2 - The Difficult Birth of Two Nations

Both the creation of the Confederate States of America and that of the Kingdom of Italy, in the spring of 1861, represented the fulfillment of nationalist aspirations whose programs had been in gestation for several decades. Confederate nationalism and Italian nationalism were both ideologies that informed movements claiming the need for the existence of new nations that ought to replace old ones. Both movements, therefore, had strengths and weaknesses related to the novelties of their claims. In a Euro-American world still living in the long shadow of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (1770–1830), whose latest product had been the revolutionary biennium of 1848–9 in Europe, nationalism had become a major force to reckon with for the Great Powers, and, as a result, the people’s aspirations to self-determination, even though mostly crushed or unfulfilled, were taken seriously, whether as threat or as promise. Thus, the high tide of nationalism that had caused the 1848–9 Revolutions ultimately led to the nationalisms that created the Confederacy and the Italian Kingdom in 1861. In fact, despite the difference represented by the protection of slavery in the Confederacy vs. its absence and stigmatization in liberal Italy and Europe’s other new nations in the nineteenth century, “Confederates argued that European nationalist movements provided models for their own efforts to establish a new nation-state,” in the words of Andre Fleche, and consequently, “they seized on the ‘right of revolution’ and the rhetoric of self-determination to make their case.”¹ Thus, the strength of the novelty of the Confederate and Italian claims to nationhood lay in the fact that Confederate and Italian nationalists voiced their aspirations to self-determination through the creation of new national institutions at a time when several emerging new nations were making similar claims and holding similar aspirations. At the very basic level, therefore, both Confederate nationalism and Italian nationalism were varieties of an increasing number of nationalisms that characterized the mid-nineteenth-century Euro-American world.

At the same time, though, as new national institutions, both the Confederacy and the Italian Kingdom had inherent weaknesses related to both the circumstances of their creation and the justifications for their existence. In both cases, in fact, the process of formation of the new national institution led to the questioning of its legitimacy, with the Southerners’ illegal secession from the Union and formation of the Confederacy and Italy’s annexation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies through much contested plebiscites at the heart of the matter. Interestingly, though, in the parallels that pro-Confederate Southerners drew between the Confederate and Italian situations, the question of self-determination appeared to simply overshadow any doubt about legitimacy in the creation of the two new nations. Thus, an 1862 article in the newspaper The Index stated:

no one ever questioned the right of the eight millions, which form the population of the Two Sicilies, to give up their autonomy, and annex themselves to the kingdom of Victor Emmanuel – why, therefore, should the eight millions of Confederates be denied the rights to submit any longer to the government of Washington, and constitute themselves as an independent nation?²

Regardless of what the journalist in The Index thought, though, the issue of legitimacy loomed large in both the Confederacy and the Italian Kingdom, both in relation to the international arena and in the internal politics of the Confederate South and southern Italy, where it was a major cause of the two inner civil wars.

At the same time, in the two southern regions, the justification for the legitimate existence of a new national institution was for the most part related to protection of the interests of the propertied elites, to the extent that slaveholding Southerners had been the main promoters of Confederate nationalism in the American South and landowners had been the main promoters of Italian nationalism in southern Italy through their parallel counterrevolutionary moves. Thus, with regard to the two southern regions, in both the Confederate and the Italian cases, nationalism and its culmination in the creation of a new national institution had the typical features of Eric Hobsbawm’s “invention of tradition” – that is, the process through which modern nations came into being, at least at the outset, as ideological constructions created by the elites in power through practices of “social engineering.”³ As such, both Confederate nationalism and Italian nationalism had inherent weaknesses in reaching out to the majorities of the people of the two southern regions. In fact, in both cases, this process could only have a hope of success with the execution of carefully planned projects of nation-building, and even so – also in both cases, as we shall see in the present chapter – opposition to those projects was widespread, as a consequence of divisions resulting from differences in terms of politics, class, and gender. As both the Confederacy and the Italian Kingdom dealt with opposition and dissent through the implementation of increasingly repressive measures throughout the period 1861–3, they ultimately unmasked the weaknesses and contradictions at the heart of both the nationalist ideologies on which they were based and the projects of nation building that accompanied them.

1 The Confederate States of America and the Kingdom of Italy

There is little doubt that, in broad terms, Confederate secession in the United States and national unification in Italy had comparable outcomes, in that they created two new political entities that aspired to the title of legitimate nations. Yet, from the very beginning, the Confederate States of America and the Kingdom of Italy were hardly in a position to be granted legitimacy in the international arena. For international diplomats, the only recognized government in the United States was the Union, whose official position was that the creation of the Confederate nation was a treasonous rebellion to be subdued, as Lincoln incessantly repeated in his speeches and in his official writings. Likewise, at its inception, the Kingdom of Italy was in an uncertain position in the international arena, since the overthrow of the southern Italian Bourbon dynasty, perpetrated by the joint action of Garibaldi and the Piedmontese army without a formal declaration of war, cast a dark shadow over the legitimacy of the new Italian nation – as Bourbon King Francis II never tired of reminding the foreign diplomats and officials with whom he came into contact. The question of legitimacy, though, was crucial in both cases, especially with regard to its effects on internal divisions within the two new nations. In fact, in both the Confederacy and the Italian Kingdom, southern dissenters found themselves legitimized to act against a new national government that they did not recognize and of which they wished to have no part. Thus, Unionists in the Confederacy and pro-Bourbon supporters in southern Italy who were involved in the two inner civil wars considered themselves engaged in legitimate struggles aimed at overthrowing illegitimate new nations.⁴

The struggle over legitimacy was at the heart of the American Civil War. As Don Doyle has written in The Cause of All Nations, on one hand, “the South’s primary foreign policy objective was to secure recognition as a legitimate member of the family of nations,” while on the other “the Union … sought to demonstrate that the South’s rebellion was without legitimate cause.”⁵ The story of the Confederate diplomatic attempts to secure recognition of the Confederacy as a legitimate nation from the major European powers, especially Britain and France – attempts suffering from both overconfidence in European dependence on cotton and underestimation of international disapproval of slavery – is well known.⁶ Ultimately, in the words of Robert Bonner, “among the signal failures of the Confederacy as a nationalist project was its government’s inability to secure foreign recognition and thus operate as a sovereign state in the international community.”⁷ It is also well known that Confederate politicians, such as Secretary of State Robert Toombs and others, sought the legitimate recognition of the Confederate nation by invoking the widespread nineteenth-century mantra of a nation’s right to self-government – as mentioned earlier – citing specifically the examples of Italy and other new nations allowed by the international community to abide by that principle.⁸ However, Lincoln’s government was ultimately more successful in presenting the Union as the embodiment of republican, and also antislavery, principles; this, in the end, led to the arrival of several contingents of foreign soldiers, especially from European countries such as Ireland, Poland, Hungary, and Germany, who sought to stake a claim for the creation of their own republican nations by serving in the Union army.⁹

However, more important for its repercussions on the inner civil war within the Confederacy was the issue of the perception of legitimacy of the new Confederate nation within America itself. As Paul Quigley has pointed out, Confederate Southerners recognized that the first step toward their recognition as a nation was the creation of proper national governmental institutions, which they set out to do right from the very beginning, at the February 4, 1861 Montgomery Convention.¹⁰ Yet, as George Rable has noticed, from its inception, the Confederacy faced precisely a crisis of legitimacy, which “the first state and national elections and the selection and inauguration of Jefferson Davis as Confederate president addressed … by short-circuiting traditional political practices.” Thus, in their attempt to create a perfected version of the American political system through governmental institutions free from the dangers of partisanship, Confederate politicians built a nation whose governmental authority left less and less room for free debate, leading inevitably to fierce opposition to its perceived illegitimacy and creating a recipe for an institutional crisis that would erode the Confederacy from within.¹¹ In a relatively short time, opposition to governmental authority from within the Confederacy produced a crisis of legitimacy of the new Confederate nation in relation to the two main reasons for its existence: the protection of slavery and the protection of states’ rights. Thus, the Confederate inability to protect the institution of slavery and the progressive centralization of the Confederate government to the detriment of the single Southern states, both consequences of the prolonged Civil War with the Union, delegitimized the Confederate national experiment in the eyes of the slaveholders who had started the counterrevolutionary move of secession, and also of those of large sections of the Southern population, whose loyalty to the new nation was based on its guarantee of protection from governmental interference in local affairs.¹²

In turn, this progressive delegitimization went hand in hand with the progressive strengthening of Southern support for the Union within the Confederacy, providing the ingredients for a prolonged inner civil war between Confederate and Unionist Southerners. From the point of view of Southern Unionists, though, from the start there was no question that the Confederacy was an illegitimate nation. They based this opinion on the words of Lincoln, who stated unequivocally, in his “First Inaugural Address” on March 4, 1861, “that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union” and thus that the Confederate States of America were an illegal creation and an illegitimate nation.¹³ Lincoln reiterated this point at different times before and during the war, elaborating on the concept of Confederate rebellion against the United States already in a “Special Message to Congress” on July 4, 1861, in which he also used the expression “so-called Confederate States,” as an alternative to “rebel states,” to describe the illegitimate Confederate nation.¹⁴ In that same speech, Lincoln also addressed the problem of southern Unionists within the Confederacy, with a particular focus on Virginia, arguing that “those loyal citizens, this government is bound to recognize and protect, as being Virginia.”¹⁵ Thus, inaugurating a policy that would last for the remainder of the Civil War, Lincoln stated clearly that he recognized as legitimate citizens living within the Confederacy only the Southern Unionists who kept their allegiance to the United States – a fact that had incalculable consequences for the development of the inner civil war within the Confederate South.

Comparably, the issue of legitimacy was also at the heart of the events that led to Italian national unification and the subsequent institutional crisis that caused the inner civil war at the heart of the Great Brigandage in southern Italy. From the point of view of international diplomacy, in the autumn of 1860, the Kingdom of Sardinia had simply annexed the entire territory of the Mezzogiorno by joining Garibaldi’s forces after they had defeated the Bourbon Kingdom through a politico-military operation conducted with the support of a majority of southern Italian landowners, but without a formal declaration of war. Also, the desperate resistance in which King Francis II and the Bourbon soldiers had engaged at the battle of Volturno and, later, at the fortress of Gaeta rendered even more evident the fact that the process of Italian national unification could be construed as an illegitimate act of Piedmontese aggression against the Bourbon Kingdom, which went against all norms and practices of international relations. At the same time, the hastened and irregular nature of the popular plebiscites on annexation to Piedmont held in the conquered southern Italian territories certainly did little to change that perception.¹⁶ Yet, there is no doubt that most of the international diplomacy, starting with Britain, was on the Piedmontese side, partly as a result of Count Cavour’s shrewd diplomatic efforts and partly because the creation of the Italian Kingdom, despite its many shortcomings, represented for many an important step in the process of construction of nations characterized by liberal institutions. This was also the reason why a majority of southern Italian landowners had supported the Mezzogiorno’s annexation to Italy.¹⁷

Thus, from the point of view of the majority of both international political and public opinion and of the southern Italian landed elite, despite the grave doubts about its legitimacy, the Italian nation-building project responded initially to the need for a new nation which, unlike the Bourbon Kingdom, was based on the liberal principles of parliamentary representation and was respectful of regional influence and power. As a result, in diplomatic terms, the Kingdom of Italy was strong enough to be recognized by Britain, France, and the United States less than a month after the official birth of the new nation on March 17, 1861, and by 1862 it would be recognized also by Russia and Prussia.¹⁸ Having said that, though, there were many among the conservative and reactionary circles in different parts of Europe who, conversely, considered the new Italian Kingdom an illegitimate political creation and supported the cause of restoring Francis II to his legitimate Bourbon throne – a cause to which they often gave concrete contributions in terms of men, arms, and funds.¹⁹ In doing so, they called themselves “legitimists,” and they volunteered to serve Francis II in the irregular guerrilla forces that the Bourbon king and his collaborators tried to gather after his defeat in Gaeta in February 1861 and his exile in Rome, in order to unleash an offensive against the Italian authorities in different parts of the Mezzogiorno.²⁰

As several studies, old and recent, have shown, a truly international brigade of volunteers for the Bourbons’ legitimist cause was recruited from countries such as France, Prussia, and especially Spain. Here, another branch of the Bourbon family represented by Queen Isabel II reigned, and thus, on July 29, 1861, Salvador Bermudez de Castro, the Spanish Ambassador to the exiled Bourbon Kingdom, could write to Francis II: “Your Majesty can rest assured that you have friends, warm and true friends, among your cousins in Spain.”²¹ Also originally from Spain came a group of officers who were contacted by the Bourbon agents while they were in exile after being defeated in the Carlist Wars; they included, among others, José Borjés and Rafael Tristany, who were particularly active in recruiting volunteers.²² For their part, large numbers of southerners – mostly peasants and decommissioned Bourbon soldiers and officers, but also several landowners – had by then already formed numerous guerrilla bands and were fighting their own legitimist war against the Italian army and for the cause of Francis II.²³ And, in truth, the Bourbon king never tired of acknowledging the plight of the southern populations who fought for him, and in his writings always maintained the view that his was the only legitimate throne in southern Italy: As he wrote to Bermudez de Castro on August 8, 1861, “It is unheard of what the populations of the Kingdom are suffering in order to support with arms the principle of legitimacy.”²⁴ Thus, the principle of restoring Francis II to his legitimate throne led to collaboration between pro-Bourbon southerners and foreign volunteers, with enormously significant consequences for the developments of southern Italy’s inner civil war.

Thus, a comparison between the American Civil War and Italian national unification, with the latter’s aftermath of crisis and civil war, shows that legitimacy was a major issue in both cases. Both Lincoln’s Union and Francis II’s exiled Bourbon government used the issue of legitimacy as an ideological and diplomatic weapon in order to argue against the viability of their enemies – the Confederacy and the Italian Kingdom – and justify military action with the aim of suppressing them and restoring the previous political situation in the United States and in southern Italy. Remarkably, even though motivated by largely opposite ideologies, both the cause of the Union and the cause of the Bourbons attracted volunteers ready to offer their services and enlist in military units. While the Union’s commitment to republicanism attracted large numbers of European nationalists and revolutionaries, the Bourbons’ claim of legitimism attracted European conservatives and antiliberal soldiers and adventurers. In both cases, therefore, the significance of the struggle transcended the local circumstances and assumed transnational features, as the most recent historiographical developments have highlighted. More to the point, regardless of the international participation in both conflicts, for the purpose of studying the inner civil wars in the Confederate South and southern Italy it is important to recognize that the issue of legitimacy was at the forefront of both the Unionists’ and the pro-Bourbon supporters’ motivation to fight. In fact, in both cases, for most, the main objective that justified their actions was the restoration of the only legitimate nation – the Union in one case, and the Bourbon Kingdom in the other.

2 Nationalism and Nation-Building in the Confederacy and the Italian Kingdom

While the issue of legitimacy was a major thorn in the side of both Confederate and Italian nation building, there were a number of factors that prevented homogenous support for the ideologies of Confederate and Italian nationalisms. In the case of the Confederacy, nationalism was based essentially on the twin pillars of slavery and states’ rights, and the slaveholding elites created an impressive iconic apparatus to convince the majority of Southerners that the protection of both was enough of a reason to create a wholly new national identity, at once American and Southern, and therefore distinct from the northern one. In the case of Italy, the southern landowning elites essentially embraced the rhetoric at the heart of the construction of the Italian nation, which was also expressed through an impressive iconic apparatus, and which, in reverse pattern from the Confederate case, predicated the absorption of the southern Italian identity, despite its distinctive history and culture, into a general Italian identity, mostly as a means to protect the elites’ local power. Thus, both Confederate nationalism and Italian nationalism functioned as major factors of unity among the elites only insofar as they succeeded in protecting the interests that were at the heart of the national experiment. Even so, the actual processes of Confederate and Italian nation building encountered major resistance from those sections of the population whose interests were best served and protected by alternative types of nationalism: Unionism in one case, and pro-Bourbon legitimism in the other.

Following the lead of Eric Hobsbawm and other influential scholars of nationalism who, as mentioned earlier, have argued that elites created modern nations through processes of “social engineering,” several historians working on the Confederate South have increasingly focused their research on the Southern elites’ attempt to create a Confederate nation and a Confederate nationalism through the employment of particularly powerful and suggestive ideas and symbols.²⁵ The pioneering work of Drew Faust has shown that the Confederate ideology of slavery, which had its deepest foundations in the idea of a hierarchical nation in which the planter elite exercised a benevolent paternalism over its subjects, was represented and celebrated in literature, art, and religious speeches, which, together, formed a Confederate national culture.²⁶ More recently, studies by Gary Gallagher and Robert Bonner have shown the importance of iconic national symbols ranging from military heroes Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson to the Confederate flag, while Ian Binnington’s work has analyzed the widespread images of the “Worthy Southron,” the “Demon Yankee,” and the “Silent Slave” – the latter present in Southern newspapers, novels, and even coins – in the context of the Confederate elites’ creation of a national culture with the potential to truly reach the Southern masses.²⁷ Ultimately, though, “feelings of southerness, regional loyalties, a history of conflict with the North, and the desire to defend slavery and white supremacy had brought [Southerners] this far,” as Paul Escott has argued.²⁸ Thus, the Confederate elites’ project of nation-building could have a hope of success only if a majority of Southerners continued to recognize these common features as the basis of their desire to become a separate nation – an idea that shared national symbols could contribute to reinforcing, but not create.

As a matter of fact, a number of different factors conjured against the success of the Confederate elites’ project of nation-building, and, even though a majority of white Southerners in the Confederate states supported the new nation in the early phases of the war, the minorities of Unionists present in different areas of the Confederacy carried a weight and significance that increased progressively as the war continued. A long tradition of scholarship has analyzed the causes and developments of the Confederate internal collapse, attributing it mostly to either the Confederate government’s inability to safeguard both states’ rights and the slave system, or to disaffection by the Southern masses due to issues of class differences, or else, more recently, to the revolts of women and slaves against established gender and racial hierarchies.²⁹ Ultimately, all these issues eroded Confederate loyalty and created a myriad of situations of potential and often active dissent, which could or could not create pockets of Unionism, depending on the particular context of time and place. In fact, by investigating dissent at the local level, and therefore as firmly contextualized in a particular time and place, in different Confederate states during the war, scholars have succeeded in showing its nature as a contingent phenomenon which changed according to a combination of different and variable circumstances, similarly to the nature of loyalty. Kinship, traditional allegiances, power relations, and the effects of these on class and gender dynamics all contributed to create a fluid and magmatic world in which dissent and support for either Confederate nationalism or Unionism depended on specific historical variables and their influences on the people of different regions.³⁰

Yet, what has become clear from the most recent scholarship is that, in all the regions of the Confederacy where Unionism was strong – especially in those Confederate areas that were either far from the plantation zones or close to the South’s Border States loyal to the Union – those specific historical circumstances influenced the people by means of a prolonged, brutal, and extremely costly guerrilla warfare – a subject which has risen in scholarly importance, especially in recent years.³¹ Both the supporters of the Confederacy and those of the Union engaged in this type of warfare, which is typical of civil wars, and in which either regular troops or irregular parties conducted small-scale lethal actions designed to hit specific targets with the maximum amount of damage and the least number of casualties in the engagement with the enemy.³² Of particular importance for a study of the Confederacy’s inner civil war is the fact that, from the point of view of Confederate authorities, Unionist guerrillas, supported by the Union government across the border, were a constant thorn in the side of the new nation in those areas where Unionism was particularly strong, such as the entire area of Appalachia, which stretched from West Virginia to East Tennessee.³³ In those areas, Confederate governors had a particularly difficult task in containing Unionist action in their states by coordinating their responses with Confederate military authorities in an effective way, and such task became increasingly more difficult as the Confederacy’s shortcomings in keeping up with the war effort led to the Confederate nation’s progressive loss of control of larger and larger areas of the South.³⁴

The same modern scholarship on nationalism that has influenced the development of research on the Confederate nation has also had a profound impact on studies on Italian nation-building. In fact, comparably to the Confederacy, the Italian nation was also the result of an exercise of “social engineering” masterminded by the political and cultural elites of the peninsula through a rhetoric based on particularly effective symbols and images that aimed at instilling in the people’s minds the concept of an Italian national unity, as Alberto Banti and others have shown in their studies.³⁵ In this process, as Marta Petrusewicz has argued, the southern Italian elites played a particularly important role, specifically with regard to the construction of the image of a progressive Italian nation opposed to a backward south, starting from the aftermath of the 1848–9 Revolutions, when a number of southerners fled the Bourbon persecution of Liberals and Democrats in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and established themselves in Turin, the capital of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. Here, they effectively forged a “black legend” of the Mezzogiorno, treating it as if it were a cursed land waiting to be rescued through a radical change of government and institutions, and therefore constructing it as the opposite of the liberal Italian nation that the majority of southern Italian landowners were to support in 1860–1.³⁶ This attitude had incalculable consequences for the construction of the image of southern Italy and of the ex-Bourbon Kingdom as “other,” different and alien to the Italian nation, in the 1860–1 crisis of national unification and at the time of the anti-Italian revolt at the heart of the Great Brigandage. Imbued with this image, the Italian military authorities deliberately “ignor[ed] the political identity of their opponents and insisted only on the violent and criminal nature of the insurgents” – as Antonino De Francesco has recently argued – branding all dissenters from the project of Italian nation-building as “brigands,” or outlaws.³⁷ In practice, this image symbolized the Italian politicians’ and military authorities’ inability to make an effort to include the southern Italian masses in the discourse of Italian nationalism, as studies especially by John Dickie and Nelson Moe have convincingly shown.³⁸

According to Marco Meriggi, southern Italy’s Great Brigandage in the 1860s was one of the few mass phenomena that occurred at the time of Italian national unification, and recent research has shown clearly not only that it was a manifestation of mass dissent against the new Italian nation, but also that the dissent was spread among large strata of the southern Italian population.³⁹ The dissent was strongest among peasants and former Bourbon soldiers, who swelled the ranks of the brigand bands, and among the religious orders, who were resentful of the antipapal policy of the Italian Kingdom; however, it was also widespread among southern Italian urban residents and “clerks, shop-keepers, artisans, professionals, manual workers,” and others. According to Meriggi, “each of these categories had some valid reason to resent the new order and to hope to return to the old one.”⁴⁰ Thus, large numbers among those groups supported the Bourbon legitimist cause in southern Italy’s inner civil war. Yet, it is important to point out that even though, in this inner civil war, the conflict between southern Italian pro-Bourbon activists, dissenters, and brigands on one side and mostly northern Italian military authorities and government officials on the other was a very important element, this was at heart also a civil war between southern Italians who either opposed or supported the project of Italian nation building.⁴¹

In fact, for the most part, the southern Italian masses opposed that project, which, as we have seen, had been supported all along by the majority of the southern Italian landowners. Thus, as a result of the existence of an inner civil war between southern Italians, in the region of Basilicata – studied extensively by Pierre-Yves Manchon – both the brigand bands, which were mostly made up of peasants, and the local militias of the National Guard, which was mostly made up of property owners and which fought the brigands, included several of the region’s residents. These were, therefore, all engaged in civil conflict within their own communities – a conflict that cut across kin, class, and gender relations and divisions, in ways comparable to those in which the Confederate South’s inner civil war affected Southern communities in America.⁴² Equally comparable is the fact that, in both cases, this inner civil war expressed itself as a form of particularly vicious and costly guerrilla warfare – which, in the southern Italian case, the brigands were particularly skilled at conducting through small-scale but lethal actions, which kept the Italian army constantly engaged. The pro-Bourbon guerrilla actions by brigands had their centers particularly in Basilicata, where there was an initial strong nucleus of foreign legitimist volunteers, and in Northern Terra di Lavoro, where, in addition to the presence of foreign volunteers, proximity to the border with the Papal States allowed better coordination of action with the Bourbon government in exile in Rome. In these areas, the Italian governors, then prefects, in charge of their respective territories had a hard task in making effective use of governmental and military resources against the brigands, especially at the height of the legitimist moment in 1861–2.⁴³

Ultimately, neither the Confederate project nor the Italian project of nation building could succeed through the creation of an abstract nationalism that was not able to reach beyond the elites’ world and truly involve the majority of the southern people in America and Italy. Yet, in both the Confederate South and southern Italy, deep divisions related to both class and gender differences also worked against this possibility, and these divisions depended on specific local circumstances and varied a great deal from region to region. Thus, at heart, the inner civil wars in the Confederate South and southern Italy were both wars between Americans, in one case, and between Italians, in the other, and also civil conflicts between southerners within various communities of the two southern regions. In both the Confederate South and southern Italy, in those communities, the parties in conflict essentially supported alternative versions of nationalism and fought against each other mostly by engaging in particularly vicious and costly forms of guerrilla warfare. As a consequence, particularly throughout the period 1861–3, both the Confederate governors and the Italian governors, then prefects – together, in both cases, with the local militias and the national military authorities – sought to suppress the dissent and guerrilla warfare that characterized, in particular, those regions where support for alternative versions of nationalism – the Unionist and the pro-Bourbon – was strongest, due to particular social and historical reasons. Several of these regions were, notably – but far from exclusively – in the areas close to the Union’s Border States in the Confederacy, and in the areas close to the border with the Papal States in southern Italy.

3 The First Tests of Confederate and Italian Nationalisms through War in 1861

Soon after they were formed, in the spring of 1861, both the Confederacy and the Italian Kingdom underwent baptisms of fire: Only a few months after formation, inner civil wars were raging in different areas of the two new nations. In the Confederacy, despite the support of the majority of the white Southern population, pockets of Unionism characterized different regions from the start of the American Civil War; both the local Confederate authorities and informal organizations of Confederate supporters attempted to suppress all instances of disloyalty by persecuting Unionists. Even though it was poorly organized in many areas at this time, Unionism received vital help from the Lincoln government across the border and, as a result of a number of guerrilla actions, throughout the year 1861 it provided an important element of militant and armed dissent within the Confederacy. Similarly, in southern Italy, as a result of the majority of the southern Italian landowners’ support for the Italian nation, large numbers among the peasant masses were advocates of legitimism and wished the return of the Bourbon King Francis II. In this instance, both the help given by the Bourbon government in exile in Rome and that given by foreign supporters of legitimism were crucial factors in turning the widespread activity of mounted brigand bands into a major threat for Italian rule in the Mezzogiorno throughout 1861. As a result, in both the case of the Confederacy and that of the Italian Kingdom, the first year of the newly born nation was a year in which the governmental apparatus was severely tested – a test which, in both cases, forced the governmental institutions to engage in emergency actions in order to contain armed dissent in several areas of the south. Ultimately, and also in both cases, the emergency provoked a governmental reaction in the form of the first implementation of repressive measures, which were enacted, effectively, for the purpose of salvaging the nation-building experiment.

It is particularly important to remember that, despite the fact that there were clearly deep fault lines in the Confederate nation due to the existence of sharp class and gender differences, modern scholarship has established that at the start of the American Civil War, in 1861, the majority of white Southerners were committed “to build[ing] a slaveholding republic,” in the words of Aaron Sheehan-Dean⁴⁴ – this explains why it took the Union four long years of costly war to subdue the Confederacy. Therefore, for the most part, the majority-white population, even though mostly nonslaveholders, began the war embracing the slaveholding elites’ project of Confederate nation building – very likely believing the idea that the Confederacy was a “herrenvolk democracy” or “democracy of the white race,” where, solely by virtue of the colour of their skin, the almost eight million white Southerners, irrespective of class divisions, had economic, social, and political opportunities that rendered them somewhat equal, since those opportunities were denied to the almost four million black slaves.⁴⁵ However, it is also true that the Unionist minority, however small, was particularly significant in several areas deep within Confederate lines, and that in those areas the Confederate authorities had a particularly difficult situation to deal with from the very inception of their nation in the spring of 1861. Wherever it was strongest, from the fall of Fort Sumter onwards the Unionist opposition fueled an alternative allegiance to the majority support for Confederate nationalism; it was instrumental in testing and eventually undermining the Confederate project of nation-building by means of an inner civil war that eroded Confederate morale and forced the Confederate government to invest men and resources, in increasing numbers, in suppressing dissent throughout the remainder of the year.⁴⁶ As Daniel Crofts has pointed out, “Unionists clustered here and there in peripheral regions of the Confederacy marked by intense localism and hostility to central authority, or by religious traditions that could not be squared with a pro-slavery nation,” among other motivations.⁴⁷

As we saw in the previous chapter, during the secession crisis, fire-eaters and future Confederate supporters dealt with dissent mostly by repressing it through the creation of citizens’ paramilitary groups that terrorized the opposition, especially in the Lower South states that followed South Carolina in the first wave of secession.⁴⁸ After the creation of the Confederacy, during the months leading up to the early battles in the first year of the Civil War, in all the areas where the Unionists were a significant minority, Confederates organized vigilance committees, widely supported by the Confederate governors and local authorities. Referring to North Carolina in the spring and summer of 1861, Barton Myers has written that “vigilance committees were the civilian population’s way of mobilizing to support Confederate principles in their own neighborhoods,” and effectively “became a community’s mechanism for enforcing loyalty to the new Confederacy.”⁴⁹ In fact, in their efforts to eradicate dissent, the vigilance committees established a true reign of terror, hitting hard on Unionist individuals, organizations, and networks. In his Civil War memoirs, entitled Tupelo (1888), John Aughey, a pro-Union Presbyterian minister in Mississippi, recalled how, in the months following secession, “many suspected of Union sentiments were lynched.” At the same time, “self-constituted vigilance committees sprang up all over the country, and a reign of terror began; all who had been Union men, and who had not given in their adhesion to the new order of things by some public proclamation, were supposed to be disaffected.” They ended up on a “proscribed list,” they were charged with treason, and they were tried by the members of a vigilance committee.⁵⁰

Countless documents, both private and official, testify to Confederate repression of Unionists, particularly through their description of the Confederate practice of hunting down those who did not enlist in the local militias of the Confederate army. Among the many sources, particularly eloquent is the July 24, 1861 issue of the Herald of Freedom and Torch Light, published in Hagerstown, Maryland, which described the following:

A gentleman from Waterford, Loudun county, Virginia, of a party of twelve Union men who escaped across the Potomac on Sunday night and reached here yesterday, represents the reign of terror in that county as unprecedented. The Union men are largely in the majority, but are totally unarmed and defenceless, and were all to be drafted in the militia yesterday by order of Gov. Letcher, and sent to Manassas [where the first battle of Bull Run had just taken place three days earlier].⁵¹

For their part, during the entire period from summer to winter 1861, Unionists in different areas of the Confederacy bided their time, organizing themselves and establishing underground networks of resistance, waiting for the right occasion to strike. In those regions that were closer to the Border Southern States belonging to the Union, Unionists sought and received active help from the Lincoln government, and especially from the Union military authorities that represented it across the border. This collaboration led, directly or indirectly, to the execution of planned guerrilla actions aiming specifically at strategic military targets, as happened particularly in East Tennessee – as we shall see in the next chapter.⁵² Therefore, by the end of 1861, after half a year of hostilities, the inner civil war between Unionists and Confederates within the Confederate South was heating up as the supporters of the Union became more organized and grew stronger, particularly in those areas where they received help from Lincoln, while the Confederate governors and military authorities were faced with increasingly unmanageable local situations that forced them to divert men and resources to suppress rebellions and violent dissent on the home front.⁵³

Comparably to the situation at the heart of the Confederate South’s inner civil war, in southern Italy a multiplicity of factors, similarly related to divisions in both social and political terms, contributed to complicate the picture of the elites’ and the people’s loyalty to either the Italian nation or the Bourbon Kingdom. Still, it is clear from the sources that very large numbers among the peasant population supported the legitimist cause and the Bourbon king. Even though resistance against the Italian Kingdom’s conscription and taxes, as well as hostility to the majority pro-Italian landowners, played a large part, the role of ex-Bourbon soldiers and officers who were still loyal to Francis II was critical in channeling the people’s discontent into attempts to create an army of guerrilla bands of brigands ready to fight for the legitimist cause.⁵⁴ In this sense, an equally important part was played by the Catholic Church’s support of Francis II, whose struggle thus assumed a “sacred” character in the eyes of the southern Italian people.⁵⁵ As a result, from the summer of 1860 onward the Italian authorities faced an explosive situation, which reached its peak in the year 1861 among the population of different southern Italian regions who proceeded to reject the Italian nation and reinstate the old Bourbon emblems in towns “liberated” by the brigand bands, effectively showing the strength and popularity of a legitimist cause alternative to the Italian nation-building project.⁵⁶ According to Salvatore Lupo, “the rituals of the brigands’ liberation of towns represent the idea of restoration of a legitimate authority, enacted by the lower classes, who wished social and political vengeance against the traitor landowners [supporters of the Italian Kingdom], and who, in most of the cases, looked for collaboration with those landowners still loyal to the [Bourbon] king.”⁵⁷

Throughout 1861, large mounted bands, formed of hundreds of men – mostly peasants and ex-Bourbon soldiers – engaged the Italian army in largescale campaigns that “liberated” a number of villages and restored Bourbon authority there. The Italian government’s response was to increase drastically the power of the military and effectively rule southern Italy primarily through the National Guard and the Italian army.⁵⁸ In the aftermath of national unification, the continental Mezzogiorno had been placed under a provisional government called “Lieutenancy,” headed first by Cavour’s collaborator Luigi Carlo Farini and subsequently by the Prince of Carignano and the Duke of San Martino; during this transitional period, it was mostly the National Guard that conducted armed action against the brigand guerrillas. However, in the face of the insurgencies of the first phase of the Great Brigandage, under Cavour’s successors, the Italian government gave General Enrico Cialdini – the conqueror of Gaeta – the Lieutenancy in July 1861, thus enlarging enormously the power of the Italian army, whose numbers were also increased as a result of the enforcement of the May 26, 1861 Conscription Law in southern Italy. In November 1861, after the abolition of the Lieutenancy, General Alfonso La Marmora received the double commission of Prefect of Naples – and therefore head of the civil administration – and Commander of all the armed forces in the Mezzogiorno.⁵⁹ The consequences of the Italian army’s administrative handling of the southern Italian insurgencies were twofold. On the one hand, the Italian army, following the official line of the government, did not acknowledge the legitimist nature of the pro-Bourbon guerrillas, not wanting to give the enemy any recognition of equal status in combat, and instead branded the peasants and ex-Bourbon soldiers simply as “brigands.”⁶⁰ On the other, and also as a result of this attitude, wherever it was deployed, the Italian army created a regime of terror aimed particularly at the southern Italian population not directly engaged in brigand activities, with the aim of deterring the latter’s support, in the form of supply of food and shelter, to the brigand bands and to Bourbon legitimism.⁶¹

With this aim in mind, Italian officers proceeded to enforce executions of suspected civilians and mass arrests, and to enact punishments of entire towns and villages guilty of pro-brigand and/or pro-Bourbon actions, as they did in the summer of 1861 at Spinelli, Montefalcione, Pescolamazza, Auletta, and most famously Pontelandolfo and Casalduni, in Campania.⁶² At Pontelandolfo in August 1861, Coronel Pier Eleonoro Negri and his four-hundred-strong battalion burned the village to the ground after being informed that the inhabitants had killed forty-one Italian soldiers, in a senseless massacre that resulted in forty-eight dead, mostly civilians.⁶³ A particularly significant description of this was written by Italian officer Angiolo De Witt, who, even though convinced of the need to punish the two villages, did not overlook the Italian soldiers’ cruelty:

then, the bloody vengeance that arrived with all its horrors on those guilty people was fierce. Different units of soldiers forcibly took scared legitimists out of their houses, and when groups of those peasants were forced with the bayonets to make their way to the street, they found squadrons of soldiers who shot them at point blank range … This episode of warlike terror lasted for an entire day; the punishment was horrific, but the act that caused it was even more horrific.⁶⁴

Events such as the one at Pontelandolfo only showed the inability of the Italian government and army, despite the regime of terror – which led to a number of dead, mostly by summary execution – to deal effectively with the widespread state of insurgency in the Mezzogiorno. Until the end of 1861, the areas in which legitimism and the pro-Bourbon brigand bands were strongest were, especially, Northern Terra di Lavoro, with the famous brigand Chiavone; Upper Basilicata, with the largest band, headed by legendary brigand leader Carmine Crocco; and Apulia, with a band headed by Pasquale “Sergente” Romano.⁶⁵ All these bands received help from the Bourbon government in exile in the Papal States, and often also from foreign supporters of legitimism, as in the case of Spanish officers Rafael Tristany and José Borjés, the latter of whom collaborated for a time with Crocco and was then killed by the Italian army in December 1861. Until the end of the year, therefore, both the Italian army and the prefects of different regions were forced to face a largescale threat represented by a legitimist, and also international, pro-Bourbon guerrilla warfare against the Italian Kingdom.⁶⁶

The tests undergone by the new Confederate and Italian nations in 1861 were difficult ones, since the strength of governmental response in face of militant and armed dissent was in direct correlation to the strength of the national institutions that had just been created with the Confederate and Italian experiments in nation-building. Thus, the show of strength through the implementation of repressive measures which characterized both the Confederate and the Italian military policies in the areas ravaged by dissent was, to a certain extent, necessary, given the situations of emergency that, especially in the later months of the year, threatened the integrity of the two newly born nation states’ institutions. Yet, in both cases, the national government’s forceful response inevitably increased the resentment of increasingly larger sections of the populations, which found themselves under a reign of terror. In the Confederacy, both potential and real Unionists were liable to be arrested and tried for treason by special vigilance committees; in southern Italy, both potential and real pro-Bourbon legitimists were routinely arrested and sometimes executed, while the army retaliated against entire villages, sometime even by burning them to the ground. It was partly in consequence of this resentment that neither Unionism nor pro-Bourbon legitimism were defeated, even though, as a result of the actions taken from the start by the Confederate and Italian authorities, their supporters were forced to change their tactics and strategies in order to withstand the increasingly harsh and repressive nature of Confederate and Italian military policies against civilians.

4 Inner Civil Wars in the Confederacy and Southern Italy in 1862

By 1862, the prolonged inner civil wars that characterized the Confederate South and southern Italy were well into their first year, with seemingly no end in sight, proving the inability of the Confederate and Italian governments to deal effectively with the two unsettling situations. Both governments had reacted to the initial unexpected outbreak of hostilities by enforcing initial repressive measures, in the hope of silencing dissenters and supporters of alternative types of nationalism to the Confederate and Italian ones. Yet, although hit hard, both Unionists in the Confederacy and legitimists in southern Italy regrouped and increased the scale and scope of their activities in several areas, forcing the two governments to intervene with even more repressive measures in order to deal with the two exceptional situations. Thus, in a remarkable parallel, in the same year – 1862 – the Confederate government ordered the military authorities to impose martial law in those areas where Unionist opposition was strongest, and the Italian government declared a state of siege in the provinces considered to be in revolt against the state. However, far from putting an end to Unionist and anti-Italian activities, and therefore to the inner civil wars, these two comparable provisions led to an increase in the brutality of the two conflicts, which by now had become two types of all-out guerrilla warfare with particularly harsh consequences for the civilian populations of the Confederate South and southern Italy.

In the spring of 1862, the Confederacy was at a turning point. Even though it had managed to maintain its independence, the Confederate nation had an ambiguous record of mixed victories and defeats on the battlefield, while the initial confidence prompted by the first victorious battle of Bull Run, at the outset of the American Civil War, had quickly evaporated in the face of increasing numbers of casualties in a conflict which, by then, everybody knew would end neither quickly nor easily.⁶⁷ As a result, the numbers of volunteers were rapidly decreasing, and, as the one-year term of service of those who had responded to Jefferson Davis’s initial call for 100,000 men in March 1861 was about to expire, and volunteers were likely to return home rather than serving additional time in the Confederate army, the Confederate government found itself in dire need of soldiers. As a result, the Confederate Congress passed the April 1862 Conscription Act, which was then amended in October 1862, according to which all ablebodied men aged 18–35 were drafted for military service in the Confederate army. This single piece of legislation contributed more than any other Confederate provision to exacerbating enormously the inner civil war within the Confederate South.⁶⁸

For a start, knowing that the Act would have met with much opposition not just from Unionists but also from a number of other Southerners resentful of being forced to leave their homes and farms to serve in the Confederate army, Jefferson Davis had sought and obtained from the Confederate Congress the suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus as early as January 1862, and was thus able to instruct the Confederate governors and the Confederate military authorities to impose martial law wherever disloyalty, and especially Unionism, were strong.⁶⁹ As a result, the reign of terror directed primarily against Unionists, which had enveloped whole areas of the Confederacy as a consequence of the vigilance activities of irregular Confederate supporters, was essentially legalized, and those activities were mostly taken over by the Confederate military authorities. As David Williams has noted, “civilians could now be arrested and held without charge” and “could be tried by military courts where Martial Law had been declared.”⁷⁰ At the same time, the activities directed at the violent suppression of Unionism, and disloyalty in general, went hand in hand with the systematic combing of the land by conscription officers, who looked everywhere for draft evaders. Aside from Union sympathizers and pacifists, draft evaders tended to be mostly poor whites, who resented the fact that, according to the Conscription Act’s October 11, 1862 amendment (the so-called Twenty-Negro Law), for each plantation with twenty or more slaves, one individual employed in slave management was exempt from military service, while rich individuals could provide substitutes and buy their way out of the war.⁷¹ More than any Confederate provision, therefore, the Conscription Act and its amendment cut across class divisions, understandably creating an impression among the Southern population that, as Jasper Collins said to Newt Knight – both draft evaders in Mississippi – this was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”⁷²

The viciousness of the Confederate conscription officers in hunting down draft evaders is well documented in a number of sources, from letters to memoirs, and so is the new wave of repression of Unionism that resulted from the enforcement of martial law. In his memoirs, John Aughey wrote about his arrest, together with other draft evaders, by Confederate military authorities in Mississippi in 1862. Aughey’s recounting of the list of “crimes charged upon the prisoners” is, effectively, a catalog of a number of different activities in which supporters of the Union engaged, both in Mississippi and in other Confederate states: among them were “desertion, trading with the Yankees, adhesion to the Federal Government or Unionism, enacting the spy, refusing Confederate bonds and money, piloting the Yankees.”⁷³ While Aughey, as a Presbyterian minister, was a pacifist in addition to being a Union sympathizer, other Unionists were more militant and either created or joined Unionist guerrilla units, which actively resisted the Confederate army, sometimes with the notable result of creating a Unionist enclave deep inside Confederate territory. The best studied case in this sense is that of the already mentioned Unionists Collins and Knight, who, after deserting the Confederate army, managed by means of Unionist guerrilla warfare to keep the Confederates out of Jones County, Mississippi; they renamed the county the “Free State of Jones,” effectively fashioning it into a Unionist enclave in the later part of the war.⁷⁴ In truth, though, in most of the Confederate territory, the period starting from 1862 saw an escalation of guerrilla warfare, also as a result of another important provision passed by the Confederate Congress in that year: the Patriot Rangers Act. The Act effectively provided a somewhat formal type of military recognition to the many irregular guerrilla units of Confederate “Bushwhackers” who terrorized Union supporters, especially, but not exclusively, in border areas such as Missouri, and who often confronted equally vicious Unionist guerrillas formed by “Jayhawkers.”⁷⁵

By 1862 it had become apparent that, similar to the guerrilla warfare at the heart of the Confederacy’s inner civil war, that at the heart of southern Italy’s inner civil war was also at a turning point. The lack of coordinated collaboration between the brigands and the foreign supporters of the Bourbon king – which was directly responsible for the tragic fate of José Borjés – had rendered the largescale offensives of the year before less incisive than they could have been, while the ruthless military tactics employed by the Italian army, whose officers were increasingly better able to cope with both the terrain and the enemy, led to important changes in the actions carried out by the brigand bands. The legitimist project of launching a full-scale warfare against the Italian Kingdom had, for the most part, failed by the end of 1861.⁷⁶ As a result, in Salvatore Lupo’s words, “the time of insurgencies and attacks to urban centers was over; nevertheless, the great brigandage was going to come back in full force, as a more adaptable form of guerrilla, already in the spring of 1862.”⁷⁷ Thus, after a temporary setback, the anti-Italian activities went through a new phase, as the brigand bands – some of which still had the help of both the Bourbon government in exile and foreign legitimist supporters, such as Spanish officer Rafael Tristany – now engaged in a widespread form of guerrilla warfare conducted with smaller bands against the National Guard and the Italian army. By the summer of 1862 – together with Terra di Lavoro, where Chiavone was active; Basilicata, where Crocco continued to lead mounted bands; and Apulia, with Sergente Romano – the operations of the brigand guerrillas also encompassed other, increasingly larger areas of present-day Campania and Apulia, specifically the provinces of Terra di Bari and Terra d’Otranto. The sheer number of bands – many of them mounted, and altogether counting thousands of peasants – created the impression that a large army of brigands had, in fact, launched a massive attack against the Italian state.⁷⁸

In that same summer of 1862, Giuseppe Garibaldi landed in Sicily and then crossed to Calabria, determined to march on Rome and conquer it from the Pope and the French army that protected it. His plan was to repeat the exploits of 1860, gather volunteers all over the Mezzogiorno, and then head toward the Papal States.⁷⁹ Yet, given his immense popularity and his commitment to democratic politics, Garibaldi might very well have ended up, paradoxically, taking the leadership of the popular movement at the heart of the Great Brigandage, which was, after all, a movement against the Italian monarchy, regardless of its crucial legitimist component. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Italian government – then headed by Prime Minister Urbano Rattazzi – reacted quickly by declaring the state of siege in the Mezzogiorno, and by ordering General Alfonso La Marmora to restore law and order and halt Garibaldi’s advance – which La Marmora did by dispatching General Emilio Pallavicini, who intercepted and stopped Garibaldi at the Aspromonte mountain on August 29, 1862.⁸⁰ The danger of a possibly unmanageable situation as a result of Garibaldi’s actions was, thus, ultimately averted, but both the state of unrest caused by Garibaldi and the general recrudescence of the guerrilla warfare waged by the brigand bands and their pro-Bourbon allies provided an excuse for the Italian government to install a harsher and more centralized military regime in the Mezzogiorno. Until then, the local authorities and prefects had dealt with the brigands under a regime of relatively loose supervision by the governmental authorities in Naples. Now, under La Marmora, who was both prefect of Naples and commander of all the armed forces in southern Italy, the Italian army was dispatched to a number of areas declared to be in a “state of brigandage”: these included the provinces of Terra di Lavoro, Principato Citra, and Principato Ultra in Campania; the entirety of Basilicata; and the provinces of Capitanata, Terra di Bari, and Terra d’Otranto in Apulia. All these areas were placed under martial law as a result of the state of siege – a situation that continued until November 1862.⁸¹

According to Alfredo Capone, the most salient features of the 1862 state of siege in the Mezzogiorno were the replacement of civil authority with military authority, “the establishment of war tribunals that replaced the ordinary tribunals, the power to suspend the functions of civil authorities, the restriction of individual freedom, [and] the power to enforce deportation.”⁸² The practical results were an even harsher enforcement of conscription, with entire towns combed by the military authorities looking for possible deserters, and countless requisitions, arrests, and public executions of brigands as well as civilians suspected of helping the latter in their anti-Italian and pro-Bourbon activities and defined as manutengoli, or guilty of the crime of manutengolismo – i.e., of harbouring, feeding, or collaborating with brigands.⁸³ In November 1862, with the state of siege formally revoked but with the military authorities still replacing the civilian ones in the Mezzogiorno, opposition MP Giuseppe Ferrari reported that, as a result of the Italian army’s regime of terror, “whole families are arrested without even a given pretext … many individuals acquitted by the judges still linger in prison. A new code is in operation, under which every man taken with arms in his hands is shot. This I call a barbaric war, a war without quarter.”⁸⁴ Yet, even with these extraordinarily harsh measures, the brigands’ activities continued unabated, and guerrilla warfare still raged in Basilicata and Apulia, with the mounted bands of Crocco and Sergente Romano, and especially in Terra di Lavoro – where Chiavone had been killed, but Rafael Tristany could still count on the help of pro-Bourbons and legitimists to engage the Italian army.

Thus, in 1862, far from being defeated by the initial harsh measures of the Confederate and Italian governments, both the Unionist and the anti-Italian oppositions regrouped, and, soon after, they launched stronger offensives against the military authorities in the Confederacy and in southern Italy. The escalation of guerrilla warfare and the widespread state of unrest in whole areas of the two southern regions, in turn, prompted the two governments to hit the civilian populations hard, in remarkably comparable ways. Although the Italian government had been enforcing conscription since 1861 while the Confederate government passed the Conscription Act only in 1862, in both cases government officials used conscription as a means to keep control of, and measure the actual loyalty of the two populations vis-a-vis the Confederate and Italian projects of nation building, and thus also to clearly identify dissenters. At the same time, in both the Confederate and the Italian cases, the enforcement of conscription was part of a more general and comprehensive set of repressive measures implemented by the two governments. These measures culminated with the Confederate enactment of martial law and the Italian enforcement of the state of siege in a number of areas where Unionist and anti-Italian guerrilla warfare had become unmanageable. The main result, again in both cases, was the increasing resentment felt by the southern civilian population against the government and the military authorities of the newly formed nation, and a consequent growth in the disaffection toward the Confederate and Italian projects of nation-building, particularly in those areas.

5 Inner Civil Wars in the Confederacy and Southern Italy in 1863

The year 1863 proved to be a turning point in both the Confederate South’s and southern Italy’s inner civil wars, in both cases as a result of a combination of several different factors. The recrudescence of guerrilla warfare in several areas and the damage suffered by the southern civilian populations as a consequence of the two governments’ repressive measures against dissenters continued to provide the main parallel narrative in both the Confederacy and southern Italy. Equally important, though, from a comparative point of view, was the fact that the year saw the enactment of two major pieces of legislation that had incalculable effects on the course of the two inner civil wars. In the Confederate South, the Union’s enactment of Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation – which freed slaves in all the rebel states, although with little practical effect – transformed the American Civil War into a war against Southern slavery, and therefore inflicted a fatal blow to the rhetoric of Confederate nationalism, while it provided a major boost to Unionists and dissenters. Conversely, in southern Italy, the Italian government’s enactment of the 1863 Pica Law – designed as a means to reorganize and further coordinate the government’s increasingly harsh repressive measures and institutions in the Mezzogiorno – succeeded in inflicting a fatal blow to brigand and pro-Bourbon activities, despite leading to more resentment on the side of the civilian population. As a consequence of these two major legislative measures, and also of other factors, while Unionism grew increasingly stronger in the Confederacy, pro-Bourbon sentiment largely lost its importance as a major component of the guerrilla warfare waged by brigands in southern Italy from 1863 onwards.

There is no doubt that the year 1863 was a major turning point in the Confederate South’s inner civil war. First Lincoln’s January 1, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and then the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July shook greatly the confidence and will to fight among many in the Confederacy. By the end of the summer, the Union had successfully reclaimed the entire Mississippi Valley; as the Union’s advance into Confederate territory continued, thousands of black slaves fled from Southern plantations and farms, while thousands of white Southerners were forced to flee from their homes.⁸⁵ If Jefferson Davis and his rhetoric partly succeeded in creating some sense of Confederate unity against the Union’s ultimate act of aggression represented by the Emancipation Proclamation, it is also true that, as a result of the Proclamation, the very justification for the slaveholding elites’ Confederate nation-building project and for the war itself – the defense of slavery – appeared less and less significant to an increasing number of common white Southerners who were now drafted into military service.⁸⁶ Meanwhile, the areas in which Unionist opposition were strong grew in number and size and, despite the Confederate military activities of suppression of dissent and the enforcement of martial law, the Confederate South’s inner civil war escalated throughout 1863, to the extent that in Georgia – one of the most divided Confederate states – a newspaper editor wrote that “we are fighting each other harder than we have ever fought the enemy.”⁸⁷ In 1863, besides East Tennessee, near where the Union Army was advancing rapidly, there was intense Unionist activity in southeast and northern Georgia, on Florida’s coast, in Mississippi’s Simpson and Jones County, in Alabama’s Winston County, in Louisiana’s Rapides and Washington Parishes, in central and western Texas, and in the mountainous areas of southwest Virginia, North Carolina – especially Wilkes County – and South Carolina.⁸⁸

In those areas, Unionist guerrilla units fought against the Confederate military authorities, which, in retaliation, extended their regime of terror with thousands of arbitrary arrests, sometimes leading to execution on charges of treason. A letter by John M. Botts, a Virginian Unionist of Culpepper County who was arbitrarily arrested by Confederate General J. E. B. Stuart under suspicion of treason, written to the Richmond Examiner and reported in the New York Times in November 1863 shows effectively the extent to which Confederate martial law affected ordinary citizens:

the power of the Executive branch of the Government has been exercised against me, when under this detestable, unwritten, unknown code called Martial Law. Upon no charge proffered before the Court of inquiry, they had me arrested in my bed … [and] I was kept in solitary confinement for eight weeks … not only has my fencing been torn down in every direction, but some twenty-five or thirty of my best hogs have been shot down, and I have not been left one ear of an entire crop of corn, all of which could not be used was carried off or destroyed.⁸⁹

And in truth, by 1863, ordinary citizens throughout the Confederacy were being particularly targeted by the Confederate army as a result of an escalation in the well-established practice of requisition, according to which the army could simply take what it needed from the citizens’ farms it encountered.

During these operations, as Paul Escott has remarked, “undisciplined Confederate troops sometimes abused civilians’ property, seizing food from suffering families,” while soldiers “ruined crops, dismantled fences to use firewood, and slaughtered animals.”⁹⁰ This was essentially what happened to John M. Botts. Only in March 1863 did the Confederate Congress regulate the practice of military requisitioning by enacting impressment, according to which the army could take up to 10 percent of a citizen’s property with no compensation if needed, but could also take more if it paid the citizen with Confederate money, even though at prices well below the property’s market value.⁹¹ Together with conscription, impressment was the Confederate measure that generated a great deal of resentment among ordinary Southerners, pushing even larger numbers of them toward the Unionist side. Resentment was equally strong toward the Confederate government and toward the planters, who were not only exempt from serving in the army, but also did nothing to convert their plantations and grow foodstuff instead of cash-crops, contributing in no small measure to the vicious circle that caused the shortage of food for the Confederate army, and in turn the army’s escalation in requisitions. In practice, this combination of factors left ordinary Southern families on the brink of starvation, also as a result of rampant inflation in the Confederate currency.⁹²

There is no doubt that women suffered the most from the many problems on the Confederate home front, and, as they struggled to support their children and their families, many turned to the Union – effectively making their own political statements of dissent, as recent significant scholarship has argued, against the prevalent repressive gender ideology in the Confederacy. Studies by Drew Faust, Victoria Bynum, Stephanie McCurry, Margaret Storey, Laura Edwards, LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long, and Catherine Clinton, in particular, among others, have shown how on one hand, the increasing hardships brought by the war, and on the other, women’s effective exclusion from active citizenship in the Confederate nation-building project, together with the latter’s oppressive patriarchal policies, were powerful catalysts for women’s dissent against the war, and often either covert or open Unionist activities.⁹³ This was especially the case with women who belonged to non-slaveholding farming families, especially when Confederate conscription took away their husbands and children, as is shown clearly in a testimony given by Marinda McLenan, from Lincoln County in Mississippi, to the Southern Claims Commission after the Civil War: “I did not know that there was any cause for fighting and I thought it was all wrong, and very hard on the poor people who had to go to war when they didn’t want to go … let the big men who had brought it on fight it out … I was for the Union and no war.”⁹⁴

Perhaps the most famous episodes of anti-Confederate dissent manifested by Southern women during the war were the 1863 food riots. Faced with no means to support themselves and their children, in the spring of 1863, thousands of desperate women took to the streets of several smaller towns and larger cities throughout the Confederacy. Armed and gathering in gangs, they caused largescale riots – the largest of which, with 1,000 individuals, occurred in the Confederate capital Richmond – sometimes shouting or carrying banners with the words “bread or blood,” as they did in Mobile, Alabama, and targeting stores and depots in their search for any food they could put their hands on.⁹⁵ In practice, the women’s food riots were a massive manifestation of dissent, and as such they are a particularly significant aspect of the Confederate South’s inner civil war, since they show how, by mid-1863, opposition to the elites’ Confederate nation-building project had reached the deepest layer of Southern society. In time, in conjunction with the activities of Unionist supporters, this opposition would become a major cause of the swelling in the ranks of anti-Confederate Southerners, and ultimately of the defeat of the Confederacy in the American Civil War a couple of years later.

In comparable terms to what happened in the inner civil war in the Confederate South, the year 1863 was also a major turning point in the inner civil war in southern Italy – partly as a result of military operations and the consequent shift of balance in favor of the Italian army in several areas characterized by the activities of brigand bands, but most of all because of legislative provisions which, no less than the legislation on slave emancipation in the American Civil War, had a crucial impact on the course of the southern Italian civil war in the following two years. The year 1863, in fact, witnessed the end of the work of an Italian Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, whose results led to the enactment of the most important legislative provision passed at the time of the Great Brigandage: the Pica Law. In the speech with which he presented the results of the Commission’s six months of work, on June 1, 1863, Democrat MP Giuseppe Massari significantly – and in part deliberately misleadingly – attributed the main reason for the brigands’ activities to the “legitimist” plans to restore the Bourbons in the Mezzogiorno.⁹⁶ In fact, according to Salvatore Lupo, by presenting the Great Brigandage as little more than a result of the influence and machinations of the Bourbon government in exile and the Papacy, the Commission aimed to deny political legitimacy to an authentically political anti-Italian movement which had the participation of a large part of the southern Italian population.⁹⁷ In truth, though, even if some of the legitimist plans were still partly afoot at this time, as a result of the mostly residual activity of the Bourbon government in exile and its allies, they were greatly undermined by two years of unsuccessful actions and they were mostly focused on a few specific areas of the southern Italian territory. Still, claiming that he intended to counteract those plans, Massari recommended even more repressive measures with the aim of defeating the guerrilla warfare waged by the brigands against the Italian army and end the inner civil war in southern Italy.⁹⁸

This is, essentially, the genesis of the Pica Law. From August 1863, when it was passed by the Parliament, until December 1865, when it was revoked, this law placed southern Italy under the jurisdiction of eight main military tribunals – which were located in major cities such as Naples, Bari, Otranto, Teramo, Potenza, and Reggio Calabria, among others – and also of extraordinary military tribunals in all the regions declared in a “state of brigandage.”⁹⁹ Among the latter, particularly targeted were Campania, Basilicata, and Apulia, where, even after the death of major pro-Bourbon leaders such as Sergente Romano, the hostilities continued as a result of the continuous guerrilla warfare waged by the bands of Crocco and several others. According to Roberto Martucci, ultimately, the implementation of the 1863 Pica Law had the effect of “encircling the provinces of the former Bourbon Kingdom into a repressive web of draconian measures.”¹⁰⁰ The consequences of the harsher regime of terror that followed the implementation of the Pica Law were soon seen in the multiplication of arbitrary arrests of brigands and pro-Bourbon supporters in many regions now placed under the authority of the military tribunals. Effectively, since the 1862 state of siege, the largest part of the Mezzogiorno was under martial law, but with the Pica Law the range of action of the military authorities increased exponentially, and the inevitable consequence was the stepping up of all types of repressive measures against the local civilian population, all justified by the needs to fight and vanquish the brigands and their accomplices. A significant contemporary source that documents the constant violation of the basic civil rights perpetrated by the Italian military authorities against southern Italian dissenters is a series of articles on southern Italy’s inner civil war that appeared in the pro-Bourbon Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica.¹⁰¹

In an article written as a commentary to the Massari Inquiry in early October 1863, less than two months after the application of the Pica Law, Jesuit Father Carlo Piccirillo explained the nature of the pro-Bourbon element in the Great Brigandage with the following words:

This civil war has lasted for three years now … could there be any doubt for anybody that Brigandage only has a political cause, and that it is nothing less than the defence of [southern] independence? … [The legitimists] proved their loyalty [to the Bourbons] by reacting. They reacted peacefully with speeches, newspapers, pamphlets, subscriptions … they reacted with their arms in every part of the Kingdom where it was possible. The peaceful [pro-Bourbon] reaction is punished for its loyalty to the legitimate Prince [i.e., Francis II] with thousands of prisoners [kept] in jail. The armed reaction is punished with thousands of people shot. The armed reaction is the Brigandage.¹⁰²

Effectively, with the 1863 Pica Law, countless individuals charged with the crimes of brigandage, pro-Bourbon legitimism, or collaboration with the brigands (manutengolismo) – all anti-Italian activities – were arrested and left in jail. Yet, they were mostly rarely executed, since, despite its illiberal features, the law also put an end to at least some of the arbitrary measures taken by Italian officers with the excuse of the state of siege.¹⁰³ Still, as Alfredo Capone has written, “in this context, the status of those charged with the crime of brigandage was equivalent to the status of enemies at war with the state.”¹⁰⁴

Significantly, among those who were charged with the crimes associated with “the status of enemies at war with the state” (i.e., with the Italian authorities), either because of their direct engagement in activities of “brigandage” or because of being guilty of manutengolismo as a result of the help they gave to brigands, there were also a number of women – a fact that offers an interesting comparative point with Southern women engaging in anti-Confederate activities in the American Civil War. Similar to the situation of anti-Confederate women, in their anti-Italian activities southern Italian women who followed the brigands, or who even became brigands themselves, fought against the patriarchal policies enforced by the representatives of the newly born Italian nation. In fact, those policies were no less debilitating than the ones enforced by the Confederate nation on Southern women in America, since, even more so than in the Confederacy, in post-Unification Liberal Italy women had little or no social status, and this was even truer of women who belonged to poor farming families in the Mezzogiorno. Therefore, southern Italian women involved in “brigandage” really “had little to lose,” according to Giordano Bruno Guerri, while, effectively, “staying at home meant to stand silently persecutions, threats, and mistreatments” by the Italian authorities looking for brigands in every village of the Mezzogiorno.¹⁰⁵

Yet, even without necessarily being active in supporting brigands, southern Italian women expressed their dissent with the Italian authorities engaging in little known acts of both individual and collective protest. In this respect, perhaps a comparable episode to the 1863 food riots in the Confederate South can be seen in the case, recently studied by Gaetana Mazza, of four young female workers in the textile mills of Sarno in Principato Citra, who, shortly after Garibaldi had conquered Naples, cried publicly: “Long Live King Francis II!” In doing this, the four female workers professed their loyalty to the Bourbon Kingdom and rejected Liberal Italy and everything the latter stood for, including its rigidly classist and patriarchal society, and they paid for their defiance by being tried and arrested as a result.¹⁰⁶ Therefore, when they joined the brigand bands – especially as brigands, rather than simply as brigands’ companions – southern Italian women made an equally powerful statement to that of Sarno’s female textile workers, and it is no accident that numerous names of brigand women, most famously Filomena Pennacchio, appear in the popular traditions of different regions and areas that were at the heart of largescale anti-Italian and pro-Bourbon activities.¹⁰⁷ This important, and much neglected, gender dimension tells us that, comparably to what happened with Unionism in the Confederacy, anti-Italian dissent in the Mezzogiorno affected the deepest structures of society, and this dimension – which still awaits a thorough scholarly investigation – was a key component in protracting the inner civil war at the heart of the Great Brigandage until the latter’s demise in 1865.¹⁰⁸

Effectively, the major changes caused by the two crucial pieces of legislation enacted in 1863 – the Emancipation Proclamation and the Pica Law – were strictly related to the differences in the situations of Unionists in the Confederacy and legitimists in southern Italy. Unionists in the Confederacy could count on the Lincoln government’s support, which was gaining in strength by the start of 1863, and by the end of the year would have achieved crucial victories against the Confederate armies. Thus, Unionism on the Confederate home front could only grow in importance and impact as the American Civil War increasingly turned against the Confederate nation. Conversely, by 1863, legitimists in southern Italy were less and less able to count on the support of the Bourbon government in exile, since the failure of Francis II and his foreign sympathizers to achieve any concrete results after two years of attempts was taking its toll in terms of costs and resources. Consequently, even though anti-Italian sentiment remained strong, pro-Bourbon legitimism lost its importance as a main cause worth fighting for among both brigands and their supporters. Therefore, the crucial legislative measures enacted in 1863 were instrumental in exacerbating the two opposite processes of disaffection toward Confederate nation-building in the Confederate South and of disaffection toward pro-Bourbon legitimism in southern Italy – processes that contributed in major ways to causing the ultimate defeat of Confederate Southerners and of southern Italian brigands in 1865.

In retrospective, the Confederate elites’ and the southern Italian elites’ initial counterrevolutionary moves, which had directly led to the creation of two new national institutions, had unwillingly, though effectively, built the foundations for the inner civil wars that would begin in the two southern regions in 1861. First, the issue of legitimacy of the two new national institutions was a major bone of contention that acted as a catalyst for oppositional claims by Unionists and pro-Bourbons about the illegality of the existence of the Confederacy and of the Italian Kingdom. At the same time, given their original elitist nature, support for Confederate nationalism and Italian nationalism in the two southern regions was bound to have problems reaching out to the southern populations, even taking into account the enormous efforts made by the Confederate and Italian governments in terms of nationalist propaganda. Still, it is important to notice that there was a major difference between the situations in the two southern regions: At the start of the American Civil War a majority of white Southerners were definitely pro-Confederate, but it seems unlikely that, in 1861, especially if we question the results of the Plebiscites, a majority of southern Italians were in favor of the Italian Kingdom.

Even so, the Confederacy included large pockets of Unionism in many different areas, and those areas just grew in size and importance over time as a result of particular historical circumstances in conjunction with the effects of Confederate repressive policies. Comparably, there were many areas where pro-Bourbon legitimism was strong in southern Italy, and anti-Italian sentiment in those areas also grew in strength and importance, as a consequence of particular local circumstances but also as a result of the Italian government’s increasing policies of repression. Yet, the main difference between the two case studies is that even though, in both cases, opposition and dissent were major thorns in the sides of both the Confederate and Italian authorities in the period 1861–3, after 1863 Unionism grew even stronger in the Confederacy as a result of the Union’s victories in the American Civil War, while in southern Italy legitimism became of secondary importance as a motivation for anti-Italian activities, mainly as a result of the foreign legitimists’ ultimate lack of support for the continuation of pro-Bourbon activities. The significance of this comparative approach, though, emerges particularly clearly when we move from this general analysis of historical processes to the comparison of two specific regions where these developments took place. For this reason, in the following two chapters, I will focus on the inner civil wars that characterized the regions of East Tennessee, in the Confederate South, and Northern Terra di Lavoro, in southern Italy, in the period 1861–3.