Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Spirit of Young America
- 1 Orthodox Jacksonianism, 1828–1844
- 2 Trade and Improvements: The Economic Orientation of Young America Democrats
- 3 Rails, Canals, and a New Commercial Spirit
- 4 Young America Democrats and the Revolutions of 1848
- 5 A New International Consciousness
- 6 The Fires of Perfection Revisited
- 7 The Antislavery Democracy
- 8 New Democrats and the Coming of the Civil War
- Conclusion: Lincoln on Young America
- Index
4 - Young America Democrats and the Revolutions of 1848
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Spirit of Young America
- 1 Orthodox Jacksonianism, 1828–1844
- 2 Trade and Improvements: The Economic Orientation of Young America Democrats
- 3 Rails, Canals, and a New Commercial Spirit
- 4 Young America Democrats and the Revolutions of 1848
- 5 A New International Consciousness
- 6 The Fires of Perfection Revisited
- 7 The Antislavery Democracy
- 8 New Democrats and the Coming of the Civil War
- Conclusion: Lincoln on Young America
- Index
Summary
Most Americans were scandalized when they heard the news. George Sanders, the prickly former editor of the Democratic Review, had hosted a well-attended London dinner. Appointed American consul to London by Franklin Pierce, in early 1854 he invited leading European revolutionaries to his home in honor of George Washington's birthday. From Italy, Giuseppe Mazzini came with Garibaldi in tow. Two decades earlier, they had both launched the Young Italy movement as a revolutionary attempt to unite the peninsula's fiefdoms into a cohesive republican state. From Hungary arrived Louis Kossuth, unsuccessful challenger to Habsburg rule over the Magyars. From Paris emerged Alexandre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin, hero of the French barricades of 1848. American minister to England James Buchanan presided, jokingly asking Mrs. Sanders how she felt playing hostess to such flammable elements. For most Americans, and certainly for European monarchs fearful of the democratic example provided by the United States, the Sanders dinner symbolized America's unseemly sympathy with European rebels. By hosting such a mix of dissenters in one place within Europe itself, and by having a senior American representative such as Buchanan present, Pierce's administration sent a menacing signal to European elites.
Sanders's 1854 dinner, however, did not represent the first such warning. Since the mid 1840s, Young America Democrats had been prodding successive national administrations to intervene in European political affairs. For them, America's sense of democratic mission implied an obligation to help European republicans achieve freedom on their own soil.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007