This marvelous attainment was due primarily to Count Cavour, the statesman who, since 1850, had been almost continuously prime minister of Piedmont; and, in the second place, to Victor Emanuel, the shrewd, honest, chivalrous King, worthy to be the visible symbol of Italy’s patriotism. But Cavour had realized from the beginning that, however strong he might make Piedmont, she would not be able singly to cope with Austria: four millions against thirty-five millions—the odds were too great! So he labored to bring Piedmont into the stream of European life; he allied her to France and England in the Crimean War; and now, at the beginning of 1859 he had persuaded Napoleon III to march the armies of France into Italy to join Piedmont in expelling the Austrians.
All this had been brought about against great hindrances, not the least of which was the keeping in check the Italian conspirators. Since the days of the Carbonari, a certain number of Italians had hoped to set up a republic. Mazzini, now the chief leader of conspiracy, was uncompromisingly republican, holding so little faith in the methods of Cavour and the Constitutional Monarchists that he never hesitated to hatch plots against them as well as against the Austrians. Between these two irreconcilable parties Garibaldi was the link. By preference a republican, he yet recognized Victor Emanuel as the only practicable standard-bearer, and he therefore fought loyally under him; but he distrusted Cavour, scorned diplomacy, and abhorred Napoleon III. In his exuberant way, he insisted that Italians could, if they would, recover independence without begging the rogue, who had crushed Rome ten years before, to succor them.
A volunteer corps, called the Hunters of the Alps, was accordingly organized, with the double purpose of using Garibaldi’s skill as a guerrilla chieftain against the Austrians, and his unique popularity in drawing all sorts of partisans to support the national war. He suspected that the government was not wholly ingenuous; he complained that his volunteers had to swallow many snubs from the regulars; he chafed at being responsible to any superior: but the fact that he had at last a chance of striking the oppressors of Italy outweighed everything else.
Despite the shortness of the war of 1859, Garibaldi and his Hunters proved of real service in it. Varese, Como, remember their valor still; and had not Napoleon III suspended hostilities after the great victory of Solferino, the Garibaldians might have redeemed the Tyrol. But Napoleon’s peace of Villafranca, while it gave Lombardy to Piedmont, left Venetia in the hands of the Austrians, and stopped further operations in the north at that time. During the autumn, however, Garibaldi, with many of his volunteers, went to Tuscany, where a provisional government was then awaiting the propitious moment for annexation to Victor Emanuel’s kingdom. The situation was very ticklish, requiring careful diplomacy: Garibaldi, who shared with General Fanti the military command, wished to have done with diplomacy, to call out one hundred thousand volunteers, and to rely on them to disentangle all complications. Irritated at having his plan overruled, he resigned his command and withdrew to Caprera.
Within three months, however, he was called from his retreat. Secret agents brought word that “something could be done” in Sicily, where for a long time Mazzinians had been preparing a revolt. It needed, they said, but Garibaldi’s presence to redeem the island from Bourbon misrule. He could not resist the temptation. Trusty lieutenants of his had collected arms and ammunition, hired two steamers and enrolled volunteers. At Genoa, where these preparations were making, nobody, except the government officials, was ignorant of their purpose. The government, however, pretended not to see. Cavour could not openly abet an expedition against a power with which Piedmont was not at war; neither did he wish to hinder an expedition for whose success he and all Italian patriots prayed. So he discreetly closed his eyes.
On the night of May 5, 1860, Garibaldi and 1067 followers embarked on their two steamers near Genoa and vanished into the darkness. For a week thereafter Europe wondered whither they were bound,—whether against the Papal States or Naples; then the telegraph reported that they had landed at Marsala, on the morning of May 11, just in time to escape two Neapolitan cruisers which had been watching for them. From that moment, day by day, with increasing astonishment, the world followed the progress of Garibaldi and his Thousand. No achievement like theirs has been chronicled in many centuries. They set out, a thousand filibusters, scantily equipped and undrilled, to free an island of two and a half million inhabitants, an island guarded by an army fifty thousand strong, with forts and garrisons in all its ports, and having quick communication with Naples, where the Bourbon King had six million more subjects from whom to recruit his forces. Grant that the Sicilians fervently sympathized with Garibaldi, yet they were too wary to commit themselves before they had indications that he would win; grant that the Bourbon troops were half-hearted and ludicrously superstitious,—many of them believed that the Garibaldians were wizards, bullet-proof,—yet they had been trained to fight, they were well-armed, and by their numbers alone were formidable. That they would run away could not be assumed by the little band of liberators, any more than Childe Roland could suppose that the grim monsters who threatened his advance would vanish when he upon his slug-horn blew.
And in truth the Bourbon soldiers did not run. At Calatifimi the Garibaldians beat them only after a fierce encounter; at Palermo there was a desperate struggle; at Milazzo, a resistance which might, if prolonged, have destroyed the expedition. In every instance it seemed as if the Bourbons might have won had they but displayed a little more nerve, another half hour’s persistence; but it was always the Garibaldians who had the precious reserve of pluck and strength to draw upon, and they always won. Their capture of Palermo, a walled city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, defended by many regiments on land and by men-of-war in the harbor, ranks highest among their exploits. Less than a month after quitting Genoa, they had liberated more than half the island and had set up a provisional government. By the first of August only two or three fortresses had not surrendered to them.
And now questions of diplomacy came in to disturb the swift current of conquest. Garibaldi determined to cross to the mainland, redeem Naples, march on to Rome, and from the Capitol hail Victor Emanuel King of Italy. Cavour saw great danger in this plan. At any moment, a defeat would jeopard the positions already gained; an attack on the Pope’s domain would bring Louis Napoleon and Austria to his rescue, and might entail a war in which the just-formed Kingdom of Italy would be broken up; furthermore, Cavour believed that assimilation ought to keep pace with annexation. He knew that it would require long training to raise the Italians of the south, corrupted by ages of hideous misrule, to the level of their northern kinsmen.
Such considerations as these could not, however, deter Garibaldi. He grew wroth at the thought that any foreigner—were he even the Emperor of the French—should be consulted by Italians in the achievement of their independence. Eluding both the Neapolitan and the Piedmontese cruisers, he crossed to the mainland and took Reggio after a sharp fight. From that moment his progress towards the capital resembled a triumph. And when, on September 7, accompanied by only a few officers, he entered Naples, though there were still a dozen or more Bourbon regiments in garrison there, the soldiers joined with the civilians and the loud-throathed lazzaroni in acclaiming him their deliverer. Yet only a few hours before their King had sneaked off, too craven to defend himself, too much detested to be defended. Think what it meant that this should happen,—that the sovereign, the source of honor, the fountain of justice, the symbol of the life and integrity of the state, should not find in his own palace one loyal sword unsheathed in his defense, even though the loyalty were hired, like that of the eight hundred Swiss who gave their lives for Louis XVI! By an inevitable penalty, Bourbon misrule in Naples passed vilely away; it had been, as Gladstone declared, the embodied “negation of God:” even in its collapse and ruin there was nothing tragic, portending strength; there was only the negative energy of putrefaction.
Having taken measures for temporarily governing Naples, Garibaldi prepared for a last encounter with the Bourbons. King Francis still commanded an army of forty thousand men along the Volturno, near Capua. There Garibaldi, with hardly a third of that number, fought and won a pitched battle on October 1. A month later he welcomed Victor Emanuel as sovereign of the kingdom which he and his Thousand had liberated. The republicans, instigated by Mazzini, had wished to postpone, if they could not prevent, annexation; but Garibaldi, whose patriotic instinct was truer than their partisanship, insisted that Naples and Sicily should be united to the Kingdom of Italy under the House of Savoy. In all modern history there is no parallel to his bestowal of his conquests on the King, as there is nothing nobler than his complete disinterestedness. He declined all honors, titles, stipends, and offices for himself, and departed, almost secretly, from Naples for Caprera the day after he had consigned the government to its new lord.