Jefferson Davis, Napoleonic France, and the Nature of Confederate Ideology, 1815-1870 by Jeffrey Zvengrowski

Author:Jeffrey Zvengrowski [Zvengrowski, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807170670
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Published: 2020-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

10

JEFFERSON DAVIS’S ANTI-BRITISH AND PRO-BONAPARTE CONFEDERACY

[T]here is a degree of something like ferocity in the Southern mind towards New England which exceeds belief. I am persuaded that these feelings of contempt are extended toward England.

—WILLIAM H. RUSSELL, 1861

Knowing that Britain had organized coalitions of the Left and Right against the French emperors, Jefferson Davis and his supporters assumed that the anti-Bonaparte forces of the Left and Right arrayed against the pro-Bonaparte Confederacy were impelled by the British, who would naturally support their Republican abolitionist proxies. Harper’s Weekly, after all, printed the pro-Garibaldi and anti-Napoleon III British Punch political cartoon Garibaldi to the Rescue in 1860, and Julius P. Garesché threatened to resign in 1861 after the anticlerical Italian racial egalitarian received an offer to become a U.S. major general.1 Garibaldi insisted upon commanding all Union forces in order to free and enfranchise every slave in North America, but Confederate newspapers reported in 1863 that Republicans had again “prostrate[d] themselves at the feet of the Italian Garibaldi,” who “is now just able to walk upon crutches, and intends to visit England as soon as practicable.”2

Quite a few of Garibaldi’s officers did serve the Union, though, and they congregated around General Frémont. Captain Gustave Paul Cluseret, for instance, supported the French Left and detested President Bonaparte, who demoted him. Cluseret subsequently resigned his commission in the French army to join Garibaldi. Volunteering for U.S. service in 1861, Cluseret served under Frémont, edited the pro-Republican New Nation abolitionist newspaper, and rose to the rank of brigadier general in 1862.

Left-leaning German, Hungarian, and Italian immigrants also wore Garibaldi-style red shirts serving in the 39th New York Infantry. The “Garibaldi

Guard” spent most of the war guarding the U.S. capital, but they did fight under Major General Julius H. Stahel, a German-speaking Hungarian immigrant and former Garibaldi officer who inflicted, in the words of “Black Dave’s” adjutant, “wanton outrages and injuries” upon Confederate civilians that unsettled even General Hunter.3 Having made their abolitionism known in 1861 by requesting that blacks be allowed to enlist with them, the Garibaldi Guard would lose over three hundred members to combat, disease, and egregious treatment in Confederate prison camps.4

The Davis administration, in contrast, hindered New Orleans Italian immigrants who tried to form a Confederate Garibaldi Legion, the sole company of which would be disbanded in 1862.5 The New York Times, moreover, reported in September that Adolphus H. Adler, a Richmond Hungarian immigrant and Confederate defector who had “gallantly served under GARIBALDI,” became a Confederate colonel of engineers in 1861 merely to allay suspicions of abolitionism, but he was still sent to a “Negro Jail” after he resigned.6 Joseph Bixio, however, had become estranged in Italy from his brother, who was one of Garibaldi’s top subordinates. A Catholic priest in Virginia who had served French troops as a Piedmont-Sardinia chaplain in 1859, Bixio befriended Father Gache in 1861 and helped the Confederacy as an unofficial chaplain, medic, and spy. He even directed an entire U.S. wagon train into Confederate lines by

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