On June 24, 1859, a combined French and Italian (Sardinian) army defeated the Austrian Emperor at the Battle of Solferino in present-day Lombardy, Italy. The battle effectively ended the Second Italian War of Independence—sometimes called the Austro-Sardinian War—resulting in the small kingdom of Sardinia gaining primacy among the Italian states and ultimately uniting the entire peninsula under the Kingdom of Italy two year later in 1861. To us in 2024, The Battle of Solferino appears as a relic. It was the last major battle in the West where every army was commanded personally by a monarch: Napoleon III, Victor Emmanuel II, and Franz Joseph I for the French, Sardinians and Austrians, respectively.
And yet, though a seemingly far-flung conflict, American Christians in the 19th century passionately followed nationalist movements in Europe like Italy’s. The struggle of the Italians against the Old World feudalism of the Hapsburg Empire was perceived as analogous to America’s own struggle for republican self-government over the British Empire. In this global struggle between the forces of national self-determination and imperialism, Italy was not so different from America.
Many Americans, like the inventor of the telegraph Samuel Morse, even feared that Austrian agents would infiltrate the US, imperiling American civil and religious liberties. Morse’s concerns were certainly overblown, yet he was not wrong to fear certain aspects of the Old World crossing the Atlantic. Like most Early Republic Americans, Morse saw the Protestantism of Luther’s Reformation, English Whig theory, and the Puritans as essential to the development of broad civil liberties and religious freedom. Morse argued that Austria, as the enemy of both,
“is one of that Holy Alliance of despotic governments, one of the ‘union of Christian princes,’ leagued against the liberties of the people of Europe. Austria is one of the partitioners of Poland; the enslaver and despot of Italy.” The Austrian government was “the most thorough military despotism in the world.” The Hapsburgs were “the declared and consistent enemy of civil and religious liberty; of the freedom of the press; in short, of every great principle in those free institutions which it is our glory and privilege to inherit from our fathers.” Austria, had from Reformation “to the present time, been the bitter enemy of Protestantism” which Morse believed led to the “very principles of civil and religious liberty which lie at the foundation of our government, and had Austria then triumphed, this republic would never have been founded.”
Morse was hardly alone in his assessment of the Austrian Empire, and most mid-19th century Americans viewed the Hapsburg Emperors as enemies of the liberal and representative government created by the Founders. Both the free North and the slaveholding South, despite massive social and economic differences, upheld what can accurately be described as a liberal republican order before the American Civil War. Hillsdale College politics professor Tom West noted in his Vindicating the Founders that the generation who fought the Revolutionary War and created the constitutional republic of 1789 were “sincere in their profession of the rights of humanity and their commitment to popular government.” George Washington, West argues, was right “to call his political convictions ‘liberal.’” The liberal republican order the founders created was neither socially liberal nor progressive in the modern senses of the terms, but it was politically liberal in that it granted broad individual rights, economic liberty, minority rights, and freedom of conscience in a way that was revolutionary in the late 18th century. It was also effective. The American Revolution, West posits, “clearly improved conditions for blacks, women, and the poor.”
American liberals in the nineteenth century weren’t libertarians, nor were they agnostic on the relationship between the state, order, and liberty. But they did believe the state should be limited, and that it could not and should not exercise coercive authority on matters of conscience. Nations were good, so long as they gave their people true freedom. In the nineteenth century, therefore, Americans were supportive of nationalist movements precisely because nationalists of the mid-nineteenth century were more committed to liberal freedoms than the conservative monarchies they fought against.
A New York City Episcopal priest, Henry Bellows, argued in 1861 that the sentiment of nationalism was “essential to the life and glory of the State” because the contemporary “progress of the world” had been “laid in the development of this self-consciousness in peoples.” Great States had, Bellows exulted, “become more and more humane, Christian, free.” As national spirits and tempers and constitutions and laws partook “more and more of what we love and admire in great Christian characters, the Son of Man has come in them, with great power and glory.” Even so, despite its positive attributes, Old World nationalism “always and under all circumstances beautiful and glorious–has been more or less in rivalry with civil liberty.” Governments which represented and externalized “the national life and spirit, have yet been commonly made strong at the expense of the rights and independence of the people.”
And yet, despite the tendency of some forms of nationalism to grow at the expense of civil liberty, Bellows recognized that on some level a “noble instinct” draws all humans to some type of nationalistic thinking. People, he argued,
“will consent to a great loss of personal liberty, for the sake of national dignity and power. They gladly merge their private rights and privileges in the majesty of the State, and the loyalty found under despotic governments, which are yet true to themselves, is an affecting tribute to the love and pride of country which sweetens even the wrongs and sufferings of the over-governed and over-taxed.” The “proud loyalty” of Britons to the United Kingdom, “where such a steady advance in popular rights is always making, does not surprise us. But it is equally true of France, which perhaps even more than England beats with a national pulse and pride, although her government is a usurpation and her emperor a despot. But he has the skill to make France great, feared, loved, he is true to her national instincts and aspirations, and her people postpone their private rights and longings, to the glory of France.”
Bellows called the national movements of the 1860s—particularly those in Italy—sublime because nationalism represented liberation: “In Italy, where a common language and blood, common hopes and fears and interests, are forcing one circulation through all its lately manacled and paralytic limbs; and a central heart, true to generous ideas and human rights, now sends for the first time for fifteen hundred years, lawful pulsations from the Alps to the Ionian Sea.”
Americans like Bellow, understandably, celebrated Italian nationalism and the victory of the Sardinian monarch and his French ally at Solferino because Italian nationalism was oriented towards liberal freedoms. The same liberal nationalism defined and justified Abraham Lincoln in his prosecution of the United States Civil War. Northerners, notes former University of Virginia history professor Gary Gallagher in The Union War, saw the Confederacy as a clique of pseudo-European reactionary aristocrats bent on making common cause with the monarchs and nobles of Europe to roll back liberal freedoms. The victory of Italy at Solferino was a victory of liberal nationalism; so too was the United States’ triumph at Appomattox. Penn State history professor emeritus Mark Neely wrote in Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation that nationalism in the 1860s was not a “near-pathology” but instead an ideology that interacted with religion, liberal freedoms, and that even led to the Emancipation Proclamation. “We cannot,” writes Neely, “be haunted by the specter of pathological nationalism if we are to understand the role of nationalism in the constitutional history of the Civil War.” Solferino and Appomattox were undoubtedly nationalist victories. They were also liberal ones.
