondage (London: Longman, 1996), 42–68.
See also Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987);
Shearer Davis Bowman, Masters and Lords: Mid-Nineteenth Century Prussian Junkers and U.S. Planters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
and Mark Smith, “Old South Time in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 101 (1996), 1432–1469.
Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Civil Wars,” in Carles Boix and Susan C. Stokes, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 417.
Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
On guerrilla warfare in the post-unification Mezzogiorno, see especially Franco Molfese, “Il brigntaggio meridionale,” in Bartolo Anglani et al., eds., Storia della società italiana, vol. 18 (Milan: Teti, 1981), 73–103.
On guerrilla in the Confederacy and in the American Civil War in general, see especially Daniel E. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
Interesting suggestions for comparisons are in Carmine Pinto, “Guerre civili. Un percorso teorico,” Meridiana 76 (2013), 31–56.
On these themes, see Enrico Dal Lago, “The End of the ‘Second Slavery’ in the Confederate South and the ‘Great Brigandage’ in Southern Italy: A Comparative Study,” in Javier Lavina and Michael Zeuske, eds., The Second Slavery: Mass Slaveries and Modernity in the Americas and in the Atlantic Basin (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014), 77–83.
“South Carolina’s Declaration of the Immediate Causes of Secession (1860),” in Rick Halpern and Enrico Dal Lago, eds., Slavery and Emancipation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 349.
On the secession of the Lower South, see especially William Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 427–499; and McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 38–63. On South Carolina in particular,
see Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 221–253.
Paul D. Escott, The Confederacy: The Slaveholders’ Failed Venture (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 14.
See Shearer Davis Bowman, At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 261–288.
See also Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
Freehling, Secessionists Triumphant, 532, see also 499–530. See also Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 21. See also Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
See Mark E. Neely, “Abraham Lincoln vs. Jefferson Davis: Comparing Presidential Leadership during the Civil War,” in James McPherson and William J. Cooper, Jr., eds., Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 96–111.
See Margaret M. Storey, “Southern Dissent,” in Aaron Sheehan-Dean, ed., A Companion to the U.S. Civil War (Oxford: Blackwell, 2014), 867–890.
See also especially William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001);
and John C. Inscoe and Robert Kenzer, eds., Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
See Aaron Sheehan-Dean, “Southern Home Front,” in Sheehan-Dean, ed., A Companion to the U.S. Civil War, 909–926; and Victoria Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and its Legacies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
See especially Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–1869 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 117. See also Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).
See Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites, 336–339. See also Giorgio Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, vol. 5: Dalla rivoluzione nazionale all’Unità (1849–1860) (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964).
See Lucy Riall, Under the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 94–110.
See also Lucy Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy, 1859–1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
See Alfonso Scirocco, Il Mezzogiorno nella crisi dell’unificazione (1860–1861) (Naples: Società Editrice Napoletana, 1981).
Roberto Martucci, L’invenzione dell’Italia unita, 1855–1864 (Florence: Sansoni, 1999), 158–159.
See also Gigi Di Fiore, Gli ultimi giorni di Gaeta. L’assedio che condannò l’Italia all’Unità (Milan: Rizzoli, 2012).
See Simon Sarlin, “Fighting the Risorgimento: Foreign Volunteers in Southern Italy (1860–63),” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 14 (2009), 476–490;
and Aldo Albonico, La mobilitazione legitimista contra il Regno d’Italia. La Spagna e il brigantaggio meridionale postunitario (Milan: Giuffrè, 1979).
John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, 1780–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 108.
On the Santafede, see also Angelantonio Spagnoletti, Storia del Regno delle Due Sicilie (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997).
See Aldo Albonico, “Lights and Shades of the Carlist Mobilization against the Kingdom of Italy, 1860–66,” Mediterranean Studies 6 (1996), 107–112.
See also Alessia Facineroso, “La dimora del tempo sospeso. Il governo borbonico in esilio e le sue trame cospirative,” PhD Dissertation, Università degli Studi di Catania, 2011;
Simon Sarlin, Le légitimisme en armes. Histoire d’une mobilisation internationale contre l’unité italienne (Rome: École française de Rome, 2013);
and Gigi Di Fiore, Controstoria dell’Unità d’Italia. Fatti e misfatti del Risorgimento (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007), 199–201.
On Sergente Romano, see especially Antonio Lucarelli, Il Sergente Romano. Il brigantaggio politico in Puglia dopo il 1860 (Rome: Laterza, 1922).
See especially Pasquale Soccio, Unità e brigantaggio in una città della Puglia (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1969).
See Marco Meriggi, “Dopo l’Unità. Forme e ambivalenza del legittimismo borbonico,” Passato e Presente 29 (2011), 39–56.
See especially Gary Gallagher, “Disaffection, Persistence, and Nation: Some Directions in Recent Scholarship on the Confederacy,” Civil War History 55 (2009), 329–353;
and the essays in John C. Inscoe and Robert C. Kenzer, eds., Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001).
See Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer, The Free State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy (New York: Random House, 2009);
Victoria Bynum, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War, 101–116.
Wayne K. Durrill, “Review of John C. Inscoe and Robert C. Kenzer, eds., Enemies of the Country and Victoria Bynum, The Free State of Jones,” Journal of American History 89 (2002), 1050.
See Winthrop Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995).
Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggle in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 69.
Justin Behrend, “Rebellious Talks and Conspiratorial Plots: The Making of a Slave Insurrection in Civil War Natchez,” Journal of Southern History 77 (2011), 40.
See especially Ira Berlin et al., Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–76;
and Louis Gerteis, “Slaves, Servants, and Soldiers: Uneven Paths to Freedom in the Border States, 1861–1865,” in William A. Blair and Karen Fischer Younger, eds., Lincoln’s Proclamation; Emancipation Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 170–194.
Abraham Lincoln, “The Emancipation Proclamation (1863),” in Rick Halpern and Enrico Dal Lago, eds., Slavery and Emancipation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 380.
See also Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010), 166–206;
and James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: Norton, 2013), 340–393.
James Henry Hammond’s quote is in Carol Bleser, ed., Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 297.
Lewis Jackson’s quote is in Anthony E. Kaye, “Slaves, Emancipation, and the Powers of War: Views from the Natchez District of Mississippi,” in Joan Cashin, ed., The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 65.
On the slaves’ networks in the antebellum and Civil War south, see also Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
On the Emancipation Proclamation and slave insurrection, see James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Norton, 2014), 102–107.
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1935), 49.
Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979), 46.
See also Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005).
See Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 55–114.
See the important synthesis of these issues in Steven Hahn, “But What Did the Slaves Think of Lincoln?” in Blair and Younger, eds., Lincoln’s Proclamation, 102–119; and also, more recently, Thavolia Glymph, “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 3:4 (2013), 501–532.
Crocco’s quote is in Maria Grazia Cutrufelli, L’Unità d’Italia. Questione meridionale e nascita del sottosviluppo nel Sud (Rome: Bertani, 1974), 259.
Franco Molfese, Storia del brigantaggio dopo l’Unità (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964), 171.
Raffaele Romanelli, L’Italia liberale, 1860–1900 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 33.
See also Franco Molfese, “Il brigantaggio meridionale,” in Bartolo Anglani et al., Storia della Società italiana, vol. 18: Lo stato unitario e il suo difficile debutto (Milan: Teti, 1981), 73–103.
Derek Beales and Eugenio Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy (London: Longman, 2002), 159.
Molfese, Storia del brigantaggio dopo l’Unità, 167. On Aspromonte, see Alfonso Scirocco, Giuseppe Garibaldi. Battaglie, amori, ideali di un cittadino del mondo (Rome: Laterza, 2001), 293–295;
and Lucy J. Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 317–325.
See especially Tommaso Pedio, Brigantaggio meridionale (1806–1863) (Cavallino di Lecce: Capone Editore, 1997), 110–135.
See Tommaso Pedio, ed., Inchiesta Massari sul brigantaggio (Manduria: Lacaita, 1983); and Pedio, Brigantaggio meridionale, 128–130.
John A. Davis, “Le guerre del brigantaggio,” in Mario Isnenghi and Eva Cecchinato, eds., Fare l’Italia. Unità e disunità nel Risorgimento (Turin: UTET, 2008), 746.
Martucci, L’invenzione dell’Italia unita, 314. According to Irish pro-Bourbon author The O’Clery, only in the period from May 1861 to February 1863, the number of brigands who were either shot or killed in battle was of 3,451 men, with an additional 3,700 men who either surrendered or were made prisoners; see The O’Clery, The Making of Italy (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1892), 306.
See also Daniela Adorni, “Il brigantaggio,” in Luciano Violante, ed., Storia d’Italia, Annali 12: La criminalità (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 283–319.
See Alfonso Scirocco, “Il giudizio sul brigantaggio meridionale. Dallo scontro politico alla riflessione storica,” in Loretta De Felice, ed., Fonti per la storia del brigantaggio postunitario conservate nell’Archivio centrale dello Stato. Triunali militari straordinari (Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1998), xiv–xxxviii.
See Enrico Dal Lago, “Rethinking the Bourbon Kingdom,” Modern Italy 6 (2001), 69–78.
See Jonathan Morris, “Challenging Meridionalismo: Constructing a New History of Southern Italy,” in Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris, eds., The New History of the Italian South: The Mezzogiorno Revisited (Exeter, U.K.: University of Exeter Press, 1998), 1–19; and Davis, “Le guerre del brigantaggio,” 738–752.
Salvatore Lupo, Il passato del nostra presente. Il lungo ottocento, 1776–1913 (Rome: Laterza, 2010), 107.
See also especially Salvatore Lupo, “Il Grande Brigantaggio. Interpretazione e memoria di una guerra civile,” in Walter Barberis, ed., Storia d’Italia, Annali 18: Guerra e Pace (Turin: Einaudi, 2002), 465–504.
See John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and the Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999);
and John Dickie, “A Word at War: The Italian Army and Brigandage, 1860–1870,” History Workshop Journal 33 (1992), 1–24.
See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
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Dal Lago, E. (2015). Inner Civil Wars in the Confederate South and the Italian Mezzogiorno, 1861–1865. In: The Age of Lincoln and Cavour. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490124_7
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