"Freemen of All Nations, Bestir Yourselves!" Exile, Emancipation, and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Age of the American Civil War

More than twenty thousand foreign-born workers lined up on New York’s streets on April 22, 1858, for one of the largest demonstrations ever organized by recent immigrant arrivals in the country’s history. They answered the call of a group of European refugees, who referred to themselves as “cosmopolitan revolutionists,” to commemorate the political martyrdom of the Italian nationalist Felice Orsini, who had died on the scaffold of French monarchy for a free and unified Italy. In solemn silence German, French, Italian, Polish, and native-born white workers marched down Broadway. Many exhibited banners with inscriptions that filled conservative Americans with alarm. Some read “Liberté, Egalilté, Fraternité,” “Ai Martiri Della Liberta,” and “Death to Tyrants.” Another conspicuous poster displayed the Goddess of Reason embracing a white man and a black man under the guardianship of the “Universal Republic. My paper takes the New York Orsini demonstration as a starting point for charting the intersecting histories of revolution, exile, and emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century Atlantic world. In doing so, it challenges widely held assumptions about the demise of cosmopolitan sentiments in the post-Enlightenment period. Rather than fade out, cosmopolitanism developed creatively, adapting to the entangled but not always compatible values of republicanism, nationalism, and socialism. Moreover, investigating midcentury discourses of human brother(or sister-)hood also helps to rectify standard descriptions of cosmopolitanism as a purely bourgeois ideology. Rather, cosmopolitan rhetoric provided a powerful mobilization tool for a polyglot group of left-wing intellectuals and radical workers who stood at the forefront of those in antebellum America formulating more inclusive alternatives to rigid concepts of ethnic nationalism and empire.