Garibaldi’s activities in South American revolutions included the Ragamuffin War (1835-1845) in Brazil alongside the short-lived Riograndense Republic, Uruguayan Civil War (1846-1851), and the Uruguayan Civil War (1846-1851). Uruguay still remembers Garibaldi as a national hero in their great civil war in the mid-nineteenth-century, as he became one of the most famous foreign volunteers, and commanded troops in the conflict. This experience in South America molded him into a military leader to help later unify Italy.
This is about his involvement within the underlying multi-racial, internationalist context of the Guerra Grande (“Great War”), or the Uruguayan Civil War fought from 1839 to 1851 between Uruguay’s two main political factions, the Colorado Party (urban, liberal, commercial interests, led by Fructuoso Rivera) and the Blanco Party (rural, conservative, protectionist interests, led by Manuel Oribe) that involved Garibaldi. The war began when Rivera overthrew Oribe in 1839 and then declared war on Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, who supported Oribe.
- INTRODUCTION: THE ITALIAN INDICTMENT OF EARLY U.S. REPUBLIC — Introduction to the history and betrayal of Italian Republicanism.
- FROM THE CARBONARI TO MAZZINI — tracing the transformation from reactive conspiracy to affirmative moral philosophy grounded in Doveri dell’Uomo.
- THE CATTANEO-MAZZINI DIVERGENCE ON FEDERALISM AND SLAVERY — expanded treatment of how both men condemned American slavery from different structural angles (unitary vs. federal republicanism), with Cattaneo’s surgical argument that slavery was a royalist remnant, not a federal defect.
- THE KOSSUTH CONTRAST — exploration of Kossuth’s cynical refusal to denounce slavery during his 1851-52 American tour vs. Mazzini’s unwavering moral consistency, and what that fault line revealed about European revolutionary movements.
- THE ITALIAN STAGE — on Rota’s Bianchi e neri, Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, satirical journalism, and how Italian audiences laughed at America’s pretensions to freedom.
- GARIBALDI IN SOUTH AMERICA: PRACTICALITY OF REPUBLICAN INTERNATIONALISM — the multi-racial, internationalist context of the Guerra Grande.
- THE TRANSATLANTIC CIRCUIT — Garrison-Mazzini parallels, Fuller’s Roman dispatches, Timothy M. Roberts’s research on Mazzini’s influence on John Brown, and the pathway into Black Republican political thought.
- ITALY’S DIARCHY AND FASCIST ALLIANCE DESTROYS REPUBLICAN INHERITANCE — the Rosselli assassinations, the outlawing of Masonic networks, and how the monarchist-conservative line triumphed over the Mazzinian tradition.
- REPUBLICANISM AS A DIVINE IDEAL — describing the philosophical displacement of republicanism in the world, why Washington and Mazzini refer to republicanism as a divine ideal, its fight against theocracy, and the argument that this republicanism is foundational, not foreign, necessitates revival, and belongs most urgently to those for whom its promise was most violently betrayed.
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