Reporting on the Roman revolution of 1848 as the foreign correspondent of theNew-York Daily Tribune, Margaret Fuller observed that Americans used the same arguments against the political emancipation of Italy that they employed against the social emancipation of blacks in the United States. “Americans in Italy,” she wrote, “talk about the corrupt and degenerate state of Italy as they do about that of our slaves at home.” “They come ready trained,” she explained, “to that mode of reasoning which affirms that, because men are degraded by bad institutions, they are not fit for better.” This essay builds upon Fuller's comment. It examines American accounts of the Italians' mid-19th-century struggle to free their country from its colonial bond to the Austrian empire and substitute local absolutist monarchies with more enlightened forms of government, and demonstrates that the discourse on revolutionary Italy became the site of a reenactment on foreign grounds of the domestic controversy over slavery. The discussion on whether Italians could become republican subjects was liable to become a mediated debate over emancipation and the future of the African bondsmen in the American republic because of the alleged similarities, both historical and “racial,” between the populations of Italy and blacks in antebellum America. Like the slaves in the United States, Italians had been subjected to brutal despotism for centuries, which, within the 19th-century environmental conception of political virtue, was believed to have negatively affected their aptitude for freedom. Like the black slaves, moreover, Italians were placed by racist ideology outside the pale of the dominant Anglo-Saxon racial category, a political as well as a “biological” class marked by the exclusive capacity for self-government.
