Acknowledgments

I wish to thank for their valuable comments Steven Hahn, Rick Halpern, and an anonymous reader for CSSH.

To date, only a handful of scholars, most notably C.L.R. James and Eugene Genovese, have seen slave rebellions and peasant revolts as having anything in common.¹

The crux of the matter lies in whether slave resistance and peasant resistance can be analyzed as instances of class conflict. The two cases have long histories in the American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno. Arguably, these histories reached their culmination in the years 1861–1865, when both regions underwent momentous social and economic transformations in the midst of civil wars. During those years, the American Civil War and the southern Italian brigandage³

We cannot underestimate the revolutionary significance of the slaves' contribution in bringing about their own emancipation through constant acts of rebellion, and their willingness to enlist in the Union Army to fight their former masters. Their revolutionary pursuits during the Civil War built upon a long tradition of resistance. They grew out of relations of mutual solidarity and kinship networks, established within the boundaries of the slave community, which formed the bases for informal political activity. During the Civil War, this tradition of resistance and informal political activity lay behind several instances of rebellion by slaves turning into freedmen. Then, soon after Emancipation, as Steven Hahn has shown, “freed African Americans built their political communities—as enslaved African Americans had done—from many of the basic materials of everyday life,” such as kinship, labor, tradition, and religion.⁴

Yet, during the Civil War, even before Emancipation reached them, African American political communities were instrumental in organizing a variety of rebellious acts and in completely disrupting the slave system in several areas of the Confederate South. Though research on these activities remains scanty, I will argue here that these instances of rebellion, though they would have been impossible without political and military help from the Union, contained within themselves the seeds of class consciousness among an African American landless peasantry in formation.⁵

On the other hand, the revolutionary significance of the brigandage in southern Italy during the 1860s showed itself in the large participation of peasants in acts of guerrilla warfare against an Italian army that mostly protected the landlords. Their aim was to destroy or requisition private property. According to Franco Della Peruta, during the 1860s rural unrest here was clearly a “large phenomenon of class struggle . . . a large scale peasant guerrilla war,” expressing through violence the hatred that the southern Italian rural masses felt toward both the proprietors' usurpation of common land and the Italian government's heavy taxation and draft enforcement.⁶

The Italian government responded not by intervening to extirpate the social causes of the unrest but rather with systematic and ruthless repression. In contrast to the Union's support for slaves' emancipation in the American South, the peasant revolt in the Mezzogiorno was crushed from the start by the state's powerful political and military apparatus. In the latter case, I argue, the collective rebellion of the agrarian laborers against their landlords was the last in a series of attempts by the southern Italian rural masses to achieve the status of a landed peasantry.

My aim here is to employ sustained comparative analysis to illuminate the processes through which two agrarian proletariats formed during the 1860s, during the American Civil War and the southern Italian brigandage. Both were pivotal episodes in the histories and experiences of the rural working classes of the two regions. There is one fundamental difference, though, between these two case studies: by focusing on African Americans, I deliberately exclude the white farmers who formed the majority of the working class in the American South. In contrast, southern Italian peasants were not divided along racial lines, and they formed the overwhelming majority of the working class in the Italian Mezzogiorno. In the antebellum American South, though many white farmers were tenants and landless, the majority did own land. We cannot say the same for the respectable minority of four million African Americans, who, after being enslaved and racially exploited by both planters and farmers, formed after emancipation a mostly landless class. Conversely, unlike the white American farmers, only a small percentage of peasants owned land in the Italian Mezzogiorno. Instead, like emancipated African Americans, southern Italian peasants formed a legally free but mostly landless class of tenants and sharecroppers. But unlike the African Americans, they made up the majority of the population.

Another equally important difference distinguishes the two case studies: shortly after the Union's victory in the Civil War guaranteed their legal emancipation, African Americans were granted civil and political rights. Especially during the period of Congressional Reconstruction (1866–1868), African Americans were able through their alliance with Radical Republicans to influence decisively the shape of southern politics with their votes and their participation in state constitutional conventions. Enfranchisement, together with the provisions of the 1867 Reconstruction Acts, paved the way for the spread of clubs and associations—the most prominent being the Union League—that were part of what Steven Hahn has called “a formal process of politicization.” This process built directly on the informal political activities and networks consolidated during slavery.⁸

Conversely, most southern Italian peasants, though legally emancipated, remained disenfranchised until the Italian parliament passed the laws of 1912 and 1913 on universal male suffrage. Though, much like African American slaves, they were able to build informal political networks, their influence on local and national politics in the Mezzogiorno was important only during episodes of rural unrest. In times of crisis, such as during the 1820 and 1848 revolutions and again in 1860, southern Italian peasants staged their political protests by occupying land in the countryside and threatening general insurrection. Particularly in the last two instances, the threat they posed assumed a clear political character due to the possibility that the rebels might ally themselves with the leaders of the Democratic Party, a political movement committed to radical and republican principles, with local branches throughout the Italian peninsula. After 1862, however, this possibility gradually waned.⁹

Though in the United States the experiment of democratizing southern politics ended with the demise of Congressional Reconstruction, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution provided a basis for formal African American political activity. This had no parallel in the peasants' situation in the Mezzogiorno. This radical divergence in political paths had incalculable consequences for African American and southern Italian rural workers, particularly in terms of class formation and consciousness. Nevertheless, at the time of the American Civil War and the southern Italian brigandage, our focus here, the working classes of these two areas had much in common; both were disenfranchised and excluded from the formal political process.

At the heart of my interpretation is E. P. Thompson's idea that “class” can only be defined in relation with other classes, through action and reaction, change and conflict. According to Thompson, “when we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions, and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways.”¹⁰

Clearly, the landless laborers who formed the agrarian working classes of the American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno were very different from the urban proletariats that have long been the privileged object of most labor history studies. Nonetheless, there are clear and important connections between the former and the latter. Among these, the most important relates to the historical phenomenon of migration. Between the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, masses of rural laborers from both the American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno migrated to the large, industrialized cities of the northern United States, where they effectively became part of the urban proletariat. If we take these two roughly contemporaneous migrations as a terminus post quem for the transformation of the agrarian working classes of the American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno into fully formed urban proletariats, then we may consider the period preceding the two historical phenomena as one of gradual proletarianization of the agricultural workforces in both regions. We can clearly locate the prehistory of this process in the 1860s, since during that decade the legal—though not economic—emancipation of the African American working class in the American South and the defeat of the peasant struggle for economic emancipation in the Italian Mezzogiorno both had the effect of creating classes of mostly landless laborers, the first step toward proletarianization.

In both regions, within the boundaries of this process of working-class formation, the crucial agents were laborers on one side and the state on the other. The importance of the action of the state in defining, in the words of Ira Katznelson, “who gets to be a citizen, how they participate, what interests they represent, what categories of social action are recognized as legitimate,” and the weight these “transactions” have on the process of working-class formation, are undeniable. Katznelson believes that these “transactions” are strictly related to “the most important contests about the grammar of liberalism,” an ideology that, significantly, was dominant among the ruling classes of both the Union government in the United States and the Right governments in Italy during the 1860s.¹²

The crucial role of the state in shaping the boundaries within which the process of working-class formation could take place was particularly evident in our two case studies. Ultimately, the outcomes of the two events were very similar, since in both cases the state was instrumental in the defeat of the demands for land reform coming from below. Yet, equally important for the future of working-class formation in the two regions were the initially different attitudes of the two governments toward the revolutionary struggles of the southern rural masses. The American government's support for legal—though not economic—emancipation has conditioned all the subsequent history of the African American working class in the American South; similarly, the Italian government's decision to brutally repress the peasant revolt has conditioned all the subsequent history of the southern Italian working class. To Antonio Gramsci, the Italian state's use of “domination” through coercion, rather than “hegemony,” in dealing with the masses, was a result of the rather weak power and influence of the Italian bourgeoisie.¹³

Slaves and Peasants in American and Italian Historiographies

The works by Marxist scholars such as Eugene Genovese, David Roediger, and John Ashworth, to mention but a few, are crucial to any understanding of the slave South as a society characterized by conflict between a master class and an enslaved working class.¹⁴

In absolute terms, it is true that the number of African American landowners increased significantly in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. Yet, it is also true that, in the words of Roger Ransom, throughout the South ex-slaveholders and “landowners were able to deny black landownership of farms through a combination of social pressure or, when necessary, outright coercion.”¹⁷

The above point has been the focus of studies written by several scholars, including Jonathan Wiener, Michael Wayne, Eric Foner, and more recently Laura Edwards. They have argued that, after the Civil War, planters retained control of the plantations and continued to exploit the freedpeople through labor obligations and contractual practices.²¹

Like the American South, the historiography of the Italian Mezzogiorno has produced key studies by Marxist scholars, among them Emilio Sereni, Pasquale Villani, and Aurelio Lepre, all followers of Gramsci's thought.²⁴

Early Marxist studies have analyzed brigandage in the 1860s' Mezzogiorno as part of a long history of class conflict focused on the struggle between the landless peasantry and the landed proprietors over land ownership and the enclosure of common land. Marxist scholars such as Franco Molfese, Maria Grazia Cutrufelli, and Tommaso Pedio²⁶

Though both points are well taken, I believe that there is still much to be said for the Marxist explanation of the 1860s' brigandage in the Mezzogiorno. No scholar could deny that the greatest numbers of the southern Italian rural working class were landless peasants and day laborers (braccianti). It should come as no surprise, then, that the hunger for land, displayed in numerous previous insurrections, played a large or even determinant part in the 1860s' rural unrest. Several sources indicate this, especially those of officials and militaries who belonged to the Italian government.²⁹

Both the southern Italian brigandage—or rather “civil war”—and the American Civil War, which was largely fought on southern soil, aimed to transform social relations in the countryside, but neither resulted in land reform. At the heart of these two civil wars lay two very similar agrarian issues. In the American South, slaves made clear from the war's beginning that for them the issue of legal emancipation was inextricably tied to that of economic emancipation through land ownership. Nevertheless, because the bulk of the rural workforce was enslaved, the agrarian question focused first and foremost on its legal emancipation.³³

It was this intense desire that led hundreds of African American families to seize abandoned southern plantations from the beginning of the Civil War. Yet, unlike what happened in the Italian Mezzogiorno, this occupation was peaceful, despite its occurring in the middle of a war. With their masters gone to fight, African American slaves took the chance to assert in a spontaneous movement their rights over what they considered as their own land. Southern Italian peasants, by contrast, fought bitterly against the landlords and instigated a guerrilla war through which they attempted to assert their rights over land that they, too, considered their own. In the American South, despite the Union's support for emancipation, there remained much potential for conflict between the now free slaves occupying former plantations and the army, which had no intention of yielding to their claims. This situation might have generated a peasant-style guerrilla war like that in southern Italy had not the Union Army disarmed black soldiers at war's end. Comparing the two cases illuminates the reasons why confrontation between the freedpeople and the Union Army did not occur, and yields a novel perspective on this still little known episode in the story of African American emancipation. A close comparative analysis of the two “civil wars” can reveal a possible explanation for the different behaviors of the African American and the southern Italian working classes regarding land occupation.

Although the behaviors of rural workers in the two regions differed in this important respect, the ultimate outcome of their actions had much in common. In both cases, the failure of the national governments and their military arms to address the crucial issues related to the agrarian questions perpetuated similar conditions of dependency: in both places, laborers remained dependent upon their landlords, and this prevented the formation of workers' movements well into the twentieth century. In the long-term, this dependency, and the fact that it was impossible to escape it, became crucial factors behind the migration of masses of African American and southern Italian peasants to the industrialized cities of the northern United States. There, both groups became part of the urban proletariat.

Civil War and Rural Unrest

The year 1861 saw the birth of two nations: the Confederate States of America and the Kingdom of Italy. The Confederate nation was born out of the movement that led eleven states to secede from the American Union in order to preserve the institution of slavery and uphold the right to self-government without external interference. The Italian nation emerged from a politico-military operation that had led to the unification of the country under the Piedmontese House of Savoy, and to the overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty in the South. The two opposite movements—for secession in America and unification in Italy—produced two new political entities aspiring to the title of “nations.” But they were hardly in a position to be granted legitimacy in the international arena. For international diplomats, the only political institution recognized in America was the Union government, according to which the secession of the Confederacy was a rebellion to subdue. Likewise, the overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty, perpetrated by the Piedmontese army with no formal declaration of war, cast a long shadow over the legitimacy of the newly born Kingdom of Italy.³⁴

As a result of their less than legitimate pedigrees, the two nations had to fight against the very institutions that they had dissolved. In the United States, the government led by Abraham Lincoln threw all its might into a war, the only declared aims of which in 1861 were the subjugation of the rebel Confederate states and the preservation—or rather reconstitution—of the Union. In Italy, the exiled Bourbon king Francis II encouraged and coordinated the guerrilla operations of an undeclared war against the Piedmontese occupation of the South, and aimed to restore the legitimate dynasty on the Neapolitan throne.³⁵

Slaves and peasants were of secondary concern to the two contending forces, but their actions and decisions nonetheless determined the course of the two wars. Both slaves and peasants recognized the revolutionary potential of the wars, and each reacted by joining the side that they believed would help them attain their goals. From the very start of the American Civil War, slaves sympathized with the Union, knowing that its victory would be one against the slaveholders' government, and therefore against slavery. Southern Italian peasants joined the movement for the restoration of the Bourbons, believing that its victory would be one against the liberal Italian government, and therefore against the liberal landed proprietors who most oppressed them.

From the beginning of the American Civil War, slaves tried to place the issue of emancipation at the heart of the conflict. Even though the Confederacy had proclaimed slavery as its cornerstone, the slave system became increasingly disrupted when hundreds of masters went away to fight and left plantations and farms in the hands of overseers and mistresses. For many slaves, this departure of the most powerful authorities from their daily lives was a sign of changing times and new opportunities. Many took their chances and fled, especially in the areas bordering the Union such as Virginia and North Carolina, and in those areas where the Union Army made its first territorial gains, such as the Sea Islands of South Carolina which were occupied as early as November 1861. Other slaves were impressed by the Confederate army, either forced to follow their masters in the war or hired as military laborers alongside free blacks. During movements of the Confederate army, the slaves' opportunities to escape increased markedly, and many managed to cross the Union lines.³⁷

However, as the Union advanced, the majority of the masters fled with their slaves and relocated in other regions, a practice they called “refugeeing.” According to Emory Thomas, this practice had deeply unsettling results, mainly because it destroyed African American communities and the authority of masters was diminished in their flights.³⁸

Most slaves lived deep inside Confederate territory, and had few chances to escape; as the war progressed, they turned increasingly against their masters and overseers in what was their largest collective show of resistance. As Peter Kolchin has written, throughout the Confederacy slaves “worked less, questioned more, and increasingly took to running away, not only singly or in pairs, as had been common before the war, but in large groups as well.”⁴¹

From the outset, it was clear that the slaves' definition of freedom included economic independence, while that of the Union government did not. Early in the war, where Union forces appeared and the masters fled, slaves often occupied abandoned plantations and farms, thereby asserting their right to the land on which they had worked. In Louisiana's New Orleans district, occupied by the Union since 1862, slaves were paid for their work; yet, in 1863, Union military commander Nathaniel P. Banks issued orders forbidding them to leave the plantations, and he used the army to restore discipline under a system that Eric Foner has termed “compulsory free labor.” In South Carolina's Sea Islands, slaves were given wages for the completion of daily tasks under a system of free plantation labor. Both labor systems revived the former plantation economy, albeit with wages, and neither offered much possibility that slaves would acquire land or become landowners.⁴⁴

Nonetheless, wherever the slave system was disrupted, slaves showed that they saw their freedom not as an abstract legal concept or a simple transition to wage labor, but rather as an economic and social emancipation. This was a step that Union officers were clearly not prepared to allow. As early as 1862, in the Sea Islands, absent proprietors were dispossessed under the Direct Tax Act.⁴⁵

Similarly, in the Mezzogiorno, the events that led to the unification of Italy showed that the economic emancipation of the peasantry was not on the agenda of the Piedmontese-based Italian government. Largely for this reason, rural disturbances began in the South even before the Kingdom of Italy had been proclaimed. Early in 1860, Garibaldi had overthrown Bourbon power throughout the South and had been hailed as liberator by the peasants who had fought by his side in the conviction that they would be compensated with land redistribution. However, Garibaldi's dictatorship in the Mezzogiorno showed no intention of proceeding in that direction. Indeed, the process of Unification was the result of an alliance between his forces and southern Italy's liberal landowners. The latter opposed the Bourbons' reactionary politics, yet desired the freedom to exploit the peasantry. Soon after Garibaldi had successfully completed his expedition, a plebiscite held in the former territory of the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies sanctioned the people's wish to join the Piedmontese monarchy. In the continental Mezzogiorno, the plebiscite recorded more than 1,000,000 in favor of the annexation and only a few thousands against it, and this result had much to do with irregular procedures and pressures by liberal politicians and their allies upon the local population. Not surprisingly, by the summer of 1860 uprisings were spreading throughout the southern regions of Apulia and Basilicata, directed against the liberal landowners, or galantuomini, and in favor of the restoration of the Bourbons. Similar unrest continued throughout the autumn, when the Piedmontese forces crushed the rebels.⁴⁹

However, it was the surrender of the Bourbon King Francis II at Gaeta in February 1861 that marked the beginning of the southern Italian “civil war.” The increased taxation brought by the new Kingdom of Italy, proclaimed in March, together with the demobilization of the Bourbon army and the forced conscription in the Italian army, forced many peasants to flee to the mountains and resist the policy of the Italian government. Officer Giuseppe Bourelly wrote that, “the poor peasant [who was] exploited, unhappy, miserable, left without a tie to his native land, without affections, or feelings of gratitude for his landlord, was only waiting for a chance to rebel . . . brigandage was his best chance.”⁵⁰

The bands moved on horseback and used guerrilla tactics against the regu-lar Italian troops. The most famous mounted band was commanded by the legendary leader Carmine Donatelli, nicknamed “Crocco.” He was a skilled capobanda (band-chief) and a charismatic guerrilla leader, and in his memoirs Crocco tells of the misery of peasant life and the exploitation and oppression suffered by his family at the hands of the landowners. He became an outlaw and fought for Garibaldi, hoping for amnesty. But when Italian officers were sent to convict him, he joined the movement for the restoration of the Bourbons, though he retained few illusions. He wrote, “I saw how many injustices were committed, and the use of the whip, the cane, the swift executions, and the terrible punishments.” Soon after, Crocco abandoned the Bourbon cause and led his peasant followers into a guerrilla warfare that they would have fought for their own sake. In his own words, “the exploited poor answered: ‘also our time has come,’ and so it was that in many villages there started murders and depredations: the fruits of the civil war.”⁵²

Crocco and his followers had by August 1861 become an army of more than 1,500 men. They were far from isolated in their ideas about the true meaning of the revolt against the Italian government. From the outset, the peasants who participated in the struggle showed that they had their own agenda.⁵³

D'Azeglio's recommendations had come far too late. By this time, the Mezzogiorno's civil war had become a guerrilla war waged by southern Italian peasants to force the government to recognize their right to the lands usurped by liberal landowners. The Italian government had other designs, and launched a full-scale repression against the peasant guerrilla fighters. They had lost even the legitimacy of the fight for the restoration of the Bourbon king, and the government branded them “brigands” and pursued them as outlaws.⁵⁶

Class Struggle and the Agrarian Question

In both the American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno, class struggle reached its peak in 1863. By late 1862, the pressure brought upon the American government by the slaves' continuous acts of resistance and the prolonged carnage of war had led to a radical change in Lincoln's policy. There was a shift in the purpose of the war—from a fight for the Union to a war against slavery itself. The Emancipation Proclamation, effective on 1 January 1863, seemed to fulfill the revolutionary aims of African American slaves and gave thousands of their men the opportunity to enlist in the Union army and fight against their former masters. Yet, the agrarian question remained unresolved. Throughout 1864 and 1865, the last two years of the war, the Union government's often contradictory policy contributed to false expectations of land redistribution among the freedpeople. That they went unfulfilled anticipated the frustrations of the Reconstruction period.

Likewise in Italy, by late 1862 the pressure brought upon the army by the prolonged peasant guerrilla warfare in the Mezzogiorno, and the fear that the latter might be used by democratic leaders to provoke a political revolution, had produced a radical change in government policy. First, a state of siege was declared in 1862, and then the 1863 Pica Law authorized the suspension of civil liberties and the military rule of large areas of the Italian South. These actions showed that the Italian government was prepared to implement every possible means to frustrate the peasants' revolutionary aim of eliminating the power of the liberal proprietors who had expropriated the land. Thanks to the Pica Law's extraordinary measures, the army succeeded in crushing the rebellious peasant bands by implementing a regime of military terror during the period 1863–1865. Subsequent resistance was at most rather sporadic, even though most peasants continued to be landless and exploited by their landlords.

In America, by late 1862 the revolution begun by the slaves' acts of resistance was showing its effects. The Confederate government was exhausted from the prolonged battle, and the rising number of slaves fleeing to Union-occupied territory began to undermine the South's internal order. According to James Oakes “slaves did not organize guerrilla bands or slink into the homes of their former masters and slit their throats,” and yet “slave resistance had not only political but revolutionary significance.”⁵⁷

The Union government clearly had aims other than transforming slaves into peasants. While it helped slaves to achieve their revolutionary aim of freeing themselves and fighting against their masters, and provided for their legal emancipation and their enlistment in the Union army, it did not bring about the land redistribution the slaves considered inextricably linked to the very meaning of emancipation. Instead, as Thomas Holt has noted, Republican leaders actively worked to prevent freedpeople from withdrawing onto small plots of land and becoming subsistence farmers, as had happened in emancipated Jamaica a few decades earlier.⁵⁹

To be sure, the Union's route toward emancipation was elaborate, and it was largely determined by questions over the legal status and the use of the growing numbers of runaway slaves in Union camps. In August 1861, Congress passed the First Confiscation Act, which called for the seizure of all rebel property, including slaves. By this time, runaway slaves arriving in Union camps were declared “contrabands of war,” a term first applied by General Benjamin Butler in Virginia. In July 1862, the Second Confiscation Act clarified that all the fugitive slaves owned by Confederate masters were free and could be enlisted in the army or in the navy. Finally, in September 1862, Lincoln drafted the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and its final version was issued on 1 January 1863. Lincoln justified the Proclamation as a war measure, and it only freed the slaves in areas under Confederate control, but it did provide legal backing for their revolutionary struggle. Despite being cloaked in conservative terms, the Proclamation enhanced the revolutionary role of African American agency in the defeat of the Confederacy.⁶¹

After the Proclamation, thousands of ex-slaves enlisted in the Union army to fight against Confederate slaveholders and bring the entire slave system to an end. By war's end, more than 100,000 African Americans had served and made decisive contributions to Union victories. Though only a fraction of the 4,000,000 slaves served as soldiers, their very existence was seen by the master class as a dire threat. Right after the end of the war, “to men and women who had owned slaves, armed black men in positions of authority embodied the world turned upside down.”⁶²

The social revolution brought about by emancipation and the enlistment of African American soldiers could not have found a better expression in writing. Not only had slaves gained their freedom, they had managed through their active participation in the war to gain their right to stand on an equal footing with white soldiers in the struggle against their former masters. On one hand, emancipation and the subsequent battles fought in the Civil War by battalions of ex-slaves against Confederate slaveholders represented the culmination of a long history of class struggle in the American South.⁶⁴

Yet, slaves were not content with the simple achievement of legal emancipation; much like European peasants after the abolition of feudalism, they considered their freedom meaningless unless it was accompanied by provisions securing their economic independence. As Ira Berlin has written, the slaves' desire was “to secure not just any land but their land, meaning specifically the land that they and their forebears had worked and in the process made part of themselves.”⁶⁵

To be sure, the issues of seizure of slaveholders' property and its redistribution among ex-slaves were at the forefront of the arguments advanced by both Abolitionists and radical Republicans from the early phases of the war, while Lincoln opposed widespread confiscation.⁶⁷

Unfortunately, the assassination of Lincoln in April 1865 and the presidency of southern Democrat Andrew Johnson led to a reversal of policy. Almost immediately, Johnson blocked the Bureau's plan, granted presidential pardons to thousands of ex-slaveholders, and placed a three-year limit on the occupation of the land opened for settlement by Sherman's Special Field Order 15. After Johnson's amnesty proclamation of 29 May 1865, which restored federal property to southern white landowners, predictably, in several areas of the South the freedpeople resisted the federal authorities' attempts to dispossess them. In coastal South Carolina, where they had been given land to cultivate from the early years of the Civil War, they put up a particularly staunch resistance. In the Sea Island of Edisto, in October of the same year, repeated attempts by the leader of the Freedmen's Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, to resolve the crisis peacefully failed in face of the freedpeople's unconditional refusal to leave the place to the white planters.⁷⁰

Rumors continued to circulate among freedpeople about a general redistribution of land on Christmas 1865; this, in turn, gave origin to widespread fears among whites of a general insurrection of former slaves. These fears were deep-seated and had a long history behind them, and provocative rumors were spread by white supremacists to organize all sorts of repressive activities. But behind these fears lay a measure of truth. According to Vincent Harding, the freedpeople “not only were . . . passing resolutions and in some places physically guarding their new settlements against former white owners,” but also “they were ready to defend themselves: one report to President Johnson near the end of the year stated that ‘in one way or another they have procured great numbers of army muskets and revolvers.’”⁷²

In the end, the deadline of Christmas 1865 passed, the redistribution of land did not occur, and nothing else happened; the insurrection failed to materialize for reasons that are still the cause of speculation among historians.⁷⁵

What Delaney's example suggests is that, even if there was clear potential for a general African American insurrection in 1865, men like Delaney, who might have led a revolution, took an accommodationist stance. A possible explanation could be that, even though the freedpeople's desire for land was immense, they may have thought that the African American cause had achieved already a great deal with emancipation and that even more could be achieved by avoiding a head-on confrontation with the federal government, regardless of its shortcomings. The example of the southern Italian peasants, who remained disenfranchised, shows that they suffered a systematic repression carried out by both military and governmental authorities as a consequence of the “brigands' war.” By contrast, in the aftermath of the Civil War, African American men for a time gained full civil and political rights with the passing of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, gains they would no doubt have been denied had they engaged in a bloody insurrection.

Much as in the American South, in 1862 the conditions were ripe for social revolution in the Mezzogiorno. From the beginning of the year, the peasant guerrilla warfare had increased in intensity and become endemic in several regions. In the region of Capitanata alone, Member of Parliament Carlo De Cesare received reports of more than 800 mounted brigands who roamed freely in the countryside, destroying masserie and landed properties.⁷⁷

By far the most important political force that could have transformed this general frustration and disillusionment into an organized movement for revolutionary change were the democrats. Followers of Giuseppe Mazzini and Carlo Pisacane had been defeated by the moderate liberal forces in the process of unification of the country when Garibaldi had allowed King Victor Emmanuel II and the Piedmontese army to take control of the South. Piero Bevilacqua writes that, “the democratic elites . . . [were] in the Mezzogiorno the only forces with some legitimate tie with the popular strata [and] were defeated by the moderate political solution with which the unification of Italy was accomplished.”⁸⁰

In August of 1862, Garibaldi was still the heart and soul of the democratic movement. When he decided to remake his famous expedition across the South and recruit volunteers to reach Rome and capture it from the Pope, there was a real possibility that the majority of the southern population would rise in arms and follow him together with the democratic leadership of the country. In the words of Alfredo Capone, “the brigandage gave origin, throughout the territory of the southern provinces, to numerous and spread epicenters of armed insurrection, which threatened to provoke a general civil war whenever they found an efficient political leadership such as the one that the democrats were able to assume and exercise, if they had the chance.”⁸²

The Deputy Prefect of Nicastro, a small southern village on Garibaldi's way, remarked in August 1862 that, “if Garibaldi's volunteers managed to reach the continent, a general and simultaneous [mass] movement would occur here and it would be very difficult to arrest it.”⁸³

As it happened, Garibaldi's march was halted in Calabria by the Italian army. While the democrats enjoyed little success in convincing the southern masses to join them, disorganization and internecine divisions within the movement allowed local authorities to crush the rebellion before it really began. Nonetheless, the episode served as a pretext for the Italian government to declare a state of siege, which lasted until the end of 1862 and created the conditions for a military dictatorship in the South. Exceptional measures were taken, clearly intended to prevent any chance of possible social revolution, but government officers justified them as due to the emergency arising from the general recrudescence of brigandage in conjunction with Garibaldi's expedition. Using the military as its strong arm, the government ordered the army to repress peasant rebellion wherever it existed, and to make ample use of martial law. Despite this, at the beginning of 1863, peasant guerrilla activities were stronger than ever, prompting the new Chief of Police Silvio Spaventa to recommend to Prime Minister Marco Minghetti new legislation that would have given extraordinary powers to the military tribunals to judge both brigands and the manutengoli who aided them.

In August 1863, the Parliament passed the infamous Pica Law, according to which military tribunals were charged with judging and executing all the members of brigand bands and their accomplices who resisted the Italian army. Eight military tribunals were set up in the majority of the provinces of the continental Mezzogiorno, “encircling”—in the words of Roberto Martucci—“the provinces of the former Bourbon kingdom into a repressive web of draconian measures.”⁸⁵

Between 1863 and 1864, the military tribunals held 3,600 trials and judged more than 10,000 people who had been charged of brigand behavior; at least 6,000 of the 10,000 people judged were peasants, a clear indication that the agrarian working class was at the heart of the struggle. According to Franco Molfese, there is little doubt that class struggle was the central motive behind the “great brigandage”: “it should be enough to prove it the fact that almost all the capibanda, their seconds-in-command, the casualties, and the large majority of the tens of thousands of convicted [individuals] belonged to the ‘peasant class’ (that is the poorer part of the peasantry, with little or no land).”⁸⁸

At the beginning of the same year, 1863, in which the Pica Law was passed, a parliamentary commission traveled through all the areas of the Mezzogiorno that were infested by brigandage. Led by Left Member of Parliament Giuseppe Massari, the commission produced a report that perceptively analyzed and identified the causes of the peasant revolt that was taking place in most of the southern provinces. According to the Massari Commission's Report, brigandage was stronger where peasants were poorer; in certain regions of Apulia, where peasant insurgences were endemic, the commission noted that all of the land was in the hands of a few proprietors, while the peasants were reduced to starvation. The commission recommended the formation of a class of small proprietors in those areas of the South where landless peasants were in the majority and where there was the possibility of redistribution of government lands.⁸⁹

In the parliamentary debate that followed the presentation of the Massari Report, one member of the commission, Left MP Stefano Castagnola, remarked that “those people have true hunger for land . . . if you could make proprietors out of those brutish peasants (caffoni) . . . who, for a combination of factors, support the brigands . . . from that day you would consider the question of the brigandage resolved.”⁹⁰

By February 1864, 116,000 soldiers were engaged in military operations against the brigands in the Mezzogiorno, almost half of the entire Italian armed forces.⁹¹

Dependency and Emigration

Having compared the accomodationist stance of the African American freedpeople and the armed revolt staged by southern Italian peasants in regard to land redistribution, we can now better understand why the agrarian question was not solved in either region. This common failure, in turn, led in both regions to the perpetuation of the conditions of dependency of the agrarian working class on the landowners. Left with no means to guarantee their economic emancipation, African American freedpeople and southern Italian peasants remained subject to the authority of the landlords who exploited them through abusive sharecropping agreements and usurious practices, and made widespread use of violence to keep them working in the fields.

In the short-term, the perpetuation of conditions of dependency prevented the two landless peasantries from organizing protest movements, or providing leadership for class struggle in the countrysides. In the longer term, it prompted a large wave of migration from the two Souths toward more industrialized regions of the world. Interestingly, while African Americans migrated exclusively to the northern United States, southern Italians migrated both to the northern United States and to other countries such as Canada and Argentina. The timing of the two migratory movements was also different: southern Italians left their country in the largest numbers from the last two decades of the nineteenth century until World War I. During this same period, African Americans migrated primarily within the American South; their first Great Migration to northern cities did not begin until near the end of World War I.

In the United States, the question of land confiscation and redistribution in the South resurfaced again after the Civil War, during the period of Congressional Reconstruction, when radical Republicans dominated national politics. Thaddeus Stevens and George Julian argued in Congress that “confiscation was a logical part of emancipation,” and that it was the only way to destroy the land monopoly of the planter class, but they met with little or no support and confiscation never became a part of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867.⁹⁴

Among the most striking evidence of their resistance to the planters' authority was a withdrawal of African American women from the fields during the early years of Reconstruction. In 1866 and 1867 women played a crucial role in the expansion of domestic production, especially in areas such as the South Carolina low country.⁹⁶

Initially, sharecropping worked as a compromise between the freedmen's desire to control their own work and the planters' need to recruit a cheap agricultural workforce.⁹⁸

However, between the 1860s and the 1930s, with the recrudescence of the white landlords' power and the rise of segregation, many African American peasants chose to head North, where life in the industrialized cities promised more opportunities for freedom. Roughly 1.5 million African Americans migrated from the South between 1917 and 1930. They ended up living in the newly formed ghettoes of the northern cities and became a consistent part of the urban working class in the North. While many men found jobs in rising mass production industries such as meatpacking, the majority of both men and women were employed in domestic service.¹⁰¹

Southern Italian peasants followed a largely similar trajectory. The single most important difference was that in Italy possibilities for resolution of the agrarian question, such as that offered in America by the period of Radical Reconstruction, were never present. As a consequence, land redistribution among southern peasants was hardly an issue for post-1865 Italian governments. To be sure, after the defeat of the peasant guerrillas in the South, the Italian government did pursue a policy of draining substantial capital from agriculture for conversion into industrial investments. According to Bruno Bongiovanni, however, “the period of development that began in 1866–1867 and lasted until the general recession of 1873–1874 did not produce appreciable benefits for the masses in the South.” Especially after the adoption of the grist tax, which provoked widespread riots throughout the Mezzogiorno, the southern Italian working class felt as if “the economic pressure was a sort of economic state of siege continuing the politico-military state of siege of the early years of the [Italian] kingdom.”¹⁰²

Together with economic pressures, peasants continued to experience various forms of exploitation. The defeat of the “great brigandage,” though followed by a minor wave of brigands' activities until 1870, allowed the landlords to continue to employ usurious practices and unequal agricultural arrangements under the protection of the government. This was especially so after the elections of 1876 and the rise of a Left majority which represented a considerable part of the southern landowning interests in the Italian parliament. All the while, the landlords made widespread use of coercion and violence to keep the peasants in place. As a result, according to John Cohen and Giovanni Federico, “as late as [World War I], the population census classified more than half of the rural population [of Italy] as landless labourers (braccianti),” with especially high numbers in the Mezzogiorno.¹⁰³

Not until the period after the Second World War, when the question of land redistribution in the South surfaced again in Italian national politics, did the peasants manage to translate their need to actively continue their class struggle with the landlords into an organized protest movement. At that time, thousands occupied the latifondi with the help of the trade unions.¹⁰⁵