Guide to Italian Republicanism in Risorgimento Era, Part 8: Republicanism as a Divine Ideal

Describing the contemporary stakes as to why it matters now, 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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THE CONTEMPORARY STAKES

AT A MOMENT WHEN POLITICAL IDENTITIES ARE BEING RENEGOTIATED in real time, this history feels urgent, for the republican tradition articulated by Mazzini and enacted by the transatlantic networks of the nineteenth century is neither “Marxist” nor “foreign” nor “radical” in any sense that can be dismissed by those who claim to defend the American constitutional order. It is foundational. American republicanism drew from European sources such as Montesquieu, Locke, Cicero, Polybius, the English Commonwealth tradition and Scottish Enlightenment. The specific form Mazzini gave it, grounding republican government in universal human duty rather than particular national interest, did not contradict the American founding, but completed it. It supplied the philosophical architecture that the American founders, constrained by the political necessity of compromise with slavery, could not build.

This is the tradition’s power, and this is why it was destroyed. In Mazzini’s expression, REPUBLICANISM becomes a weapon against Power, or against the concentration of wealth, the abuse of authority, the corruption of democratic institutions by oligarchic interests, the betrayal of the public trust for private gain. It is a weapon that cannot be co-opted by Power, because its philosophical structure demands the universal application of its principles. A republicanism grounded in duty toward Humanity cannot be deployed to justify the domination of one class, one race, one nation over another. The moment it is so deployed, it ceases to be republicanism and becomes the thing it was designed to combat.

The modern politician, i.e., the corrupt officeholder, the demagogue and the aspiring autocrat cannot dismiss this tradition as alien ideology, because it is the foundation of the government itself. To reject Mazzini’s universalism is to reject the principle upon which republican government depends: that the state exists to serve the common good of all its citizens, without exception, without hierarchy, without the carving out of privileged enclaves for the powerful at the expense of the weak.

That this tradition manifests strongly in Black Americans who have studied it deeply is not paradoxical. The tradition itself, by its own internal structure, belongs most urgently to those for whom the promise of republican liberty was most violently betrayed. The early Black and radical Republicans of the Reconstruction era understood this. They read Mazzini. They followed Garibaldi. They corresponded with Garrison. They built their political philosophy from a tradition that was explicitly transatlantic, explicitly universalist, and explicitly hostile to every form of domination — racial, economic, political, and cultural. They understood that the American republic, as constituted, had never fully been a republic at all, but that it had been, from its inception, compromised by the feudal, aristocratic, slaveholding interests that Cattaneo had diagnosed with such precision.

The early thinkers understood that the remedy was not to abandon, replace or supersede the republican idea but to complete it — to build the republic that the founders had promised but never delivered, the republic that Mazzini had described but never lived to see.

“Be your country your Temple: God at the summit; a people of equals at the base. Accept no other formula, no other moral law, if you would not dishonour alike your country and yourselves.” (Mazzini, Dei Doveri dell’Uomo)

This is REPUBLICANISM, not the hollowed-out, partisan, instrumentalized word that contemporary political discourse has reduced it to; but the principled, universalist, anti-tyranny philosophy that Mazzini systematized, that the Carbonari died for, that Garibaldi fought for on three continents, that Garrison and the abolitionists wielded against the slaveholding power, and that the freedmen of the Reconstruction era claimed as their birthright. It is the intellectual tradition that provides the moral deathblow to corruption, to injustice, to every form of power that seeks to exempt itself from the universal law of human duty. It belongs to everyone who has ever been told that they are not worthy of the liberty that others enjoy. And it cannot be destroyed, not by the Fascists, not by the slaveholders, not by the demagogues of any era; because it is grounded not in the contingent arrangements of any particular state but in the permanent moral structure of human obligation.

The Carbonari lit the fuse. Mazzini built the architecture. Garibaldi proved it could be lived. The transatlantic abolitionists proved it could cross oceans. And those who carry it forward today — who insist on the universal application of republican principles, who refuse to compromise with tyranny, who understand that the duty toward Humanity is prior to the duty toward party, faction, or interest, are not innovators. They are inheritors. They stand in a tradition that is older than the American Republic, deeper than any constitution, and more dangerous to Power than any army.

That is the tradition. That is the inheritance. And that is why it matters.

REPUBLICANISM AS A DIVINE IDEAL

The destruction of the Mazzinian inheritance by Italy’s monarchist-Fascist diarchy did not occur in a vacuum. It was the culminating act in a longer philosophical displacement of republicanism itself as read in the last chapter. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the affirmative moral architecture that Mazzini had forged from the Carbonari’s reactive conspiracy was steadily emptied of content. Liberal constitutionalism reduced republicanism to a set of neutral procedures protecting private interest. Socialist and Marxist currents treated it as an exhausted bourgeois stage to be superseded by class dictatorship (. Ethnic nationalisms severed it from universal duty and yoked it to blood. Clerical and monarchical reaction denounced it as impiety. In Italy the process reached its terminus when Victor Emmanuel III’s alliance with Mussolini outlawed the remaining republican and Masonic networks, assassinated the Rosselli brothers, and extinguished the last organized carriers of the tradition that had once declared “Neither pope nor king — only God and the People.” What survived in official language was the word “republic,” and what vanished was the divine Ideal that alone had given the word substance.

That Ideal was never a merely Italian invention. It appears with unmistakable clarity in the founding language of the American experiment. In his First Inaugural Address of 30 April 1789, George Washington declared that “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” The metaphor of the sacred fire is not rhetorical ornament. It presents republican self-government as a divine trust, an experiment whose success depends upon fidelity to “the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.” Washington’s language already contains the seed of a civic theology: liberty is sacred, the republic is its earthly vessel, and the people are its custodians under a higher law.

Mazzini transformed that seed into a complete philosophy of life. Writing in the aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848, he defined the republic with deliberate precision:

“The republic, as I at least understand it, means association, of which liberty is only an element, a necessary antecedent. It means association, a new philosophy of life, a divine Ideal that shall move the world, the only means of regeneration vouchsafed to the human race.” (Giuseppe Mazzini, Royalty and Republicanism in Italy, London: C. Gilpin, 1850, p. 118; reprinted in The Duties of Man and Other Essays, p. 146)

Liberty is indispensable yet insufficient. Association, meaning the free, duty-bound cooperation of equals under a single moral law, is the higher principle. Only the republic can institutionalize that association without the hereditary lie of kingship or the theocratic intermediary of priestly power. The motto “Dio e Popolo” is therefore not a secular slogan but a theological-political axiom. God is the author of the one law that binds all humanity; and the People are the collective subject charged with enacting that law on earth. Any regime that inserts a privileged caste, whether of blood or of cloth, between God and the People commits both political and religious treason.

This is why the fight against theocracy was inseparable from the fight against monarchy. The Papal States represented the purest fusion of spiritual and temporal absolutism. Mazzini’s critique of Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864) and his earlier insistence, during the Roman Republic of 1849, that the Pope might retain spiritual authority only by surrendering temporal power, followed directly from the logic of the divine Ideal. The same logic disqualified the slaveholding American republic. A polity that claimed the sacred fire of liberty while holding millions outside the circle of duty and rights violated the Ideal at its root. It was not an imperfect republic; it was no republic at all. Cattaneo’s surgical distinction between federalism and slavery, Mazzini’s unwavering moral consistency against Kossuth’s cynicism, the satirical laughter of Italian audiences at Rota’s Bianchi e neri and Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, Garibaldi’s multi-racial practice in the Guerra Grande, and the absorption of Mazzinian universalism into Black Republican political thought through Garrison, Fuller, and John Brown, all of which were applications of the same principle.

The republicanism recovered in this series is therefore foundational. It is continuous with Washington’s words about the Sacred Fire of Liberty and with the classical and Christian sources that fed both the American founding and the Italian Risorgimento. It is not a Marxist import, nor a Jacobin excess, nor an alien European abstraction. It is the most coherent articulation of the moral logic already latent in the language of the American experiment, basically the logic that the American experiment itself betrayed through the original compromises with slavery and racial hierarchy. Because that betrayal was most violent against those excluded from the promise, the tradition belongs most urgently to them. The early Black and Radical Republicans who read Mazzini, who corresponded with Garrison, who studied Garibaldi’s campaigns, and who absorbed the indictment of the “false republic” understood this with perfect clarity. The duty of recovery is therefore not optional. It is the unfinished work of the divine Ideal itself.

REPUBLICANISM AS DIVINE IDEAL II

George Washington and Giuseppe Mazzini each located the highest political form within a transcendent order that is not invented by human will but discovered, sustained, and judged by a reality that exceeds contingency. For both, that form was not merely useful, stable, or historically successful; it was the earthly structure in which the divine governance of human affairs becomes visible and effective. Their shared conviction that this form constitutes a “divine ideal” rest on a philosophical anthropology and a philosophy of history in which moral agency, free association, and progressive responsibility are not secondary ornaments but the very means by which finite beings participate in an infinite design.

Washington’s understanding emerged from lived experience of PROVIDENCE as an active, discriminating force in concrete events. He repeatedly observed that the American struggle and the subsequent constitutional settlement bore marks that could not be reduced to human calculation or force of arms. The tranquil deliberation and voluntary consent by which the new order was framed stood in sharp contrast to the usual methods of establishing government by conquest, inheritance, or the fiat of a single will. That contrast itself appeared to him as a “token of providential agency.” The Invisible Hand that conducts the affairs of nations had, he believed, supplied what human defect could not supply and had opened a path of political happiness rarer than any previous people had been granted. Yet this favor was conditional. The propitious smiles of Heaven, he insisted, could never be expected on a nation that disregarded the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself had ordained. Virtue and happiness, duty and advantage, honest policy and public prosperity were bound together in the economy of nature. Religion and morality therefore functioned not as private consolations but as the indispensable supports of political prosperity; without them the experiment of self-government would collapse under the weight of human passion and faction.

Washington’s view rests on the premise that human beings are moral agents created under a moral Governor. The capacity for self-restraint, public spirit, and deliberate consent is not a historical accident but a reflection of the order that structures the universe. A political form that multiplies opportunities for the exercise of that capacity, while simultaneously checking the perennial temptation to dominate, therefore participates in the same order that PROVIDENCE itself observes. The divine ideal is not the claim that the government is sacred in its every detail, but that the conditions under which free people govern themselves under law align more closely with the structure of moral reality than do forms that concentrate power in a single will or hereditary line. The destiny of that model is staked on the people precisely because the people are the locus in which the moral law must be continually re-enacted; and Heaven’s favor is withdrawn the moment that moral law is treated as optional.

Mazzini’s articulation is more explicitly metaphysical and progressive. He begins from the conviction that a single divine Unity underlies all existence and that this Unity unfolds historically through a continuous Law of Progress. Humanity is not an aggregation of isolated individuals but a collective being that lives and learns across generations. Each nation is assigned a distinctive function within that collective labor, and geographical and cultural particularities are not accidents, but the mission given by God. The Ideal is not constructed by human preference; it is gradually discovered. Liberty is necessary but preparatory, and Fraternity is the joining of faculties and forces toward a common aim. Fraternity (or Association) is synthesis, and synthesis is the lever by which the world is regenerated (Giuseppi Mazzini’s Political Theology on the Origin of Revolution). Analysis can only criticize and clear away what is exhausted; but synthesis alone advances toward new life.

Within this framework the political form that enthrones association becomes the visible organ of the progressive interpretation of divine law. God stands at the summit of the social edifice, and the people of equals stand at the base as progressive interpreters of His law. Country itself is to be regarded as a temple. The republican order is therefore not a political party tactic but a religious party in the deepest sense: it is the institutional expression of the duty to discover and incarnate the Ideal through labor, sacrifice, and voluntary self-giving. Sovereignty, Mazzini insisted, does not reside finally in the individual or in the majority, but in the aim—the divine plan—and any government is legitimate only insofar as it conforms to that plan and keeps open the road of progress.

What the phrase “divine ideal” means, then, is that the highest political arrangement is neither a pragmatic compromise among interests nor a pure human construct. It is the form in which the moral and historical order of reality becomes habitable for finite beings. For Washington that order is experienced primarily as PROVIDENCE acting through virtue; but for Mazzini it is experienced as progressive revelation acting through association and duty. In both cases the ideal transcends any particular material configuration or distribution of power. It judges every arrangement by whether it cultivates the moral capacities required for further participation in the higher order.

Critiques that treat this ideal as a mere mask for particular interests, or as an incomplete stage awaiting more thorough dissolution of distinctions, fail to engage the claim on its own terms. Such critiques presuppose that the only real forces are material or power-relational, and therefore that any appeal to a transcendent moral structure must be ideological. Washington and Mazzini reverse the priority: the moral and providential structure is constitutive; material conditions and power relations are secondary and derivative. To reduce the ideal to an instrument of any finite group is already to abandon the very agency and teleology that both thinkers regarded as its foundation. Likewise, demands that every particularity of nation, responsibility, or differentiated capacity be abolished in the name of a more absolute equality invert the divine design as both men understood it. That design works through ordered multiplicity with distinct missions, distinct virtues and distinct responsibilities, toward a higher unity. Homogenization would not fulfill the Ideal but would erase the very organs through which the Ideal is progressively discovered and incarnated. It orients political life toward an infinite horizon of moral ascent, and it measures every concrete arrangement by its capacity to keep that horizon open.

HISTORY REVIVAL AND PRESENT DUTY

Washington explicitly connects the republican form of government to providential agency and divine favor:

“No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency; and in the important revolution just accomplished in the system of their united government the tranquil deliberations and voluntary consent of so many distinct communities from which the event has resulted can not be compared with the means by which most governments have been established without some return of pious gratitude…”

Later in the same address:

“…there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage… since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained; and since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” (The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, Vol. 2).

Washington treats religion and morality as the indispensable foundation of the republican order:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. … And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. ’Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” (The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, Vol. 20, National Archive; Original publication in American Daily Advertiser, 19 September 1796)

These passages show Washington treating the republican form not as a merely pragmatic human invention, but as an experiment under the “Invisible Hand” and the “smiles of Heaven,” whose success depends on alignment with “eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.”

Mazzini states the theological character of the republican principle directly:

“The Republic—as I understand it at least—is the enthronement of the principle of association, of which liberty is merely an element, a necessary antecedent. Association is synthesis; and synthesis is divine: it is the lever of the world; the only method of regeneration vouchsafed to the human family. … Now the republican party is not a political party; it is essentially a religious party.” (Giuseppe Mazzini, Faith and the Future, 1835, reprinted in Essays: Selected from the Writings, Literary, Political, and Religious of Joseph Mazzini, London, 1887)

Mazzini’s formula for the proper political-religious order in The Duties of Men encourages to:

“Be your country your Temple: God at the summit; a people of equals at the base. Accept no other formula, no other moral law, if you would not dishonour alike your country and yourselves.”

The phrase “divine ideal” is therefore a fair analytical condensation of their own terminology, not an external imposition.

The divine Ideal of republicanism stands or falls with the recognition that self-government is not a human contrivance but a sacred trust. Washington’s sacred fire and Mazzini’s divine Ideal are two expressions of the same truth: liberty without association under a higher law degenerates into private interest or collective tyranny; association without liberty becomes theocratic or monarchical despotism. The philosophical displacement of this Ideal has left the modern world with the vocabulary of republics and the reality of managed subjects. Who denies this? The Italian republican tradition, forged in the Carbonari, perfected by Mazzini, tested by Garibaldi, and nearly extinguished by the Savoy-Fascist diarchy, remains the purest available recovery of that Ideal! Its indictment of the early United States was not the resentment of outsiders; but the judgment of a higher and more rigorous standard applied to a polity that claimed the sacred fire while denying it to millions. That judgment still stands. The Ideal still summons. Those for whom the promise was most violently betrayed remain its most natural heirs and its most necessary protagonists. The work of revival is both historical recovery and present duty.

LEGACY OF REPUBLICANISM, AND ITS OPPONENTS

This is not to evaluate whether Washington or Mazzini were flawless men, nor that the American or Italian republican experiments achieved perfect justice. It is a specific philosophical claim: both men located the highest political form within a transcendent moral order. For them, the republican structure was not a contingent human preference or a mask for class interest. It was the institutional form that best enabled free moral agents to participate in that higher order through virtue, duty, and association.

Modern critiques associated with progressive historiography, critical theory, and Marxist analysis rarely refute this claim on its own terms. Instead, they typically perform three related moves.

Firstly, the historical moral indictment of the persons and founding moment. Emphasis is placed on Washington’s ownership of enslaved people, the exclusion of women and non-property owners from the franchise, the economic interests of the founding generation, and the persistence of hierarchy. Mazzini is less frequently targeted, but when he is, attention turns to the nationalism, gendered language, or religious framing of his thought. These facts are real and serious. They demonstrate that the historical instantiation of the republican form fell far short of its own stated ideals. They do not, however, engage the philosophical content of the ideal itself.

Showing that the early American republic was riddled with injustice does not refute the claim that a political order grounded in virtue under PROVIDENCE or association under a divine Law of Progress is the form most congruent with human moral agency.

Second, reduce every transcendental claim to ideology. A common analytical step is to treat appeals to Providence, “eternal rules of order and right,” or “synthesis as divine” as post-hoc rationalizations of power. On this view, transcendental language functions to naturalize the interests of a particular class, race, or gender. This is a coherent materialist position, but it is not a refutation. It is a competing ontology. Washington and Mazzini explicitly rejected the premise that the only real forces are material or power-relational. They held that moral law and historical purpose are prior to, and normative for, economic and political arrangements. To dismiss their transcendental claims as ideology is simply to reassert the materialist premise they denied. It begs the question rather than answering it.

Third, leap from historical failure to systemic abolition. Once the founding is painted as constitutively corrupt, the conclusion is treated as obvious: the entire constitutional form must be replaced by socialism, Marxism, or some variant of collectivist reorganization.

Once the founding is portrayed as constitutively tainted, the practical conclusion frequently drawn is that the entire constitutional and institutional architecture must be transcended in favor of forms oriented toward substantive equality of outcome, collective ownership, or the dissolution of national particularity. One can acknowledge every documented failure of the early American republic and still hold that a political form ordered toward virtue, limited power, and moral agency under a higher law remains superior to forms that concentrate power in the name of historical necessity or class destiny. The move from “the founders were deeply flawed” to “therefore replace the republican form” requires an independent normative argument about the nature of justice and political order. That argument is rarely supplied; the moral horror of the past is treated as sufficient warrant.

In short, these critiques are often effective as moral history and as political mobilization. The result is not refutation. It is rhetorical displacement. The original claim concerned the structure of moral and historical reality. The critique answers with biography, genealogy, and a demand for regime change. That may be effective politics, but it is weak philosophy. They do not show that the structure of moral reality is otherwise than Washington and Mazzini claimed; but they show that historical actors failed to live up to the structure they invoked.

A serious opponent would have to meet Washington and Mazzini on the ground they actually occupied: Does history have a teleology that political forms can either serve or obstruct? Does human flourishing require institutions that cultivate virtue and free association rather than merely redistribute material goods or dissolve particular identities? Does free association under law better enable human beings to participate in that order than forms that subordinate the person to historical necessity or class destiny? Those questions are left untouched. Most contemporary critiques decline that engagement. They change the subject from the nature of the ideal to the sins of its early proponents and then treat the change of subject as victory.

The republican tradition, as articulated by Mazzini rests on a simple, enduring claim: human beings are moral agents ordered toward a reality higher than power or material interest. Political forms succeed when they cultivate virtue, free association, and responsibility under that higher order; and they fail when they treat persons as mere instruments of class, history, or economic force.

Materialist politics denies this. It reduces the citizen to a unit of production or a vector of power, and the state to a mechanism for redistribution or control. In doing so it severs politics from the very capacities that make self-government possible. The spiritual ideal of the republican form refuses that reduction. It insists that liberty without moral order collapses into license or domination, and that no amount of material equality can compensate for the loss of the person as a responsible agent under a law not of his own making.

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REFERENCES AND NOTES FOR FURTHER READING

This essay draws on a body of scholarship that has, in recent decades, fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the transatlantic connections between Italian republicanism, American abolitionism, and the global struggle for democratic governance.

• Enrico Dal Lago, William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini: Abolition, Democracy, and Radical Reform (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). The foundational comparative study of Garrison and Mazzini, documenting their parallel careers, their personal meetings, and the structural connections between American abolitionism and Italian democratic nationalism.
• Axel Körner, America in Italy: The United States in the Political Thought and Imagination of the Risorgimento, 1763-1865 (Princeton University Press, 2017). A key study of how Italians perceived, debated, and critiqued the American republic, with particular attention to the role of theater, ballet, and the press in shaping public opinion about American slavery. Körner’s earlier article, “Uncle Tom on the Ballet Stage: Italy’s Barbarous America, 1850-1900” (The Journal of Modern History, 2011), provides the detailed case study of Rota’s Bianchi e Neri.
• Timothy M. Roberts, “The Relevance of Giuseppe Mazzini’s Ideas of Insurgency to the American Slavery Crisis of the 1850s,” in C. A. Bayly and E. F. Biagini, eds., Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism, 1830-1920 (Oxford University Press / British Academy, 2008). A revelatory study of Mazzini’s direct influence on John Brown and the ideology of insurrectionary abolitionism.
• Richard Bourne, Garibaldi in South America: An Exploration (Oxford University Press / Hurst, 2020). A vivid account of Garibaldi’s formative years in Brazil and Uruguay, connecting his South American experience to the later campaigns for Italian unification.
• George Washington, First Inaugural Address, 30 April 1789, National Archives.
• Giuseppe Mazzini, An Essay on the Duties of Man, Addressed to Workingmen (composed 1844-1858). The primary text of Mazzinian political philosophy.
• Giuseppe Mazzini, Royalty and Republicanism in Italy: Or, Notes and Documents Relating to the Lombard Insurrection, and to the Royal War of 1848, London: C. Gilpin, 1850.
• Federico Ferretti, Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796-1900 (Springer, 2022). Includes essential analysis of Cattaneo’s federalist thought and its relationship to debates over American political structure.
• Samantha Wilson, The Fragmented Republicanism of Nineteenth-Century Italy (c. 1830s-1880s) (Doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2025). A comprehensive recent study of the spectrum of Italian republican thought, encompassing Mazzini, Cattaneo, De Sanctis, Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, and Villari.
• Paola Gemme, “Domesticating Foreign Struggles: American Narratives of Italian Revolutions and the Debate on Slavery in the Antebellum Era,” Prospects (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Essential on Margaret Fuller’s dispatches and the American reception of Italian revolutionary events.
• Joseph Rossi, “Carlo Cattaneo and the United States of America,” Italica 26, no. 1 (1949).
• The writings of Margaret Fuller, especially her dispatches from Rome for the New-York Daily Tribune (1847-1850), remain among the most powerful firsthand accounts of the convergence between the Italian revolutionary movement and the American antislavery conscience.