The Foreign Terrorist Lincoln Tried To Hire

For 150 years the American Lincoln cult denied what it called a “rumor” that, after a string of devastating battlefield defeats, Abraham Lincoln in 1862 offered command of the U.S. Army to an Italian mercenary named Giuseppe Garibaldi.  The “rumor” was proven to be true, however, when an Italian historian named Arrigo Petacco discovered in an Italian archive a faded letter from Garibaldi to King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, telling the king of the offer (See Rory Carroll, “Garibaldi Asked by Lincoln to Run Army”).

Garibaldi was Lincoln’s first choice to replace General George McClellan, long before Ulysses S. Grant took command of the Army of the Potomac.  It is obvious why Lincoln made the offer.  In the early nineteenth century Italy was a confederation of states, with Sicily being the most prosperous.  At the time, Sicily was not composed of just a few islands, but also a large portion of the Italian peninsula.  It included

Southern Italy was plundered and impoverished by Garibaldi’s exploits, just as the American South was plundered and destroyed economically by war and “reconstruction” at the hands of Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and the rest.  As with the American “Civil War heroes,” Garibaldi never accepted responsibility for his actions.  Why would he?!  Piazza quotes him as saying, years later, that “the outrages and injustices perpetrated against the southern [Italian] people are immense and immeasurable. I do not feel that I was personally responsible, for I have a clear conscience on the matter.”  Garabaldi also admitted that he would never do it again, for fear “I would be stoned to death, having engendered nothing but squalor and hate in the process.”  It is no mere accident, notes Piazza, that the great migration of Italians to “the new world” in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century came overwhelmingly from the impoverished South.

Garibaldi turned down Lincoln’s offer, which is understandable.  If he accepted the offer he would not be terrorizing mostly unarmed Italian peasants, but engaging in a battle to the death with Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia which, for the previous two years, had mostly destroyed and devastated Lincoln’s invading armies.