On 24 June 1859, at Solferino in Habsburg Italy, Napoleon, chain-smoking in the saddle, defeated the Austrians under Franz Josef in one of the first battles of modern warfare and the last commanded by sovereigns. A total of 300,000 soldiers fought and 29,000 were killed – more than at Waterloo. ‘The poor fellows! What a terrible thing war is!’ sighed Napoleon, vomiting at the sight of a heap of amputated limbs. Later he joked grimly but wisely, ‘I’ve had enough of war. There’s too much luck in it.’ In a hut outside Villafranca, he met Franz Josef and agreed a compromise that ceded most of the Habsburgs’ Italian territories to the new kingdom. But, again betraying his Italian allies, Napoleon took Savoy, today’s Riviera, for France. Many Italians were infuriated. A swashbuckling patriot, Giuseppe Garibaldi, a sailor from Nice who became a professional liberator,* now led his army of volunteers, the Thousand, to seize Sicily, where he was acclaimed dictator. In Milan, Victor Emmanuel declared himself king of Italy, hailed by Garibaldi, who now turned to a new war.
In 1861, Garibaldi offered his services to the newly elected US president, Abraham Lincoln, in the crisis over slavery ignited by the moral contradiction at the heart of the world-changing democracy.
Just months earlier, in April 1860, an ex-officer, fallen on hard times, started work as a clerk in his father’s leatherwear store in Galena, Illinois, where he served customers and collected invoices. Sometimes Ulysses Grant entertained friends with stories of the Mexican war. But there was a shadow in his past: six years earlier Captain Grant had been forced to resign from the army for being drunk on duty. ‘When I have nothing to do,’ he confessed, ‘I get blue and depressed, I’ve a natural craving for drink.’ His father Jesse, now a rich tanner and store owner, gave him a job as shop assistant, and it was from this unlikely perch that Grant observed the rising crisis.
He never grumbled, but he was obviously destined for obscurity, and there was little sign he would soon emerge as one of the greatest Americans.
LICK ’EM TOMORROW: ULYSSES AND ABRAHAM
The next month, the recently formed Republican Party chose as their presidential candidate a little-known prairie lawyer and former congressman, Abraham Lincoln. Six foot four, grey-eyed, simian and loquacious, born in a Kentucky log cabin, Lincoln had been promoted as Honest Abe and the Railsplitter (a backwoodsman used to splitting logs) who had won national attention in the debates for an Illinois Senate race.
The American schism was already simmering into war. It had started in Kansas where a half-mad abolitionist, John ‘I’m the instrument of God’ Brown, led an anti-slavery militia that fought slave owners. In October 1859 Brown invaded Virginia, for which he was hanged. Lincoln loathed ‘the monstrous injustice of slavery’ and the moral decay of ‘slave power’. Although the presidential candidate of the new Republican party acquiesced in its existence in the southern states, he would not countenance its spread. Southerners feared that any limit would ultimately threaten their power to expand. Suddenly the forty-year quest for compromise seemed to exhaust itself.
On 6 November 1860, Lincoln was elected president. In December, South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed by six other slavery states. Together they declared a Provisional Confederacy of the United States, which elected a slave-owning former general and senator, Jefferson Davis, as president and Alexander Stephens as his deputy. At a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Stephens defined the Confederacy through slavery: ‘its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.’ The gentlemen planters of the Confederacy created a myth of Southern gentility that Grant mocked: ‘Southern slave-owners believed that the ownership of slaves conferred a sort of patent of nobility.’ The rebellion was about slavery, not about states’ rights. The ensuing war revealed that slavery was not only morally repugnant but economically disastrous. The Confederacy was less populous, because slavery drove down the wages of poor whites and therefore did not attract new immigrants; and its slave-owning entitlement did not foster industry. Yet this would be a war of conscript armies and industrial slaughter.
