I am thankful to Ferdinando Fasce, Susan K. Harris, Lucy Maddox, Anne C. Rose, and Sam Worley for their comments on several drafts of this essay.

1. Fuller, Margaret, “Italian Patriotism,” New-York Daily Tribune, 10 27, 1847Google Scholar, in “These Sad but Glorious Days:” Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, ed. Reynolds, Larry J. and Smith, Susan Belasco (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 159Google Scholar.

2. For an overview of the Italian wars of independence, see Holt, Edgar, The Making of Italy, 1815–1870 (New York: Atheneum, 1971)Google Scholar; Woolf, Stuart, A History of Italy, 1700–1860: The Social Constraint of Political Change (London: Atheneum, 1979)Google Scholar; or the more recent Spencer Scala, M. Di, Italy: From Revolution to Republic, 1700 to Present (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1995)Google Scholar. For a detailed account, see Candeloro, Giorgio's eight-volume Storia dell'Italia moderna (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1956–1978)Google Scholar and the multiauthored, six-volume Storia d'Italia dal sette-cento all'unità (Turin: Einaudi, 1972–1976) edited by Valeri, NinoGoogle Scholar.

3. While my work partially refutes his thesis that Americans all hailed the Italian wars of independence, Marraro, Howard R.'s American Opinion of the Unification of Italy, 1846–1861 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932)Google Scholar remains the most exhaustive guide to American periodical literature on the Italian revolutions. For travel writing, see the section on American tourists' reactions to Italy's political modernization in Vance, William A., America's Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 2: 105–210Google Scholar. For recent Italian scholarship on this issue, see Gli Americani e la Repubblica romana del 1849, ed. Antonelli, Sara, Fiorentino, Daniele, and Monsagrati, Giuseppe (Rome: Gangemi, 2000)Google Scholar.

4. For invitations to apply an internationalized approach to American multiculturalism, see Amy Kaplan's foundational essays, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Kaplan, Amy and Pease, Donald E. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 3–21Google Scholar; and “Domesticating Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 18 (1994): 97–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Romero, Lora, “Nationalism and Internationalism: Domestic Differences in a Postcolonial World,” American Literature 67 (1995): 793–800CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Desmond, Jane C. and Domínguez, Virginia R., “Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism,” American Quarterly 48 (1996): 475–90Google Scholar; and the collaborative introduction to Post-Nationalist American Studies, ed. Rowe, John Carlos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. We now understand, for instance, the connection between the international effort to subjugate Cuba and the Philippines in the 1890s and the domestic struggle to deny African Americans access to their political rights (Kaplan, Amy, “Black and Blue on San Juan Hill,” in Kaplan, and Pease, , Cultures, 219–36Google Scholar), or, conversely, between the United States's urge to lure the emerging Third World countries away from an allegedly color-blind Soviet Union and the civil rights concessions of the 1960s (Furedi, Frank, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998]Google Scholar; and Singh, Nikhil Pal, “Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy,” American Quarterly 50 [1998]: 471–522CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

6. Kaplan, Amy, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70 (1998): 581–606CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. The major studies of U.S. assessments of the European revolutions of mid-19th century — Williams, William Appleman's America Confronts a Revolutionary World: 1776–1976 (New York: William Morrow, 1976)Google Scholar; Reynolds, Larry J.'s European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Davis, David Brion's Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar — all emphasize the American censure of French socialism and read it as an expression of middle-class apprehension at the rise of an industrial and urban working class. Recent analyses of Hiram Powers's The Greek Slave by Jean Fagan Yellin and Joy S. Kasson are exceptions to this pattern of interpreting the U.S. response to European conflicts as an expression of class anxiety. In her Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture ([New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989], 112–24)Google Scholar, Yellin examines the relationship between Powers's representation of a young woman taken captive by the Turks during the Greek War of Independence and American abolitionism. In her “Narratives of the Female Body: The Greek Slave” (in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Samuels, Shirley [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], 172–90)Google Scholar, Kasson suggests instead that the viewers of The Greek Slave saw it as a moving representation of women's physical and social vulnerability as well as of their spiritual power.

8. I am indebted for my discussion of proslavery arguments to Ash-worth, John, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), vol. 1Google Scholar; Faust, Drew Gilpin, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Frederickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on African American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1971; rept. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Genovese, Eugene D., The Slaveholders' Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Horsman, Reginald, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Stanton, William, The Leopard's Spot: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815–1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Takaki, Ronald T., A Proslavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; and Tise, Larry E., Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

9. For information on Italian political exiles and their relationship with American intellectuals, see Lograsso, Angelina H.'s “Piero Maroncelli in America,” Rassegna storica del Risorgimento 15 (1928): 894–941Google Scholar, and “Silvio Pellico in the United States,” in Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association at the University of North Carolina, September 8–12, 1958, ed. Friederich, Werner P. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 429–45Google Scholar.

10. “Miss Sedgwick's Letters from Abroad,” Southern Quarterly Review 1 (1842): 183–84Google Scholar.

11. Greeley, Horace, Glances at Europe (New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1851), 211Google Scholar.

12. Peabody, Elisabeth Palmer, “Italy,” North American Review 78 (1854): 470Google Scholar.

13. Nott, Josiah C. and Gliddon, George R., Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1854), 404–5Google Scholar.

14. Tuckerman, Henry T., “Giuseppe Garibaldi,” North American Review 92 (1861): 35Google Scholar. For Tuckerman's interview with Garibaldi, see Gay, H. Nelson, “Il secondo esilio di Garibaldi (1849–1854),” Nuova antologia 147 (1910): 635–59Google Scholar.

15. “Count Camillo di Cavour,” North American Review 96 (1863): 47Google Scholar.

16. Ibid., 53.

17. Sedgwick, Catharine, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (New York: Harper, 1841), 2: 272Google Scholar.

18. “The People,” Southern Quarterly Review 9 (1854): 36Google Scholar.

19. When Louis Kossuth failed to support the abolitionist cause for fear of losing the support of the South, Garrison attacked him in the more-than-one-hundred-page-long Letter to Louis Kossuth Concerning Freedom and Slavery in the U.S. (1851) as the embodiment of a myopic patriotism incapable of traversing national boundaries to embrace the cause of universal freedom. See Spencer, Donald S.'s Louis Kossuth and Young America: A Study of Sectionalism and Foreign Policy, 1848–1852 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977), 65–81Google Scholar.

20. William Lloyd Garrison to Garrison, Wendell Phillips, 03 13, 1872, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, ed. Ruchames, Louis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971–1981), 4: 229Google Scholar. Part of Garrison's attraction for Mazzini, as he relates in the introduction to Joseph Mazzini: His Life, Writings, and Political Principles (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1872)Google Scholar, was the Italian's antislavery stance. Mazzini was a member of the British Negro Emancipation Society, had contacts with several American abolitionists, and openly expressed his condemnation of slavery in his correspondence with them. In a letter to Theodore Dwight Weld that Garrison reprinted both in the April 22, 1859, issue of the Liberator and the introduction, for instance, Mazzini wrote, “We are fighting the same sacred battle for freedom and the emancipation of the oppressed: you sir, against negro, we against white slavery. The cause is truly identical…. We are both the servants of the God who says, ‘Before me there is no Master, no Slave, no Man, no Woman, but only Human nature, which must be everywhere responsible, therefore free.’ May God bless your efforts and ours!” It was Mazzini's interest in global rather than merely national freedom, in Garrison's words, his “full-orbed soul,” that explained the “irresistible magnetism” (Joseph Mazzini, xxiGoogle Scholar) he exercised over the American abolitionist.

21. Among the articles devoted to the Roman republic in the Liberator are foreign correspondent Edward Search's “France and Italy” (June 1, 1849) and “Rome, Austria, France” (June 29, 1849), and especially the reprint of Mazzini's own “Letter to Messieurs de Tocqueville and de Falloux, Ministers of France” (October 19, 1849), in which he refutes the imputations of anarchy with which the French government had legitimized intervention against the republican government of Rome.

22. Howe, Julia Ward, “Whit-Sunday in Church,” in Passion Flowers (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1854), 76–78Google Scholar. The most recent general discussion of the Italian poems in Passion Flowers can be found in Buonuomo, Leonardo's Backward Glances: Exploring Italy, Reinterpreting America, 1831–1866 (London: Associated University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

23. Simms was complaining against the use of slavery as, to use Foner, Eric's terminology, “master metaphor for inequality” (“The Meaning of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation,” Journal of American History 81 [1994]: 435–60)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He may have been referring, among others, to the body of lyrics on the Italian revolutions, mostly composed by writers who had abolitionist sympathies, that describe Italy's political situation in terms of enslavement. Antislavery poet and editor John Greenleaf Whittier, who devoted more verses than any of his contemporaries to modern Italy, did so in “To Pius IX” (1849), a severe condemnation of the pope for having asked the help of the sovereigns of Europe against the Roman republic; in “The Peace of Europe” (1852), composed after the defeat of the revolutionary movements of midcentury; and in “Naples 1860,” which celebrates Garibaldi's expedition in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. William Cullen Bryant, a supporter of the Free-Soil Party, denouncer of the Dred Scott decision and defender of John Brown, also referred to the Italians as slaves in his 1860 “Italy,” where he wrote, “Slaves but yester-eve were they — / Freemen with the dawning day.” For American poetry of the Risorgimento in general, see Marraro, Howard R.'s extensive collection of poems by famous and less popular writers alike, “Poesia americana sul Risorgimento italiano,” in his Relazioni fra l'Italia e gli Stati Uniti (Rome: Edizione dell'Ateneo, 1954), 104–304Google Scholar; Peterson, Roy Merel's “Echoes of the Italian Risorgimento in Contemporaneous American Writers,” PMLA 47 (1932): 220–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Celli, Aldo's “Il Risorgimento nella poesia americana,” in Italia e Stati Uniti del Risorgimento e della Guerra Civile, ed. Lombardo, Agostino (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969), 19–39Google Scholar. For Whittier in particular, see Gay, H. Nelson's “Whittier propugnatore del Risorgimento italiano,” in Scritti sul Risorgimento, ed. Sillani, Tommaso (Rome: La Rassegna Italiana, 1937), 169–75Google Scholar.

24. Simms, William Gimore, “The Morals of Slavery,” in The Proslavery Argument, as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States (1852; rept. New York: Negro University Press, 1968), 264–67Google Scholar. The essay, occasioned by British writer Harriet Martineau's indictment of slavery in her Society in America, was originally published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1837.

25. “Glimpses at Europe During 1848: The Lombardo-Veneto Kingdom,” Southern Literary Messenger 15 (1849): 194–95Google Scholar.

26. “More Sham, More Mock Republican Sympathy,” North Star, 07 6,1849Google Scholar.

27. Delany, Martin R., “True Patriotism,” North Star, 12 8, 1848Google Scholar. Reprinted in Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader, ed. Robert S. Levine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming in 2003).

28. For my discussion of the tensions between black and white abolitionism and the racialist prejudice that tainted the latter, I am especially indebted to Ripley, Peter, ed., Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery and Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)Google Scholar. Among fundamental studies of abolitionism in general, see Bender, Thomas, ed., The Anti-slavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Dillon, Merton L., Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Filler, Louis, The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830–1860 (New York: Harper, 1960)Google Scholar; Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Kraditor, Aileen S., Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 1969)Google Scholar; Morrison, Michael A., Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Walters, Ronald G., The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; and Perry, Lewis and Fellman, Michael, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge: Louisiana state University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

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32. Ibid., 234.

33. Annie Adams Fields, “To dear home people,” January 1860, Annie Adams Fields Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

34. Uncle Tom's Cabin went through ten Italian editions between 1852 and 1854. See Woodress, James, “Uncle Tom's Cabin in Italy,” in Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, ed. Gohdes, Clarence (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 126–40Google Scholar.

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36. Quarles, Benjamin, ed., Blacks on John Brown (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 40–41Google Scholar. For a study of African American abolitionists' interpretation of the Harpers' Ferry episode, see Littlefield, Daniel C.'s “Blacks, John Brown, and a Theory of Manhood,” in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, ed. Finkelman, Paul (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 67–97Google Scholar.

37. Douglass, Frederick, “The Meeting in Joy Street Church,” Douglass' Monthly 4 (1861): 391–92Google Scholar.

38. For a discussion of the cult of Garibaldi in the United States, see Berthold, Dennis's “Melville, Garibaldi, and the Medusa of Revolution,” American Literary History 9 (1997): 425–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39. See Bercovitch, Sacvan's The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar and The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar.

40. For a brilliant analysis of the link between anti-Catholicism and abolitionism, see Franchot, Jenny's Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

41. “Politics and the Pulpit,” Liberator, 07 14, 1848Google Scholar.

42. Fuller, Margaret, “New and Old World Democracy,” New-York Daily Tribune, 01 1, 1848Google Scholar, in Fuller, , “These Sad but Glorious Days,” 164–65Google Scholar.

43. “Address of H. W. Johnson,” North Star, 08 21, 1848Google Scholar.

44. See Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, rev. ed.; and Andrews, William L., To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 174–76Google Scholar.

45. Douglass, Frederick, “The Prospect in the Future,” Douglass' Monthly 3 (1860): 306Google Scholar. Although her argument differs from mine, I am indebted to Miller, Marion S. for alerting me to Douglass's references to Garibaldi in her “Rivoluzione e liberazione: Garibaldi e la mitologia americana,” in Giuseppe Garibaldi e il suo mito (Rome: Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano, 1984), 219–29Google Scholar.

46. Douglass, Frederick, “The Progress of the War,” Douglass' Monthly 4 (1861): 514Google Scholar.

47. Marsh, George P. to Secretary of State William H. Steward, 09 14, 1861, in Garibaldi, ed. Smith, Denis Mack (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969), 71–72Google Scholar. For a detailed account of the episode, see Gay, Harry Nelson, “Lincoln's Offer of a Command to Garibaldi: Light on a Disputed Point of History,” Century Magazine 75 (1907): 63–74Google Scholar; Marraro, Howard R., “Lincoln's Offer of a Command to Garibaldi: Further Light on a Disputed Point of History,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 36 (1943): 237–70Google Scholar; Fragasso, Philip, “Giuseppe Garibaldi and the Civil War,” Civil War Times Illustrated 16, no. 7 (1977): 5–8, 42–44Google Scholar; and Bacarella, Michael, Lincoln's Foreign Legion: The 39th New York Infantry, the Garibaldi Guard (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Maine, 1996), 61–66Google Scholar. The scholarship on this moment of transatlantic contact constitutes an interesting example of American historians' efforts to constrict the past within the framework of national exceptionalism. Most critics maintain that Lincoln's attempt to enlist Garibaldi failed not because the Italian's strong antislavery stance clashed with the Union's conservative position on the issue, but because he requested to be made commander in chief of the army, a role reserved by the Constitution for the President only. This emphasis exorcises the episode's potential, which Douglass well understood, to severely compromise the mythology of America's moral superiority and reduces it instead to the amusing tale of a foreigner's naive arrogance.