The Specter of Confederate Secession in Early Post-Unification Italy

Abstract

In the early days of June 1861, Count Camillo Cavour, the first prime minister of unified Italy, and former prime minister of the Piedmontese Kingdom of Sardinia, was on his deathbed with high fever. For the previous ten years, Cavour had been the driving political and diplomatic force behind the movement that had led to Italian national unification and that had resulted in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in March 1861.1 In those last days of his life, Cavour gave advice to his successors about maintaining the authority of the Italian government over the whole peninsula and not treating the population of southern Italy too harshly. The latter was the territory that Giuseppe Garibaldi had conquered in 1860, leading to the annexation of the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the north-based Kingdom of Sardinia in the process of Italian national unification.2 Cavour feared the possibility of an Italian civil war starting from the southern part of the country (or the Mezzogiorno) and in all likelihood reflected on the sequence of events that was unfolding in the United States. Significantly, he commented on the news of an imminent American Civil War in a somewhat pessimistic tone, noting that, “while the thrust to unification takes hold of Europe, America is about to divide itself.”3 Effectively, with this particular observation, Cavour compared and contrasted the seemingly opposite processes of national unification in Italy—which he optimistically saw as leading the way to other national unifications, such as the one that would take place in Germany only a few years later—and national division in the United States, implicitly posing the question of whether the breakup of the Union could serve as a cautionary tale for Italy and for the future unified countries of Europe.