I’ve come across a local website by a southern Italian gentleman who says that his great-great grandfather left Italy to fight for the south in the US Civil War and who returned with eight others to Italy in 1868. Furthermore, “To his last days [he] testified his devotion to the Confederate States of America...”. The author writes passionate letters to nostalgic Southern Civil War websites in the U.S. and signs them “God Bless the Confederacy.” I have no reason to share his politics, but I also have no reason to doubt his numbers and statistics, which seem well researched, nor the authenticity of his family’s personal memoirs that he cites. Taken together with a few other sources (bibliography, below), it is perhaps possible to piece together a bit of a narrative about the fascinating fact that there were at least some Italians on both sides in the U.S. War Between the States.

A bit of background:

—On March 17, 1861, King Vittorio Emanuele II proclaimed the new nation of Italy after annexing the south, The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (aka The Kingdom of Naples), made possible by Garibaldi’s conquest of southern Italy. A few weeks later, on April 12, Confederate forces fired on Ft. Sumter, the Union garrison in Charleston harbor, South Carolina, to begin the US Civil War.

—US opinion on the run-up to the war in Italy was overwhelmingly in favor of Italian unification. An exception to this was the Catholic press in the US and opinion among U.S. Roman Catholics, who knew that the unification of Italy would mean the dissolution of the Papal States and the so-called “temporal power of the Church.” (That is precisely what happened.)

—Opinion in the new Italy on the U.S. Civil War was not as lopsidedly pro-north as one might think. It is true that “national unity” as a theme appealed to many Italians, who had just united their own nation (an unfinished process, however, that would continue well into the 1870s), but there was also a large conservative economic, social and religious sentiment even among new pan-Italians that still viewed the “-isms” of the 19th century with suspicion—liberalism, modernism and socialism. (Even after unification, Italy rejected republicanism and kept the monarchy, and most Italians remained staunch Roman Catholics.) To many such Italians, the US north smacked of such "-isms," while the south did not. (After all, Karl Marx, himself, had just written an enthusiastic letter of encouragement to Abraham Lincoln!)

—There were foreign-born soldiers on both sides in the US Civil War. These were of two kinds and it is important to make the distinction: most (Group 1) were immigrants who had come to stay (say, the vast numbers of Irish and German who immigrated in the 1840s and 1850s. (There were not many Italians in Group 1. The Italian-born population of the U.S. in 1860 was only about 10,000. The great wave of immigrants from Italy would not start until the 1870s.) Some numbers place the Union Army at as high as one-third foreign-born. (Many of them, obviously, had become or would become naturalized citizens.) The others (Group 2) were those who had come specifically to participate in the Civil War, for whatever reason—ideology, money, etc. Those in the first group wound up fighting for the side they happened to live in. The second group came with a purpose, but compared to the first group, was small.

—The white population in the eleven states of the Confederacy was nearly 5,500,000 people, of whom nearly 250,000 had been born abroad (Group 1), or roughly between 4 and 5 percent. In large cities such as Richmond or New Orleans, the percentage was much higher. Again, Group 2—those who came to fight—probably numbered no more than a thousand fighting for the south. (And perhaps the same number fighting for the north; those would primarily have been either from Garibaldi’s army of recent Italian unification—or at least inspired by Garibaldi. Maybe a few were knights errant, soldiers of fortune or maybe they just liked to fight.) (Garibaldi, himself, turned down Lincoln’s offer to be a general in the Union army in 1861 shortly after the beginning of the U.S. civil war.)

That is background. As to the nitty-gritty of how some southern Italians wound up fighting for the Confederate States of America, that is not too complicated. When Garibaldi took Naples in September, 1860, his army captured a lot of prisoners. Enter the swashbuckling figure of Chatham Roberdeau Wheat (1826-1862), Capt. in the US Army, volunteer in the Mexican War, mercenary in Cuba, Mexico and Italy (!), and a native of Virginia and then member of the Louisiana legislature. He had got to know Garibaldi in 1850 in New York; in 1860 he traveled to fight with Garibaldi in the campaign to unify Italy. By November, the war for most of the south had ended (the siege of Gaeta lasted into February of ’61). Garibaldi was then sitting on the city of Naples and most of the rest of the south with a lot of Bourbon prisoners on his hands. In November, the election of Lincoln convinced Roberdeau that a civil war in the US was imminent (he was right) and appealed to Garibaldi to let him recruit members of the ex-Bourbon army of Naples being held prisoner to go off and fight for the Confederacy instead of being shipped off to some northern Italian prison camp. Garibaldi said “yes”.

And so, in early 1861, before the Union blockade closed the port of New Orleans, four ships arrived from Naples with 884 ex-members of the armed forces of the ex-kingdom of the Two Sicilies to take up arms for the Confederacy. They were enlisted as the “Italian Guards” in the European brigades in the 10th Louisiana Infantry Regiment. Some survived the war and some returned to Italy. To this day, in the museum at Civitella del Tronto in Abruzzo, the last Bourbon fortress in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to surrender (on March 20, 1861) to the forces of Italian unification, there is a Confederate flag commemorating the soldiers who left to fight for another South.

sources:

—Cassani, Emanuele. Italiani nella guerra civile americana. Prospettiva Editrice, Rome. 2006.
—Codignola, Luca. “The Civil War: The View from Italy” by Luca Codignola in Reviews in American History, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Dec., 1975), pp. 457-461. Johns Hopkins University Press.
—Dufour, Charles L. Gentle Tiger: The Gallant Life of Roberdeau WheatLouisiana State University Press, 1999.
—Lonn, Ella. Foreigners in the Confederacy Chapel Hill, U. of NC Press, 1940
—Marraro, Howard. American Opinion on the Unification of Italy, 1846–61. Columbia University Press, 1932.