Timothy M. Roberts

Revolutions Have Become the Bloody Toy of the Multitude: European Revolutions, the South, and the Crisis of 1850

Southerners and northerners initially responded to the European revolutions of 1848 in France, Hungary, Germany, and elsewhere with enthusiasm, but grew skeptical of the revolutions once they moved from toppling monarchy with seemingly more radical quests for social equality. Skepticism consolidated more quickly in the South than the North, but this was not a case of southern exceptionalism; essentially the South and North shared the same attitudes. Slavery did not distinguish southern attitudes toward revolutionary Europe, contrary to the arguments of David Brion Davis and others. Instead, both southerners and northerners sought to contrast the American revolutionary experience with the 1848 revolutions, in emphasizing the conservative elements and legacy of the American Revolution, which, they believed, had protected property and Christian values, was relatively nonviolent and successful, and led to national prosperity. European celebrities, in particular Lajos Kossuth, gained Americans favor on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, but only when he seemed to emulate American revolutionary heroes. Southerners especially drew upon the alleged American revolutionary heritage to construct an understanding of secession as a peculiarly American, conservative, and constitutional doctrine. Radical southerners met in the Nashville Conventions to consider secession during the Crisis of 1850. Yet along with the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Law, the specter of bloody revolution and reaction in Europe helped to dissuade them, at the time, from pursuing disruption of the Union. Counterrevolution on both sides of the Atlantic at the mid-nineteenth century, in effect, largely maintained the status quo.

Republican citizenship in the post-Civil War South and French Algeria 1865–1900

ABSTRACT This essay compares the American South and French Algeria from 1865 to roughly 1900. Their similarities and connections reveal the paradox of republicanism in an era of growing nation-state power. The Civil War’s outcome, particularly slavery’s abolition, inspired American and French liberals alike. But after bold initiatives to establish full citizenship for people of color in the 1860s, provincial, white rule was established in both territorial areas. Fears of socialism provoked by the Paris Commune figured in this pivot. The essay shows us transnational aspects of race-based, contingent citizenship in the post-slavery era of these two republican empires.

Margaret Fuller's Rome and the problem of provincial American democracy

ABSTRACT Margaret Fullers visit to Italy as a correspondent for the New York Tribune at the time of the 1848 revolutions gave her a unique perspective on them, not only as a feminist intellectual but also as a commentator on the American relationship with revolutionary Europe. In her Tribune writings she addressed issues at once more partisan and more global than those she had covered inside the United States, including the political condition of Italy as a subject state under Austrian imperial control, and as an object of ridicule by many American observers, and the condition of American slavery. Italian peoples and slaves, in her mind, were, like women, oppressed by a transatlantic patriarchy whose prejudices allowed only for white males to enjoy political independence. Fuller called for American support for the Roman republic, but her sympathies did not reflect the thrust of American opinion. Many Americans did not believe Italians were capable of maintaining republican self-government, which was different, they alleged, from their own version, part of the inheritance of the American Revolution. That heritage conferred a unique American revolutionary ‘exceptionalism’. For these Americans, the 1848 revolutions provided evidence that Europe was impulsive, reactionary and flawed; they saw in them confirmation of the superiority of American race relations and democratic society. After her death in 1850, the American Civil War would confirm Fullers implicit sense that the United States and Europe were more alike than many Americans of her generation believed or realized. Her critique of American attitudes to the prospect for democracy in Italy provides perspective on the ambiguity of American global leadership today.