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The American Civil War wasn’t the only national struggle to capture world attention in September 1862. Italy, already partially unified under King Victor Emanuel II by the valiant efforts of Giuseppe Garibaldi, was riven with tension over whether to annex the rest of the peninsula. What many observers didn’t realize is how, behind the scenes, the roiling events in Italy that fall would have a critical influence on the course of the American conflict.

King Victor Emanuel II and his prime minister, Urbano Rattazzi, had spurned Garibaldi’s cry to complete the Risorgimento and take Venice, controlled by Austria, and Rome, defended by Napoleon III’s French troops. That summer Garibaldi staged public meetings, made speeches, issued bombastic press statements and began organizing rifle clubs across Italy. In July he returned to Sicily, the scene of his spectacular invasion and conquest two years earlier. At Marsala before a wildly enthusiastic crowd he vowed “Rome or death!” while the crowd chanted his promise in response. It became the new slogan of the Italian Risorgimento.

“Death if they like,” French Empress Eugénie was said to have replied, “but Rome never.” Her husband, Napoleon III, was less resolute; he faced growing opposition to his ill-fated takeover of Mexico and worried that the “Roman question” would drag France into another unpopular war. He was willing to leave Pope Pius IX to fend with the Italians, were it not for the fury it would incite among French Catholics (to say nothing of his devout wife). The unspeakable humiliation of retreating in the face of Garibaldi’s revolutionary army also carried risks.

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As news of Garibaldi’s bellicose reveilles in Sicily reached Turin, the capital at the time, panic seized the Italian government. Holding the wolf by its ears, King Victor Emanuel issued a public proclamation disavowing any support for Garibaldi’s aggression against foreign powers. Many believed he secretly encouraged Garibaldi to excite a popular mandate; one rumor claimed Garibaldi carried a sealed box with a letter authorizing a march on Rome and signed by the king.

Garibaldi was convinced that the Italian government would not dare employ force against him, and if it tried, Italian soldiers would defect and join him. At the end of August he and his army of Red Shirts crossed the Straits of Messina from Sicily to Calabria and began the march toward Rome. The Italian Army confronted him at Aspromonte, demanded that he surrender and began firing when he refused. Garibaldi ordered his men not to return fire and stood before them shouting “Viva l’Italia” when two bullets struck him, one in the foot and another in his thigh. Soldiers from both sides rush to attend him and laid him beneath a tree; many wept in despair. He was arrested and taken down the mountain on a stretcher and then to Varignano, an Italian fortress prison near Spezia.

News of Garibaldi’s injuries, arrest and imprisonment rippled across Europe and the Atlantic world with disturbing force. Rumors that Garibaldi had died, was about to be executed or was being tormented in prison spread quickly through the press, along with images of the wounded hero. Thousands of well-wishers sent letters, money, food and gifts to Varignano. Hundreds flocked to the fortress to visit or stand vigil outside.

Public interest focused on the wounded foot, and doctors from several countries came to inspect it before the bullet was finally removed weeks later. The wound refused to heal, and people soon came to talk of it as the stigmata, the mark of Christ’s crucifixion. Blood-soaked bandages became coveted relics. One cartoon portrayed him nailed to the cross, surrounded by his tormenters, duplicitous politicians and priests, and the pope and Napoleon dancing in the background.

News of Italy’s disastrous campaign for its own union unfolded before the world precisely as the United States passed through the perilous autumn of 1862. In September leaders of Britain and France were conspiring to end the American war by intervention. News of the Union stand at Antietam, followed by Lincoln’s Sept. 22 announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, arrived in Europe in early October. Inevitably, the parallel struggles for union and liberty in Italy and America became intertwined.

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George Perkins Marsh, the American minister in Turin, fretted that America would be implicated in Garibaldi’s “insurrection” at Aspromonte. Rumors were swirling through the Italian court that an American ship, the frigate Constellation, had played a role in “conveying men and munitions of war to the insurgents” in Sicily and that an American consul in Ancona had aided the Garibaldi expedition. Marsh warned Secretary of State William H. Seward of the “extreme jealousy of the Italian government . . . in relation to all manifestations of sympathy with a movement whose ultimate aims it professes to believe to be the destruction of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic.”

Without authority, Marsh moved quickly to negotiate amnesty for Garibaldi and offer asylum for him and his men in America, where they “would be willingly received” into military service. Marsh was a seasoned diplomat who wanted nothing more than to avoid the kind of embarrassing publicity of the previous year when James Quiggle, a glory-seeking consul in Antwerp, took it upon himself to invite Garibaldi to lead the Union Army.

As he communicated with Garibaldi through a trusted intermediary, Marsh had no idea that another obscure consul, Theodore Canisius in Vienna, was about to outdo Quiggle. Canisius was a German-born Illinois newspaper publisher whom Lincoln bankrolled during his presidential bid to help win support among Illinois Germans. The newspaper later failed, and as a favor the president gave Canisius an appointment in Vienna. “The place is but $1,000, and not much sought,” Lincoln rationalized to Seward, “and I must relieve myself of Canisius.”

But Canisius didn’t go quietly. “General!” he wrote to Garibaldi breathlessly on Sept. 1. “As you have failed for the present to accomplish the great and patriotic work you lately undertook in the interest of your beloved father land, I take the liberty to address myself to you, to ascertain whether it would not be against your present plans to lend us a helping hand in our present struggle to preserve the liberty and unity of our great Republic. The battle we fight is one which not only interest ourselfs, [sic] but also the whole civilized world.”

Garibaldi recognized an ideal opportunity to arouse international support and embarrass the Italian government in the bargain. “I am a prisoner and I am seriously wounded, therefore it is impossible for me to dispose of myself,” he replied to Canisius. “I believe however that when my imprisonment shall cease and my wound heal, the favorable opportunity shall have come, in which I will be able to satisfy my desire to serve the Great American Republic, of which I am a citizen, and which to day fights for the Universal freedom.”

Canisius delayed before reporting his initiative to Seward, who read the enclosed copies of the Garibaldi correspondence about the same time that it appeared in The New York Times in early October. Canisius had taken his scoop to a Vienna newspaper, and within days the story was spread through the international press. Seward immediately fired Canisius, not simply for exceeding his authority but also for violating the very principle on which the Union was waging war: Canisius had publicly applauded an imprisoned rebel against the Italian government for performing “great and patriotic work.”

Canisius’s adventure in public diplomacy, meanwhile, was paying rich dividends for the Union cause across Europe. Large demonstrations expressing support for Garibaldi and scorn for Napoleon III, the pope and the Italian government erupted in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. In London enormous riots broke out in Hyde Park. On Sunday, Sept. 28, a group of radicals meeting to express sympathy for Garibaldi were assaulted by a gang of Irish Catholics shouting “Long live the pope!”

A few days later London newspapers ran a public letter from Garibaldi “to the English Nation” pleading for Britain to take the lead in calling for peace and liberty throughout the world. Garibaldi gave his full-throated endorsement of “the great American Republic, for she is in truth your daughter, and is struggling now for the abolition of that Slavery which you have already so nobly proclaimed,” a sentiment that anticipated the Emancipation Proclamation, news of which wouldn’t reach Europe until Oct. 4. “Help her to escape from the terrible strife waged against her by the traders in human flesh. Help her, and then place her by your side at the great assembly of nations — that final work of the human intellect.”

The London Garibaldians, enthused by their hero’s appeal, reconvened in Hyde Park the following Sunday, Oct. 5. A crowd of some 100,000 people gathered around the speakers’ mound, which they called the “Hyde Park Aspromonte.” Irish gangs again assaulted the Garibaldians, and a full-pitched battle ensued, leaving more than a few broken heads and cuts from stiletto-wielding Italians among the Garibaldians.

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The governing classes of Britain, France and Italy trembled at the revolutionary unrest Garibaldi had ignited. King Victor Emanuel quickly granted amnesty to Garibaldi and his men. Prime Minister Rattazzi resigned in public disgrace. Britain’s prime minister, Lord Palmerston, quietly tabled a motion in his cabinet to recognize the Confederacy, partly in response to the pressure from the Garibaldians. Lady Palmerston made a public show of sending a special bed to the convalescing Garibaldi. Seward conveyed President Lincoln’s gratitude to Garibaldi, instructing Marsh to say that he was “touched by the respect and good will toward our country which is manifested by the illustrious General Garibaldi.”

Meanwhile, Theodore Canisius was stranded in Vienna with a wife, young children and no job. After watching the “great commotion throughout Europe,” he felt fully vindicated when he wrote to Seward with an unapologetic account of his actions. No diplomat dared reach out to Garibaldi in his time of peril, Canisius told Seward, and “I thought the time had come to let the world know what the great Hero of the Castle of Varignano thinks of us and our cause.” Referring to the “great Garibaldi demonstrations in England” and Garibaldi’s letter “to the English nation,” he took full credit for Garibaldi’s moral support, which had “strengthened our cause throughout Europe.” Seward understood the value of Canisius’s unauthorized action, and with permission from the Italian government and no doubt Lincoln, he quietly reinstated the Vienna consul.

It was left to Marsh to deal with the still unresolved invitation to Garibaldi and his men to fight for the Union. Marsh had written to him hoping that America would “have the aid both of your strong arm and of your immense moral power in the maintenance of our most righteous cause.” Thousands of Red Shirts and other Europeans volunteered to fight for the Union. Garibaldi, however, returned to his island home on Caprera. He would never walk again without the aid of crutches or a cane. But if not with his “strong arm,” certainly with his “immense moral power” Garibaldi served the Union during its most perilous moment in the autumn of 1862.

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Sources: Jasper Ridley, “Garibaldi”; Lucy Riall, “Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero”; Sheridan Gilley, “The Garibaldi Riots of 1862,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 16, Issue 4 (1973); H. Nelson Gay, “Lincoln’s Offer of a Command to Garibaldi”; Mary Philip Trauth, “Italo-American Diplomatic Relations”; The New York Times; The Times of London; Diplomatic Correspondence, Italy; Consular Correspondence, Vienna, Record Group 59, National Archives.

Don H. Doyle is McCausland professor of history at the University of South Carolina and the Archie K. Davis fellow at the National Humanities Center. He is author of several books, including “Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question” and “Secession as an International Phenomenon.” He is currently writing a book on the international context of the American Civil War.