Louisiana’s Anti-Confederate Slaves versus Basilicata’s Anti-Italian Peasants: Race, Class, and Nation in Comparative Perspective, 1862–65

Between 1862 and 1865, the western part of Louisiana, in the Confederate South, and the northern part of Basilicata, in southern Italy, were both in the midst of civil wars, with their territories alternatively occupied by opposite armed forces. At the heart of the two civil wars, and in complex relations with the military developments that characterized them, were the struggles of the agrarian masses—African American slaves and southern Italian peasants—against the property owners of the two regions—slaveholders and landowners—and against the two national governments that supported them: the Confederate States of America and the Kingdom of Italy. Focusing on the areas of the Red River Valley, in Louisiana, and the Melfese, in Basilicata, this paper compares the African American slaves’ rebellion against the Confederacy supported by southern slaveholders with the southern Italian peasants’ revolt against the Italian kingdom embraced by southern Italy’s landed proprietors, interpreting both rebellions as anti-national mass movements. It argues that, in both cases, the motivation for rebellious action was a desire for emancipation from an oppression brought by the exclusivist ideologies and practices of a recently formed elitist nation. The aim in forming the new nation was to maintain the social status quo in terms of racially exclusive relations, in the Confederate case, and economically exclusive relations, in the Italian case, between property owners and rural workers in the southern agrarian countryside. Despite these fundamental parallelisms in the logics of the two rebellions, though, their actual historical trajectories diverged sharply, mainly as a result of the opposite historical contexts within which the struggles carried out by African American slaves and southern Italian peasants took place in the two southern regions. Thus, a comparative investigation can illuminate the reasons for this fundamental historical difference amidst the important similarities outlined above.