Fame, Friends, Funds: Giuseppe Mazzini’s International Activism in the Nicholas Brown and Rush Hawkins Papers

Daniel F. Banks

Among the many exceptional documents to emerge from the Annmary Brown Memorial in 2017 are a number of letters penned by Giuseppe Mazzini. These were collected by Annmary’s father, Nicholas Brown III, and husband, Rush Hawkins. Hawkins later included many of them in a scrapbook that, along with Brown’s own papers, has been digitized by the Brown University Library. The scrapbook contains documents that the famous Italian revolutionary and his associates addressed both to Hawkins and Brown themselves and to various other correspondents in the United States and United Kingdom. As a result, the scrapbook and related documents in Brown’s collection offer a fresh perspective on the important ties linking Brown, Hawkins, and a host of British and American liberals to Mazzini and the European republican movement.

Mazzini, one of the main architects of Italian unification in 1860, and a central figure of nineteenth-century European republicanism in general, has been the subject of an immense outpouring of historiographical attention. In recent years, scholars have been particularly interested in exploring his global intellectual legacy by highlighting the originality and influence of his ideas on democracy, republicanism, and nationalism. These authors have convincingly argued that the scope of Mazzini’s ideas went beyond Italy to affect Europe and the world. Historians Salvo Mastellone, Laura Fournier Finocchiaro, and Leonardo la Puma, among others, have stressed how Mazzini was, in Finocchiaro’s words: “a European intellectual.”¹ The political theorist Nadia Urbinati has argued that Mazzini’s contributions to republicanism as a widespread political ideology were both “seminal and unique in his time.”² An important international collaborative project has demonstrated the global reach of Mazzini’s ideas, from Latin America to the Indian subcontinent.³ Eugenio Biagini and Christopher Bayly, the project’s coordinators, have stressed that “after 1860, Mazzini became a major political icon for radical liberals and democratic nationalists across Asia, as well as in Europe and America.”⁴ Ultimately, they conclude that “the diffusion and appropriation of the image and thought of Giuseppe Mazzini represents a paradigmatic example of globalization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”⁵

While these histories have established Mazzini’s stature as a political thinker of global importance, they have focused primarily on one element of his famous duality of “Thought and Action.” Mazzini believed that any political movement required the two to be intertwined. He thus always strived to accompany the conceptual definition and dissemination of political goals with concrete propaganda, organization, and insurrectional activity to attain these goals. At the beginning of his political career, he was already stressing that “thought is action.”⁶ Thirty years later, in 1866, he was still insisting on this principle in one of the letters held in Rush Hawkins’s scrapbook. Here, in addressing the New York committee of the Universal Republican Alliance, Mazzini blamed the failure of republicanism to take hold in Europe in the 1850s and 1860s on “the divorce between thought and action,” while exhorting his American contacts to provide practical help to overcome this obstacle.⁷ The remarkable testimonies previously hidden in the Annmary Brown Memorial tell the story of the wide international scope not just of Mazzini’s thought, but of his action, too.

Furthermore, the materials in the Rush Hawkins and Nicholas Brown collections also point to the central role played by allies in the United Kingdom and the United States in Mazzini’s efforts at international organization. The nature of this role is apparent in another of the letters concerned in Rush Hawkins’s scrapbook. Writing to fellow Italian patriot Antonio Gallenga on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, Mazzini expressed hopes and fears following the first signs of unrest in Sicily, and a will to help the insurgents. To do this, “the first thing”—according to Mazzini—was “to gather some, or a lot of money.” He encouraged Gallenga to provide advice on the matter and to “prod a few Englishmen” to donate to the cause.⁸ This brief letter reveals Mazzini’s awareness of the importance of financial means for political action, but it also shows that he saw England—his place of exile for most of his life—as a significant reservoir of such means.

Many of Mazzini’s acquaintances in the English-speaking world were close personal friends. When he first arrived in London in 1837, described by John Stuart Mill as “the most eminent conspirator and revolutionist now in Europe,” local liberals and members of polite society were interested in meeting him.⁹ They were sympathetic to his persona of the down-and-out exile and attracted to his romantic view of nationalism, but also enjoyed the prospect of hosting such a controversial and renowned figure at their social gatherings. Through wit, erudition, and an innate amiableness, Mazzini soon formed close ties with several of his patrons. These included the historian Thomas Carlyle, whom Mazzini met in 1838 through Mill’s partner, Harriet Taylor, and the political activist Arethusa Milner-Gibson.¹⁰ He later befriended the radical lawyer and campaigner William Ashurst who, together with his daughters, was to provide Mazzini with a surrogate family for the rest of his life.¹¹ At the same time, he also forged close ties with more radical Chartist activists such as Julian Harney and the radical engraver William James Linton.¹²

These friendships created a warm environment into which Mazzini could emerge from the self-isolation of exile, but also entailed certain practical benefits. These were not negligible, and often helped Mazzini to escape extremely complicated situations. On the one hand, his friends were able to offer concrete assistance when Mazzini was facing persecution, both on the European continent and in England. But they also offered him connections to the British and—later—American press, giving him a publishing platform that was free from the censorship imposed in Europe. His journalistic activity allowed him to illustrate his ideas to an ever-expanding reading public, which included the working-class followers of his Chartist associates. Finally, as Mazzini’s letters in the Nicholas Brown and Rush Hawkins collections make clear, his British and American friends helped him obtain the financial means he needed for the revolutionary projects he planned from his London exile. The letters he exchanged with Gallenga provide an excellent window onto the earlier development of Mazzini’s nexus of practical, propagandistic, and financial benefits obtained through his ties to Atlantic liberalism.

Mazzini’s London in the 1840s

The exchange between Mazzini and Gallenga is the only part of Rush Hawkins’ scrapbook to have previously been published, by Henry Nelson Gay, an early American historian of the Risorgimento who lived in Italy. Gay obtained copies from the Annmary Brown memorial’s curator, Margaret Stillwell, and used them to write a brief article confuting previous claims that Mazzini and Gallenga were estranged in the 1840s.¹³ The received wisdom at the time was that the two men had not been in touch since Gallenga’s failure to carry out an assassination attempt on Charles Albert, the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, in 1833. Gallenga had since forsaken his republicanism for more liberal views and settled in London under the pseudonym Luigi Mariotti. Gay was eager to point out that Mazzini and Gallenga actually collaborated quite closely in London until at least 1847, when Gallenga ignored a final exhortation from Mazzini “to fight for our republican symbol […] to be ours as you once were.”¹⁴ Their collaboration intensified in 1844, after Mazzini discovered that the British government had been opening his private letters and transmitting sensitive information to the press and other European powers.¹⁵ Mazzini managed, through his friends the Ashursts, to get the radical M.P. Thomas Duncombe to raise his case in Parliament.¹⁶ Although the government defended its conduct and set up a parliamentary committee which cleared it of any wrongdoing, the case sparked immense public debate.

The episode was a turning point in Mazzini’s first London exile, as it allowed him to put some of his new friendships to use and to hone his propaganda skills among the British public. Mazzini’s network of liberal and radical British friends had been growing ever since his arrival, and he now possessed what Lucy Riall has called “a distinct public profile,” centered on “an air of romantic intensity and passionate dedication” to the cause of a united, republican Italy.¹⁷ The uproar over the government’s interference with his personal correspondence now gave Mazzini a pretext to drastically scale up his search for sympathy and publicity. More importantly, as he fanned the flames of public opinion, he also pivoted to looking for ways to obtain concrete benefits for the cause of Italian unification.

The letters in the Rush Hawkins scrapbook show that Antonio Gallenga was a close ally throughout this process. Gallenga was a well-known writer and exile in his own right, having published extensively since his arrival in London in the late 1830s. Mazzini, then, was happy to employ him in his press campaign against the British. Less than a month after the discussion in Parliament, Mazzini was telling Gallenga that “the agitation will continue” and asking him to “help, if you can” with the press campaign and “out of doors agitation.”¹⁸ On December 6th, he requested Gallenga’s language skills for the translation of an article by an Italian exile in Malta. The governor of Britain’s small Mediterranean colony had shut down an Italian-language newspaper and Mazzini hoped to publicize the case as further evidence of the British government’s illiberal treatment of exiles.¹⁹ The article came out five days later in the Morning Chronicle, a widely read daily newspaper known for its opposition to the pro-government Times and thus an ideal vehicle for Mazzini’s propaganda.²⁰

Mazzini was extremely attentive to striking the right tone in his press releases. When an unidentified ‘Sir’ approached him with an offer of support, Mazzini asked Gallenga to write a letter for the unknown benefactor to sign and publish in the Chronicle. However, he entreated Gallenga “not to shout at the English too much,” repeating a common plea to his collaborator. He had previously complained that Gallenga “violate[d] moderation far more easily than [himself],” while asking his associate “not to awaken English pride against us” and explaining that “[o]ur language must be based on a faith in the country and the conviction that the government has betrayed the country’s ideas.” “Do not let yourself get carried away,” chided Mazzini, “by polemics and reactions which will not help us and might damage our goal.”²¹ The careful choice of press outlets, along with the disciplined messaging that Mazzini imposed on himself and on collaborators like Gallenga, yielded wildly successful results. As Denis Mack Smith has noted, the press campaign brought “enormous publicity to the cause of Italian patriotism and to his own name as a victim of political persecution.”²²

Mazzini accompanied the press campaign with another device, this time adapted from his Chartist friends: the mass public meeting. Such events were a fixture of radical politics in nineteenth-century Britain: they allowed political activists to reach large, working-class audiences and provided attendants with a sense of strength derived from their numbers.²³ This was the “out of doors agitation” Mazzini mentioned in his July 1844 letter to Gallenga, which also refers to “a large meeting,” to be held, if possible, in London’s monumental Guildhall.²⁴ Elena Bacchin has shown how Italian exiles made use of such meetings at an impressive rate in subsequent years, as they became a tried-and-tested tactic for the “mobilization of an Italophile ‘public sphere’ in Great Britain.” Bacchin estimates that over 850 public debates on Italian politics were held in Britain between 1847 and 1864.²⁵ What Mazzini’s correspondence with Gallenga reveals is the pioneering role the former played in establishing this form of propaganda as early as 1844.

The meetings Mazzini planned in 1844–1845 were not merely one-off awareness-raising exercises either. They provided an impulse for fundraising drives and the creation of formal associations that could support the Italian cause in a more continuous manner. Bacchin highlights this with reference to the 1850s, when public meetings were often followed by the creation of local support committees, which in turn organized more meetings.²⁶ Mazzini’s letters to Gallenga show that he had already adopted this strategy in the wake of the letter-opening affair. In May 1845 he explained that “I absolutely must try to create an English public association for Italian Nationality,” which had to be founded at “a public meeting.” Crucially, Mazzini specified that “for this we need one M.P. to act as chairman, and another three or four on the platform.”²⁷ By laying out three fundamentals of the propaganda efforts to gain support for Italian nationalism that would continue into the 1860s, Mazzini displayed a remarkably lucid and precocious understanding of how to turn the nascent mass politics of Great Britain to his advantage.

Ultimately, though, public sympathy for the Italian cause was only the more visible of Mazzini’s propaganda goals. What Mazzini really hoped to collect were funds for direct revolutionary action. Press articles called for donations, meetings provided money via the collection of attendance fees, and public associations acted as reliable fundraising organizations. Mazzini’s obsession with the conversion of support into funds was already evident in one of his earlier missives to Gallenga after the letter-opening affair, in which he complained that “we are not men, if we do not succeed in this money-conspiracy.”²⁸ The theme persisted in the last letter the two exchanged, in September 1847. Here, Mazzini reminded Gallenga that, for any revolutionary attempt to be successful, “the first thing is to collect money.”²⁹ For Mazzini, influential friendships among British liberals, public opinion campaigns, and fundraising were all part of an innovative and concerted effort to promote and sustain revolution in Italy. When revolution did come, just a few months after this last letter, it caught Mazzini off guard. Yet he soon managed to carve out an influential role for himself in the maelstrom of 1848, one in which he once again put his transnational friendships to good use.

The Revolutions

Mazzini did not expect local revolts in Sicily in January 1848 to explode into the trans-European conflagration known as the “Springtime of the Peoples.” When a republic was proclaimed in Paris at the end of February, he was still in London. Yet he soon adapted to the new circumstances, doing his best to influence the course of events on the ground. In March 1848, he founded an “Italian National Association” in Paris, whose stated goal was to bring together Italian exiles, both liberal and republican, to work for Italian unification. By April, he was in Milan, the epicenter of the revolution in Italy, trying to put plans for unification into action by advocating for an agreement between local insurgents and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. After the city was re-taken by Habsburg troops in the summer, he lay low for a few months, only to reappear triumphantly in Rome in March 1849. Here, a Republic had been declared in February after the Pope had fled the city’s revolutionary mob for the safety of Gaeta, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. When it became clear that a French expeditionary force under general Charles Oudinot was on its way to restore papal authority, the Republic’s Assembly gave Mazzini full power, as part of a triumvirate with Carlo Armellini and Aurelio Saffi. From April 24th, when the French landed in Civitavecchia, to July 3rd, when they occupied the city center of Rome, Mazzini was thus solely preoccupied with staving off the invaders.

During the Republic’s desperate attempts at resistance, Mazzini once again turned to English-speaking liberals for help. Nicholas Brown’s papers and Rush Hawkins’ scrapbook show how he maintained regular correspondence with Brown himself, who was the United States’ consul in Rome at the time. The details and significance of Brown’s work in aid of the Roman Republic have been discussed elsewhere.³⁰ But his relationship with Mazzini also followed patterns of political behavior and action that the latter had already established during his London exile. Mazzini saw Brown as an ally to rely on both for propaganda purposes and for extremely practical matters, just as he had relied on the Ashursts in London.

Brown aided the propaganda effort by forwarding pleas from the besieged Romans to the wider world. One letter, which six Italian consuls in Rome—no doubt inspired by the Republic’s leadership—sent to Brown on June 24th, lamented the French troops’ incessant bombardment of the city center. The number of bombs had grown “beyond measure” in the previous three days, killing “elderly [people], women and children.’ The signatories hoped that Brown, “representing a great and civil nation,” would do his best to stop the war from “erupting at least into those excesses that disgust […] the civilized nations of Europe.”³¹ Brown and other foreign consuls seem to have forwarded a formal protest on the matter. The complaint also appeared in the press. This is referenced in another letter on the affair, this time written directly by Mazzini—in French—for Brown to copy. Addressed to an unknown “Monsieur,” it informed the recipient that Brown had indeed sent a protest to General Oudinot about the bombing, prompting the “Monsieur” in question to retort that “Rome has not been bombed.” Mazzini, through Brown, nonetheless reaffirmed his eyewitness account of the bombing.³² As with the letter-opening affair in London, Mazzini hoped that the public support of foreign liberals could help him in his predicament, this time by reducing the intensity of the French attack on Rome.

Once Oudinot’s troops began occupying the city, Brown offered more practical help in the form of passports for republicans hoping to flee the scene. Mazzini wrote to Brown on July 5th about “two young men […who] have been asking you for passports.” He urged Brown to give the two, and a third companion of theirs, the documents they needed as “they deserve to be helped.”³³ But Mazzini’s requests for passports were not just driven by humanitarian concerns. On May 11th, during the siege, Mazzini asked for passports for two men “sent by us for the purchase of arms,” one of whom was “entrusted with a large sum of money.” He requested that Brown “put the seal of the American Embassy or Consulate upon the parcel containing the money with an outward address to the American Consul in Marseilles., because “it is vital that they [the emissaries] are not detained or hindered or delayed in their journey.” Finally, Mazzini needed “the Consul of the U.S. at Marseilles […] to grant that the American flag should be hoisted on the ship, through which, the arms will be conveyed from Marseilles to Ancona.”³⁴ In this ploy to avoid the French embargo, Mazzini tried to shield revolutionary activities behind a veil of respectable government business. Although we have no further news of the expedition, it is clear that Mazzini relied on foreign sympathy for more than just shielding himself and his associates from persecution. Just as he had expressed to Gallenga on the eve of the revolutions, appropriate amounts of money and weapons were crucial for success, especially in such desperate circumstances as those faced by the Roman Republic.

The 1850s: Keeping the Flame of Revolution Alive

Soon after the French occupation of Rome, Mazzini relocated to Switzerland, and from there, to London. There, he created an “Italian National Committee” to coordinate action towards Italian unification. At the time, Mazzini still saw the defeats of 1849 as a temporary setback and expected revolution to resume as soon as a spark could set it ablaze. He, of course, hoped to provide that spark. For this to happen, he once again needed money with which to act.

This is when Mazzini launched one of his most ingenious fundraising schemes: the Prestito Nazionale (National Loan). Anyone willing to contribute to the Republican cause could purchase franc-denominated bond slips for the loan directly from Mazzini’s agents. These were not dissimilar to the bonds sold by the Roman Republic or during the Greek Revolution, but the innovation lay in the fact that they were being sold before the revolution they were meant to fund had taken place.³⁵ Subscribers were promised that the money would be employed “only to speed up the independence and freedom of Italy.”³⁶ The loan itself was underwritten by the Italian National Committee as representing a future Italian government. Mazzini and other members of the Committee signed the slips, promising 0.5 percent monthly interest and repayment in full once a revolutionary government was instated in Italy. Throughout 1850 and 1851, Mazzini set himself to distributing these slips as far and wide as possible.

Although he stressed the Italianness of the Prestito Nazionale, Mazzini once again relied on his foreign friends for its success. The slips themselves listed James Stansfeld—the son-in-law of Mazzini’s patron William Ashurst—as their London agent. Nicholas Brown’s papers also include three slips of the Prestito Nazionale, to which Brown added a revealing handwritten note, specifying that these constituted “evidence of a small loan by me to Mazzini.” When Brown purchased these notes in late 1851, Mazzini was already making renewed efforts to mobilize his wealthy foreign friends for the obtention of funds. By now, one year after the loan’s inception, it had become clear that the Italian exiles scattered across Europe and the Americas did not have the means to contribute significantly, while those who remained in Italy did not do so for fear of political repercussions.

Mazzini realized that his foreign friends represented a much more reliable source of funds than the Italians he had tried to woo with the Prestito Nazionale. Although he kept exhorting his contacts to sell slips well into 1852, he also turned his attention to the creation of a reliable fundraising structure in Britain. For this, his friendships from the 1840s once again proved instrumental. In May 1851, William Ashurst and his fellow Mazzini sympathizers in London created the Society of the Friends of Italy (SFI), whose goal was to attract sympathy and funds from a wide range of actors both in London and the wealthier British manufacturing centers. Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe has described the SFI as “an outpost for Italian propaganda in the regions, aimed at drawing financial subscriptions from the well-to-do bourgeoisie.”³⁷ In this, it gave full expression to the ideas Mazzini had expressed to Gallenga in the mid-1840s. In fact, many of the people who had supported him through the letter-opening affair of 1844 were involved directly with the SFI, including James Stansfeld, who had also helped with the Prestito Nazionale.

Mazzini used the funds he had gathered from the bond slips and the SFI as a monetary base for a large-scale insurrection in Milan in February 1853, which failed spectacularly, causing many Italian nationalists to distance themselves from him. Still, he did not desist from his plans to incite a revolutionary spark in Italy. After a brief period of despondency following the insurrection, he once again set himself to organizing and fundraising for future revolts. Mazzini now turned to a public lecture tour as the spearhead of his fundraising activities in the United Kingdom. The lectures were mainly organized by the SFI and its contacts in large provincial towns, and picked up speed in 1856 and 1857. Their star performers were Aurelio Saffi, one of the former leaders of the Roman Republic, and Jessie White, a young radical from Bournemouth and a formidable lecturer. The pair’s tours through Scotland and the north of England in 1856–1857 drew large crowds, often selling out venues, and received rave reviews in local radical newspapers. The enthusiasm provoked by these tours generated momentum and inspired general sympathy for the Italian cause, while also bringing in funds. According to Elena Bacchin, the lectures themselves did not yield large sums of money.³⁸ But the local enthusiasm they generated often resulted in the creation of pro-Italian committees and locally organized fundraising drives. For example, one month after Saffi’s lecture in Glasgow in April 1857, a newly formed local committee had already sent 50 pounds to the SFI’s central committee in London.³⁹

Mazzini used the money raised during the 1856–1857 lecture tours to fund yet another insurrectionary attempt in Italy. This time, the plan included urban uprisings in Genoa and Livorno, accompanied by a naval expedition to southern Italy led by Carlo Pisacane, another veteran of the Roman Republic. Yet the results were just as catastrophic as they had been in Milan four years previously. The revolts in Genoa and Livorno never got off the ground, and Pisacane and his expeditionary force were massacred by hostile peasants just a few days after landing near the village of Sapri. Mazzini himself only narrowly escaped capture in Genoa, while Jessie White, who was also in town, ended up in jail. The tragic outcome of the planned insurrection also dealt a serious blow to Mazzini’s credibility as the leader of the Italian nationalist movement. After 1857, many Italian nationalists began to look to the new King of Piedmont-Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II, to provide leadership for the unification movement, given the failure of Mazzini’s republican tactics.

Mazzini was nonetheless still eager to plan further attempts at revolution, and thus to keep up the propaganda and fundraising work he had so successfully carried out in Britain. He also sought to take this activity further afield, to the lucrative lecture market in the United States, following the example of Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian leader of 1848 who had enjoyed an incredibly successful lecture tour in 1851–1852.⁴⁰ There is evidence among Nicholas Brown’s papers that Kossuth helped Mazzini to organize an American tour for Jessie White—now married to the Italian republican Alberto Mario—in 1858. On July 7th, Kossuth requested organizational help from the American abolitionist Hiram Barney, telling him that “Mrs. Mario White will feel very much obliged for your advice.”⁴¹ On the same day, Mazzini alerted an unnamed American contact in London—quite possibly Barney—that “my friend Kossuth” had relayed this man’s “good intentions towards Mrs. White-Mario concerning her scheme of going this year to your country and lecturing there on and for the Italian cause.” Mazzini introduced her as a “brave, highly intellectual and energetic woman” who “will rapidly succeed and increase the United States sympathy to which we attach high importance.” He therefore asked his contact to “promote the success of this scheme,” and to get in touch with James Stansfeld of the SFI to agree on the timing for the tour.⁴²

Jessie White and Alberto Mario eventually landed in New York on November 10th, 1858.⁴³ The couple delivered a series of lectures, with White speaking in English and Mario addressing the city’s growing Italian community in his native language. An editorial in the New York Times praised the lectures and painted White as “one of the most active and ablest agents MAZZINI [sic.] has ever had.”⁴⁴ It seems, however, that White and Mario did not enjoy the success they had hoped for. While they did manage to stoke interest in the Italian cause, they were dragged into debates about whether this was best served by the moderate monarchists or by the republicans. They also had trouble raising the funds Mazzini hoped to derive from their tour. Joseph Rossi has called the whole affair “a complete financial fiasco,” pointing to the fact that the couple had to borrow money from Mazzini to pay for their upkeep.⁴⁵ They eventually returned in the summer of 1859, just after the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia had taken the lead in the unification movement by declaring war on the Habsburg Empire.

The Universal Republican Alliance

As the monarchists created the new Kingdom of Italy between 1859 and 1861, Mazzini took a back seat. Though cut out from the main flow of events, he took comfort in seeing his lifelong dream of a united Italy finally take shape, even if this was not the republican shape he had hoped for. By the mid-1860s however, he was once again hungry for action. The monarchy’s failure to complete the unification process by adding Rome and Venetia to the new state frustrated him. He thus reactivated his propaganda and organizational networks in a bid to make this happen himself. To sustain these activities, of course, he needed funds. After the country’s unification under a liberal monarchy, general enthusiasm for Italy in Britain beyond Mazzini’s inner circle had died down, leading him to look for funds elsewhere.⁴⁶

It was as part of this strategy that he created the Universal Republican Alliance, whose goals were to foster closer links between republicans in the United States and Europe and to promote republicanism worldwide. Buoyed by the Union’s success in the Civil War, Mazzini hoped to obtain both practical help and the support of U.S. public opinion. At the same time, the Alliance was a vehicle through which he could express the more universalist views of republicanism he had been developing since the monarchy’s triumph in Italy. As a first step towards establishing the Alliance, he sent an envoy to America from the European Revolutionary Committee he had maintained in London since the early 1850s. This envoy was Louis Bulweski, a veteran Polish revolutionary who arrived in the United States in the winter of 1865–1866 with letters of recommendation from Mazzini’s friends the Taylors and other London liberals.⁴⁷ After shuttling across the north-eastern seaboard to establish contacts with local progressives and canvassing various members of Congress in Washington, Bulewski organized a public meeting in New York City.⁴⁸ This was meant as a first step towards creating a formal organization for the Alliance in the United States, just like the meetings Mazzini had organized in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s.

The meeting was held on April 19th, 1866 at the Loyal Publication Society on Broadway.⁴⁹ Rush Hawkins, Nicholas Brown’s son-in-law and a celebrated Unionist veteran of the Civil War, was one of the organizers and took minutes.⁵⁰ It is quite likely that his involvement was a consequence of his ties to Brown, who had so helped Mazzini in 1849. During the meeting, the organizers read out an address from Mazzini “to our friends in the United States,” written in December 1865. A copy of this document is in Hawkins’ scrapbook.⁵¹ In fact, the scrapbook contains a wealth of documents concerning the Alliance’s trajectory in the United States, which allow us to paint a detailed picture of the inner workings of the various organizational attempts it underwent.

The address explained the larger plan within which Mazzini hoped the United States would feature and displayed the particular rhetorical style he had tailored for his potential American associates. The speech began by claiming that “the power of the United States […] is—since the war and the abolition of slavery—immense.” The Union’s victory marked the triumphal reaffirmation of “the Republican principle” as “the principle of your National life.” It was now a “duty” for the United States to become “for the good of your country and of mankind, a leading, an initiating power.” Mazzini sketched a vivid picture of a worldwide “mighty battle […] fought between Equality and Privilege […] between a Republican belief and Monarchical interests.” The Civil War was proof that the United States had not been spared a part in this battle. Mazzini also pointed to the establishment of the Second Mexican Empire as an indication that an alliance of “European Despots” was ready to encroach on the republics of the American continent. American republicans thus had to form a “brotherly alliance with the European Republican Party.” By supporting republican revolutions in Europe, Americans could “strike the evil” of monarchism “at the root,” and prevent its spread across the Atlantic. This would also foster stronger ties between the United States and Europe, as the “[o]ld states will vanish, young Nations come to life, and they will acknowledge with special ties of grateful friendship the help tended to them in their times of struggle.”⁵²

This remarkable appeal reiterated Mazzini’s belief in the intertwined destinies of European republicanism and American abolitionism, a belief he had developed after meeting prominent abolitionists in London in the 1840s. According to Enrico Dal Lago, Mazzini saw the Civil War as a “central confrontation for the future of freedom in the Euro-American world.”⁵³ But his faith in the victorious Union as a worldwide republican beacon was a relatively new development. Axel Körner’s work shows that the United States’ failure to abolish slavery in the 1850s had led many Italians to discount it as a model republic.⁵⁴ The Union’s victory restored this status. Mazzini also appealed to the American progressives’ self-image of themselves as republican pioneers. He called on the United States to “be, for the good of your own country and of mankind, a leading, an initiating power.”⁵⁵

On the immediate level, however, Mazzini’s efforts did not bear many consequences. The meeting’s attendants elected a committee—including Hawkins—tasked with writing a response to his address. This was then printed and circulated among potential supporters.⁵⁶ A pamphlet in Hawkins’ scrapbook shows that it garnered 54 signatures, hardly an impressive number when compared to the petition campaigns running into the hundreds of signatures that Mazzini had orchestrated in England.⁵⁷ The response, moreover, stopped short of what Mazzini hoped for. While happy to acknowledge his praise of the United States, its “accumulated power” and the “proportionately increased consequences of our example,’”the authors stressed their commitment to “the sacred obligations of National neutrality.” They would only “respond to the appeal of our brothers in Europe […] as individuals,” by setting up an “organized association” so that “the American voice will reach you, in the assuring tones of American liberty.”⁵⁸ Far from a concrete provision of funds and materials, Mazzini’s American contacts mainly offered sympathy.

Still, Hawkins and the others did try to form an association that could channel some funds and propaganda, following a blueprint Bulewski had read out to them at the New York meeting. This called for “a corresponding committee” in the United States to keep in regular contact with “the European Republican Committee” and to “enlighten and inform correctly and truly the public opinion in America of the intimate relations, wishes and spirit of the people of Europe.” The committee would also “bring all possible aid to the European Republican Committee.”⁵⁹ Nonetheless, momentum for the Alliance in the United States expired quickly. Bulewski soon returned to Europe and did not write back until the end of July. The delay, he explained to Hawkins, was due to the outbreak of war between Italy and Prussia on one side, and the Habsburg Empire on the other. Bulewski believed that the war, which resulted in the Italian annexation of Venetia, would offer new opportunities for republican action and propaganda. He hoped it would “convince definitively the peoples, that only by institutions of self-government, they can be secured from such absolute government […that] brings upon them such calamities.” It was thus “now the time for the coordinating of our alliance.” Bulewski placed his faith in the provision of material help from the Americans, whom he knew to be “men of deeds.”⁶⁰

Mazzini further stressed the “divorce between thought and action” in a letter of his own to the New York committee a few days later. He emphasized the conceptual importance of “our Republican Alliance,” as it would “lead to a powerful increase of faith and hope in all the struggling Nations.” He then addressed “how to make of this alliance a widespread and powerful reality.” His American counterparts were to follow three steps. First, they needed to create a formal organization by establishing “a Central committee in every State, and subcommittees in every town of any importance.” As a second axis of intervention, Mazzini urged his partners “to spread the knowledge of our alliance and its aims” in print. They also needed to produce “a series of pamphlets headed ‘Universal Republican Alliance’,” to be distributed throughout Europe. Finally, Mazzini stressed the importance of funding for these activities, given his own difficult financial circumstances. He asked the Americans to sell “subscription notes of 1, 5 and 20 dollars,” of which he included a draft example.⁶¹ The notes were a revival of the Prestito Nazionale strategy established in the 1850s, but also followed on from the success Irish Fenians had enjoyed in selling similar bonds.⁶² The inclusion of different languages and currencies on the notes’ reverse side is further proof of Mazzini’s views of the organization as a pan-European and Transatlantic endeavor.

Still, the lack of an effective agent on the ground hindered his plans. In late 1866, frustrated that the American committee had not acted on his suggestions, Mazzini sent his old friend William Linton to the United States to kickstart the process.⁶³ In his public work on behalf of the Alliance, Linton continued to stress the organization’s universalism. He produced a leaflet claiming that the Alliance’s goal was to “maintain the right of every Country to a Republican government,” and to promote “the consequent duty of all Republicans to unite for a Solidarity of Republics.”⁶⁴ The leaflet was accompanied by a pledge to be taken by prospective members, which terminated as follows: “I believe, therefore, that it is the right and the bounden duty of every nation and every man to aid to the utmost the striving of other nations or of other men towards the establishment of the Universal Republic.”⁶⁵ Linton also sold subscription notes, not unlike the prototypes Mazzini had sent Hawkins, that were “redeemable by the first Republic established in Europe after issue.”⁶⁶ This universalist language, however, acted mostly as a façade for the more practical goals to which Mazzini now hoped to dedicate money raised in the United States. To this end, the first leaflet specified that “all monies for European work shall be placed at the disposal of JOSEPH MAZZINI for the European Committee.”⁶⁷

Mazzini’s shift from a universalist outlook to practical goals focused on Italy was evident in an article he published in the Atlantic in February 1867 to coincide with Linton’s mission, a handwritten copy of which is in the scrapbook. Though titled “The Republican Alliance,” the article focused mostly on the previous summer’s war against Austria. Mazzini’s main claim was that the Italian republicans would have led the troops in much better fashion than the monarchist generals who almost compromised the war effort. For Mazzini, the war was proof that the monarchy was unfit to lead Italy. He hoped the republicans would soon overthrow it, especially since they were now “fortified by a fraternal compact with all the representatives of our principle in Europe and, recently, with the best men of the United States.”⁶⁸

Mazzini’s plan was to spark a republican revolt in Rome—still under papal rule—which he hoped would both prove his organizational ability and inspire further agitation across Italy.⁶⁹ His main intent of raising funds for such a revolt is evident in his and Linton’s further correspondence with Hawkins. The American committee eventually replied to Mazzini’s letter of August 1866 in February 1867. They apologized for the delay and specified that they had mostly been preoccupied with domestic politics in the previous months, and so had not had the time or energy to create a formal organization. Nor did they believe this would happen in the future: they warned Mazzini that “our people are eminently practicable, and seldom act upon abstractions” like the universalist Alliance.⁷⁰ In his reply, Mazzini was eager to provide the pragmatic and concrete goal his correspondents needed, namely “the freedom of Rome, her emancipation from Papal rule.” This was now “the special object of the European Republican Party,” to be funded in part by the subscription notes Linton had been selling.⁷¹ Once again, then, Mazzini’s focus on propaganda and the mobilization of transnational support eventually boiled down to obtaining practical means for promoting insurrection. It is still not clear whether Linton’s trip to the United States was successful in this respect. From a couple of letters that Linton exchanged with Hawkins just before leaving in June 1867, it appears that the American committee had “subscribed for” around 3,000 dollars’ worth of subscription notes.⁷² It seems there was a misunderstanding as to whether the sum represented notes they had already sold or ones they intended to sell.⁷³

In any case, Linton reiterated that the sum was “very much needed at this very moment, when every possible help is wanted for the Roman movement.”⁷⁴ Ultimately though, there is no indication of whether the money arrived or not. According to Dennis Mack Smith, Mazzini’s fundraising drives in England and Italy in 1867 were also unsuccessful. He was thus left waiting for Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was also involved in the plan, to take the initiative. By the time Garibaldi did invade the Papal States, in October 1867, Mazzini was bedridden and could only watch from afar as the expedition ended in abject failure.⁷⁵ This was also Mazzini’s last grand organizational attempt: increasingly alienated from the Italian republican movement, he died five years later in the Pisa home of his Anglo-Italian friends the Nathans, having mostly faded out of the limelight.