The Legion, the State and the Indians

Although events transpired in a corner of the world, the Military-Agricultural Legion was not some wayward experiment divorced from the mainstream. Rather, it was as an ambitious enterprise, financed by the Buenos Aires government and lauded by many of the secular saints of democratic internationalism, most famously Mazzini and Garibaldi. The principal organizers were Giovanni Battista Cuneo, the chief representative of Mazzinism in the Río de la Plata, and his colleague Bartolomé Mitre, the Minister of War who launched the Legion in 1855. Cuneo had previously lived in Montevideo where he collaborated with Mitre and other romantic literati of the ‘Generation of 1837’ who had formed the bulwark of Young Argentina, rebaptized the May Association. These exiles had spearheaded the intellectual opposition to Rosas. The Unitarian faction had returned to Buenos Aires where its member served as politicians and journalists in the new state. Cuneo frequented Buenos Aires associations while editing the bimonthly periodical, La Legione Agricola. In this way, Mazzini and Cuneo sought to repeat the same propaganda operation with Olivieri as they had orchestrated with Garibaldi when Cuneo had edited Il Legionario Italiano in Montevideo.Footnote ¹⁸

It might seem surprising that Risorgimento elite and foreign legionnaires demonstrated such enthusiasm for conquest and settlement. Italian and other foreign legions were usually comprised of volunteers who crossed borders to fight against absolutist empires that supressed sovereignty and exerted hegemony over ‘oppressed peoples’. This brand of volunteerism began with Napoleonic war veterans who fought for Latin American independence and philhellenic volunteers who travelled to Greece beginning in 1821 and 1822. It continued in civil wars in Spain and Portugal in the 1820s and 1830s, and multiple conflicts in Europe and the Americas, including Garibaldi’s first overseas adventure on behalf of the independence of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.Footnote ¹⁹ Furthermore, the Risorgimento was, at least in its origins, splenetically anti-imperial. Early theorists had pilloried the legacy of ancient Rome, which they associated with a despotic aristocracy whose thirst for conquest and riches had led to disorder and decadence. Instead, they harked back to the Italic peoples as a repository of simple customs, austere habits and harmonious social relations, and to the civic humanistic traditions of the medieval city-states as a source for republican virtue. The mention of Rome also evoked the Napoleonic empire in Italy, the legacy of which generated disagreements among patriots.Footnote ²⁰ When the ‘empire’ did not specifically refer to Rome or Napoleon, it always referred to the Habsburg Empire, the grand enemy of Italian unification.

All the same, by mid-century, many republicans had come to terms with empire, past and present, providing the concept did not refer to one of Europe’s despotic monarchies. By the 1830s, Mazzini and his contemporaries had broken with the ‘Italic model’ by promoting the Roman Empire as an exalted reference for a unified nation able to overcome provincialism and regionalism. They connected its glorious imperial past with the messianic destiny of the Risorgimento.^{Footnote 21} The French conquest of Algeria also evoked frequent comparisons to the Roman Empire and its racial hierarchies. By the 1840s, Algeria had grown from an absolutist military adventure into a liberal colonization project that was to constitute a laboratory for further expansion overseas and attract immigrants from various European states. Saint Simonian travellers, ethnographers and engineers heralded Algeria as a promised land where impoverished urban masses from different nations could relocate as yeoman settlers. They mixed romantic stereotypes of the sensual allures of the Orient with scientific studies for the exploitation of minerals and land.Footnote ²²

The foundation of the French Foreign Legion in Algeria also served to endow volunteerism with an imperial air, rehabilitating the spirit of the Grande Armée, which had incidentally crossed into Russia in 1812 with Germans, Poles, Italians and other foreigners comprising half of its ranks. The Foreign Legion sent satellite legions to combat absolutism during the Carlist War (1833–40) and the Crimean War (1853–56).Footnote ²³ Defeating Spanish or Russian obscurantism in Iberia and Crimea was deemed equivalent to fighting Bedouin hordes in Algeria, or, for that matter, Indian tribes on the Pampa.

The Military-Agricultural Legion was literally cloaked in threads of ancient Rome and contemporary Algeria. The periodical La Legione Agricola bristled with references to New Rome as a Capitoline Hill, Olivieri as a new Romulus or Aeneas and the legionnaires as world citizens from diverse European lands with Italic ploughs.Footnote ²⁴ In this vein, the poet Francesco Dall’Ongaro heralded the legionnaires as ‘civilizers’ who were ‘pure of American blood’ destined to carry out a ‘new conquest of the Americas’ by replacing religion with the ‘sacred fire of Rome’.Footnote ²⁵ Mitre cited the French colonies in Algeria as the model for his military-agricultural colonies.Footnote ²⁶ Cuneo compared New Rome with its ‘progressive agriculture’ and ‘military discipline’ to the settlements of army veterans created by Marshal Bugeaud in Algeria.^{Footnote 27} Most revealingly, the State of Buenos Aires outfitted the Legion in the striking (and sometime ridiculed) ‘oriental-styled’ uniform of the zouave troops of the French Foreign Legion, which had garnered celebrated victories in the Crimean War.^{Footnote 28} If this was not enough to remind soldiers of their mission, Olivieri decorated his headquarters with ‘six paintings of the war in the Orient’.^{Footnote 29}

Whilst the romantic attraction of virgin lands, triumphal allusions to the Roman Empire and the flamboyant uniforms of the zouave troops attracted volunteers to the Legion, Coronel Olivieri also had much celebrity cachet. His colourful biography made him famous as a budding ‘hero of two worlds’, a patriot of impeccable revolutionary pedigree destined to replicate the triumphs of Lafayette and Garibaldi.Footnote ³⁰ Olivieri was educated in the military academy of Nunziatella in Naples, fought in the First War of Italian Independence in Milan in 1848 and joined the Sicilian uprising in 1849. After fleeing Europe, he enlisted in the Italian Legion in Montevideo. He rose to fame as the charismatic leader of a new Italian Legion – christened the ‘Valiant Legion’ – that defended Buenos Aires during the siege of the Confederation. He also boasted impressive family connections. Born into a liberal family of the Neapolitan aristocracy, he married into a Bonapartist dynasty after meeting Leocadia Cambaceres in Buenos Aires. Imprisoned in Rome in 1853, Napoleon III intervened with the Pope to secure his release.Footnote ³¹ Before leaving again to Buenos Aires in 1855, Olivieri met with Mazzini in London where they discussed the Legion and perhaps its future participation in a march on Rome.Footnote ³²

Had Olivieri met a different fate, the Military-Agricultural Legion might have joined Risorgimento military operations in Italy. Ostensibly, this was the plan. As Mazzini grew uncomfortable with Garibaldi’s flirtations with monarchy, he contemplated the young and fiery Neapolitan as a possible ‘replacement for Garibaldi’ as early as 1854.Footnote ³³ Once Olivieri returned to the New World, Mazzini suggested that he should be ‘responsible for the military organization’ of the Partito d’Azione in Latin America, destined for a mission to the Italian Peninsula.Footnote ³⁴ For his part, Garibaldi envisioned him as the commander of an expedition of Argentine and Italian patriots to the Kingdom of Two Sicilies.Footnote ³⁵ From Zurich, the distinguished exile Filippo de Boni, also took note. In 1848, this official of the Roman Republic had travelled to Switzerland with the objective to recruit foreign volunteers. He heaped praise on the legionnaires of the ‘plough and arms’ and foresaw the mobilization of the Legion in a future war against the Habsburgs.Footnote ³⁶

The focus on the Legion also sheds light on the global interconnections of the State of Buenos Aires. Even though the State has been often viewed as an ephemeral entity, squeezed between the end of the dictatorship of Rosas in 1852 and the national unification of Argentina in 1859, it was one of the states in Latin America where liberals had, or were soon to, triumph over authoritarian caudillos. In this sense, romantic intellectuals, such as Bartolomé Mitre, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Valentín Alsina succeeded where Mazzini, Kossuth and Ledru-Rollin had failed in Europe. The political elite of the new state refused to remain part of the Confederation of Argentina, depicting its president General Justo José de Urquiza, one of the richest men in Latin America, as another dictatorial cattle rancher in the image of Rosas. Wary of mass politics and sceptical of caudillo populism, this elite did not embrace the socialistic policies of 1848. Instead, they interpreted 1848 conservatively and equated their non-violent September Revolution of 1852 with the Glorious Revolution in Britain. Nonetheless, this powerful and potentially rich revolutionary state was regarded as a pariah by European (and Brazilian) monarchies precisely because of its bold republican and expansionist pretentions.^{Footnote 37}

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was the guiding light of the new state, and one of the most influential Latin American intellectuals of his generation. His return from Chile in 1855 to edit the newspaper El Nacional coincided with a radicalization of the State of Buenos Aires, highlighted by the appointment of Mitre as Minister of War in January and the return of Olivieri to Buenos Aires in October. In his acclaimed essay, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845), Sarmiento had articulated a vision for a ‘new government’, which he disseminated in a steady stream of articles in the Chilean and Argentine press. The mission of the city of Buenos Aires was to ‘de-Hispanize’ and ‘Europeanize’ an Argentina that had been dominated by caciques, gauchos and caudillos, and to turn it into a democratic nation. With respect to the pampas, it would be necessary not only to conquer the Indian caciques but also to replace cattle ranching, the lifeblood of the caudillos and gauchos, with smallholding agriculture and animal husbandry. Accordingly, the Army should refrain from fratricidal civil wars and be dispatched to the south with the mission to extend the frontier to the Colorado River. He advocated populating the southern pampas with military colonies, comprised of immigrants from northern Europe in search of land and freedom. The port of Bahía Blanca would then become the capital of a new south in which goods – produced by family farmers of European descent – could be shipped directly across the ocean without having to be driven by cart or hoof to Buenos Aires.Footnote ³⁸

Bartolomé Mitre complemented Sarmiento’s Facundo with a number of influential articles published in exile and in the Buenos Aires periodical Los Debates in 1852. To Sarmiento’s bucolic vision of a bountiful pampas populated by White peasant immigrant farmers, he added a messianic role for the Army. Under Rosas, local cattle ranchers had relied chiefly on cavalries of friendly Indians and locally recruited militias in order to coordinate frontier defences. In contrast, the historian and artillery specialist Mitre strove to create a revolutionary volunteer army on the European style, believing that the army embodied the principles of the Latin American revolutions and doubled as a school for democracy by instilling discipline, self-sacrifice and republican virtue.Footnote ³⁹ In 1855, he reorganized the Army to rely on volunteers, recruited many Europeans, converted local militias into a National Guard and drastically reduced the reliance on companies of friendly Indians. He foresaw that a division of 2000 soldiers could drive the Indians south of the Colorado River in a ‘short campaign’. Immediately afterwards, he proposed to pacify the zone with a coordinated network of frontier forts and military-agricultural colonies.Footnote ⁴⁰ Although this plan derived from an ideological vision, it also responded to a demographic and economic reality. Given the economic potential and sparse population of the much of Argentina, European immigration companies were promoting Buenos Aires as a viable alternative for hardworking families given the saturation of the east coast of the United States, and the hot climate of other destinations such as French Algeria and Texas.

The Military-Agricultural Legion, then, was intended to pave the way for steady colonization. New Rome was to be the maiden settlement in the fertile valley of the Sierra de la Ventana, irrigated by a river system that emptied into the Bay of Bahía Blanca (see Figure 1). In consonance with Sarmiento’s preference for northern Europeans, organizers sought inspiration from the German immigration schemes of Brazil and Chile. Before departing, Olivieri signed an agreement in January 1856 in Buenos Aires with Theodor Hoffman, legal representative of the businessman Daniele Levi, a resident of Montevideo. Levi’s company would recruit 400 to 600 German and Danish farmers who would settle near Bahía Blanca in a sister colony protected by the Legion.Footnote ⁴¹ Exuding optimism, the Buenos Aires legislature passed an immigration law on 7 September 1855, promising to distribute lands around Bahía Blanca and the southernmost fort of Carmen de Patagonés to immigrants from Europe. Accordingly, in December 1856, a few hundred men, women and children arrived in Buenos Aires from Le Havre, sent by the consul Alfredo de Dax in collaboration with French and Swiss immigration companies. By then, however, New Rome had failed and the valley of the Sierra de la Ventana remained Indian territory.Footnote ⁴²

This idealistic, if not utopian, vision generated some warranted scepticism. In Chile, Vicente Pérez Rosales, the government agent organizing German colonization in the province of Valdivia, doubted the viability of the plan. He reasoned that the only successful contemporary militarized settlements were those of Russian Cossacks in Siberia, but this system would not work against the fierce and mobile Araucanian Indians.Footnote ⁴³ The Indians, for their part, were well aware of the threat. In general, they preferred to deal with pragmatic caudillos and ranchers such as Rosas or Urquiza, knowledgeable of the harsh realities and more sensitive to the collage of customs of the frontier. Such a situation was common in Latin America, as indigenous groups often pursued alliances with oligarchic conservatives against doctrinaire liberals, who were more representative of urban interests, less tolerant of tradition, suspicious of natural hierarchies and eager to divide ‘unpopulated’ lands into smallholding parcels for republican farmers.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Indians were by no means a monolithic ethnicity nor were they homogenously ‘indigenous’. Some Europeans, Chileans, Argentines and other Latin Americans lived in their settlements where mestizaje was common. The principal groups included the Ranqueles of the northern pampas who had traditionally inhabited the southern zones of the provinces of Mendoza, Córdoba and Santa Fe. Further south, the Tehuelches or ‘Manzanaros’ had their homeland was in what is today the Patagonian province of Neuquén. The ‘Pampa Indians’ lived on the frontier near the fort towns of Azul and Tapalqué. In the 1850s, the most powerful group was the Llaimaches who had arrived from Chile relatively recently (1841) and displaced the Boroganos, causing them to migrate towards the fort town of 25 de Mayo. Also called ‘Salineros’ or ‘Chilean Indians’, the Llaimaches settled in Salinas Grandes, a strategic zone that was rich in the key mineral of salt, essential for the conservation of meat and leather. Salinas Grandes was an entrepot for indigenous trade and a point of convergence of roads that led west across the Andes. Its control allowed the Llaimaches to dominate pampa commerce with the Arucanía region of Chile. Since the times of Rosas, the great Llaimache cacique Juan Calfacurá had led a loose Confederation of Indian tribes on the pampas. He controlled the so-called negocio pacífico, in which the Indians maintained peace on the frontier in exchange for rations of cattle, sheep, horses, meat, clothing and ‘vices’ (tobacco, herbs and alcohol).Footnote ⁴⁵

The State of Buenos Aires did not prevail in the frontier warfare of the 1850s nor was colonization successful at this time.Footnote ⁴⁶ The decade featured the periodic modification and breakdown of the negocio pacífico, which, together with the threat of colonization, provoked a number of Indian raids (malones), the largest of which carried off tens of thousands of heads of cattle and sheep and dozens of prisoners. Calfacurá’s Confederation, allied with the Confederation of Argentina, inflicted defeat after defeat on the Army of Buenos Aires in 1855. Mitre’s decision to rely on infantry and artillery, and his reluctance to mobilize cavalries of friendly Indians familiar with the terrain, proved to be a disaster in spite of its ideological appeal. The arrival of the Military-Agricultural Legion in Bahía Blanca in February 1856 made a limited impact. At first, Oliveri participated in the typical frontier tactics of raiding, kidnapping and prisoner exchange. He sent emissaries to negotiate a peace with Calfacurá of the Llaimaches (to the west) and Yanquetruz of the Tehuelches (to the south) in April 1856, which was subsequently ratified along with other accords in Buenos Aires.^{Footnote 47} Still, the foundation of New Rome in July on the banks of the Sauce Chico blocked the corridor between Salinas Grandes and the Bay of Bahía Blanca, threatening the livelihood of the Llaimache, upsetting the territorial balance and creating tension.

In December 1857, the newly elected president Valentín Alsina mobilized the Army of the South – the Military-Agricultural Legion included – in a campaign that sought to capture the Llaimache stronghold of Salinas Grandes. Sarmiento’s broadsheet, El Nacional, declared that this ‘decisive blow’ would ‘put an end to the domination of the savage on the Pampa’.^{Footnote 48} Salinas Grandes was ‘the key to the Pampa since the time of the conquistadors’.^{Footnote 49} Although the Army won some key battles and occupied an abandoned Salinas Grandes in February, it could not hold the position. The frontier soon returned to unstable spells of war and peace. As is well known, the ‘decisive blow’ did not occur until the ‘conquest of the desert’ of the 1870s, culminated by Julio Roca’s campaign that extended the frontier to the Colorado River in 1879. In the end, Argentine colonization paralleled European projects. Grand plans for spreading civilization and transforming landscapes were largely unrealizable but served to popularize war and disseminate the ideal of a manifest destiny. Despite military failure, a puissant and persuasive republican ideological justification for conquest and colonization was firmly in place in the 1850s, interwoven with the discourse of the triumph of democracy over caudillismo.

Democratic Imperialism and Risorgimento Colonialism

For addicts of the republican press in the decade following the Revolutions of 1848, the presence of democratic volunteers from Crimea to the Maghreb to the Pampa provided hope that the triumphal march of democracy would once again arrive in Europe. In retrospect, it is paradoxical that nobody ever queried whether Amerindians might share a similar plight as Italians, Poles and other oppressed nations who anxiously sought to benefit from such a triumph. Yet ‘universalistic’ doctrines proclaiming popular sovereignty and natural rights, from their inception, had always excluded women, children and ‘savages’ deemed to have not yet achieved a mature, active or civilized state.Footnote ⁵⁰ If anyone needed clarity, Mazzini’s providential mission to forge a cosmopolitan brotherhood of free democratic nations was reserved for those Christian cultures capable of instilling rights and duties through education and association. In 1845, Mazzini privately expressed that ‘Europe had been providentially called to conquer the rest of the world to progressive civilization’ to rid it of its ‘retrograde and backward beliefs’.^{Footnote 51} In 1858, he publicly announced that the futures of ‘New Colombia, Africa, Australia, China and Japan’ depended on the immigration of Europeans rather than ‘inept Indians, black Kaffirs and Abyssinians, and yellow Mongols’.^{Footnote 52}

All the same, neither Mazzini nor his Risorgimento colleagues actively campaigned for grand overseas military operations in the 1850s. In this respect, events taking place on the Argentine frontier – following the French wars against Abd el-Krim in Algeria – helped make conquest respectable. It might be expected that the Argentine quest to populate the ‘desert’ would have included at least a rhetorical praise for mestizaje. However, this was not the case. The Buenos Aires of Mitre and Sarmiento was not the Mexico of Benito Juárez nor even the Argentina of Rosas. Rosas’ famous Desert Campaign (1833–34) cultivated his image as the ‘Hero of the Desert’ and helped spread an agrarian, nativist and ‘Americanist’ vision of Argentina identified with cattle ranching and frontier life. His supporters portrayed the campaign as a traditional military operation led by gaucho troops allied with ‘friendly Indians’ against ‘enemy Indians’.Footnote ⁵³ The press campaigns of the 1850s, in contrast, exuded Europhilia. The State of Buenos Aires strove to implant an idealized and pristine image of a what a republican Europe might look like in the Argentine ‘desert’ – an image perhaps only conceivable from the perspective of overseas.

The ideological tool that allowed republicans to reconcile conquest with democracy was to depict armed conflicts – be they against European despots, Latin American caudillos or Asian, African or Amerindian emperors, chiefs and caciques – as wars between ‘civilization and barbarism’. Although these concepts emerged within a sophisticated intellectual mosaic during the Enlightenment, this dialectic first appeared in Napoleonic expedition to Egypt when propagandists promised to ‘liberate’ the populace from their Mamluk and Ottoman pasts.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the 1840s, the expression appeared as a republican mantra in the war in Algeria.^{Footnote 55} Around the same time, Sarmiento in Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism endowed the rhetoric with political theory, equating the triumph of civilization on frontier and savage lands with the struggle of democracy over dictatorship. Dumas, for his part, transported this idea to Europe in his New Troy (1850) where it further penetrated democratic discourse. To the French author, France’s Second Republic should come to the aid of compatriots ‘from the Andes to the Carpathian Mountains’Footnote ⁵⁶. Of course, these were not the only vectors. Similar notions had long been the chatter of thousands of men and women who moved, sent letters or published pamphlets around the world. In 1827, for example, the Guatemalan José Cecilio del Valle had suggested that America would catch up to the level of civilization as Europe, and together in ‘adventurous harmony’ would civilize Africa, Asia and Australia.Footnote ⁵⁷

What ‘civilization’ meant to Latin Americans, though, was subject to conflicting interpretations. During the colonial period, Spain had erected a juridical system that protected indigenous customs, hierarchies and land tenure providing that Indian caciques submitted their peoples to evangelization. By the mid-nineteenth century, the colonial regime had disappeared, leaving the new republics and Indian communities to negotiate and reconcile traditional privileges with the requisites of individual liberty and private property. To many Latin Americans, European ‘civilization’ was associated with decadent aristocracies and feudal laws, while the New World republics, with their open franchises and multiracial definitions of citizenship, represented the future. It is important not to idealize either the colonial protection of indigenous communities or to exaggerate the inclusiveness of republican citizenship regimes; native rights were frequently trampled upon and overrun by the categorical imperative of juridical equality, blatant racism and sheer political fiat.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, it is also crucial to recognize that Latin America projected two polls of republicanism following the fall of the caudillos – one Americanist, multi-racial and inclusive and another Europhilic, racial and exclusive. Many political ideas obviously fell between these two extremes, but the officers and troops of the Military-Agricultural Legion, who disembarked in Bahía Blanca in February 1856, were not prone to nuance. Their concept of ‘civilization’ consisted of implanting European intensive agriculture, free labour, commerce, schooling, associational life and science.

Unlike many Latin American intellectuals, few romantics of Argentina’s Generation of 1837 praised the nobility of the savage or mythologized the sophistication of preconquest civilizations. Mitre claimed that the Araucanian Indians had resisted evangelization since colonial times, so he favoured a ‘crusade against the savage’ that would ‘exterminate’ them from the Pampa. He prophesied that ‘an army of landowners tied to the earth’ would impose their will with the ‘fire of the civilizing canon’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Once the Indians were pushed south of the Colorado River, they would be permitted to enter commercial relations with European immigrants in a new Patagonian world that would resemble the northern reaches of Europe with an economy based on salt mining, fur trading, logging and Merino sheep farming.^{Footnote 60} For his part, Sarmiento equated Indians to hyenas, tigers and snakes that prayed on cattle and humans in the dark of night. He praised the United States for ‘exterminating a savage people’ and characterized the ‘Caucasian race’ as ‘the most perfect, the most intelligent, the most beautiful and the most progressive’ of all peoples on earth.^{Footnote 61} Such strident opinions, expressed in El Nacional in the 1850s, were somewhat tempered by La Tribuna, which regarded Indian communities as victims of native caudillismo and advocated war followed by assimilation.^{Footnote 62} In August 1855, La Tribuna suggested to civilize the Indians as had occurred in Mexico, Peru and Algeria where the Bedouins had begun to ‘exchange their long caravans for French ploughs’.Footnote ⁶³

In Buenos Aires, opinion shapers drew inspiration from nascent European civilizing missions overseas. Above all, they invoked the French colonization of the Maghreb. To Sarmiento, Argentina shared ‘same struggle between civilization and barbarism between the city and the desert that exists today in Africa’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The British Empire also featured. The Indian Mutiny coincided with Alsina’s offensive in the latter months of 1857. The Buenos Aires press drew parallels between the barbarity of the Indian rebels in Asia and the ‘Indian’ malones in Argentina. La Tribuna decried ‘Women are raped by these corrupt assassins. After deflowering them, they oblige their sweet children and unhappy husbands, if they have not previously died, to drink the blood of their victims’.^{Footnote 65} When the British captured Delhi, Sarmiento’s El Nacional, in clear parallel to Salinas Grandes, exclaimed that the ‘entire civilized world should congratulate itself on the expulsion of these barbarous and sanguinary hordes from their stronghold of treachery and deceit, the capital of the old kings of Delhi, the centre of operations of Mohamadism’.Footnote ⁶⁶

Politicians and journalists – in spite of the ‘anti-Hispanism’ of the Generation of 1837 – did not hesitate to invoke the conquest of the Americas. On 25 January 1856, the president of the State of Buenos Aires, Pastor Obligado, presided over the sending-off ceremony for the Military-Agricultural Legion at the port. In a famous harangue, he praised ‘Compatriots of the immortal Columbus’ and the ‘illustrious conquerors of South America’. He urged them to ‘conquer virgin lands from the domination of the savage in the name of world civilization and the progress of our fatherland’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Such characterizations were also expressed in Europe. In July 1856, the Sicilian patriot Giuseppe Carini praised the legionnaires from the pages of the Revue Franco-Italienne, encouraging them to ‘bring civilization’ to the New World in spirit of their ‘ancestor’ Columbus.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Spanish, in turn, equated the conquest of the Pampa with the invasion of Morocco. In December 1858, La Tribuna published a letter from the Republican Emilio Castelar who had been stirring up public opinion for what would later be bombastically labelled the ‘War of Africa’ (1859–60). He wrote: ‘In a manner like your present situation in which you must try to dominate the Indians to push them towards a good – or bad – degree of civilization, we must subject these Moors, the remains of the barbaric races who for so long have bloodied the land and darkened its history’.^{Footnote 69} Upon the Spanish victory in Morocco, the Argentine Press praised ‘the green laurels that the mother country has picked up in Africa’ and congratulated the ‘great nation… that, while crossing the Atlantic, spread civilization throughout the world, leaving its blood as the seed for vigorous peoples’.Footnote ⁷⁰

These transatlantic, democratic and imperial dialects of the triumph of democracy over despotism, Christianity over Islam, and civilization over barbarism were drilled into the ears of the volunteers of the Military-Agricultural Legion. Upon arriving in Bahía Blanca, Olivieri promised to bring ‘state security’ and secure ‘private property’ while ensuring that ‘the intelligent hand of civilized man’ would defeat ‘the savage who destroys everything’. ‘Agriculture and art’ would thereafter blossom forth from the ‘virgin bosom’ of the Pampa.Footnote ⁷¹ Furthermore, the mission was cast within a Risorgimento practice in which immigrants and refugees formed ‘colonies’ abroad. Much like Juan Bautista Alberdi, one of the leaders of the Generation of 1837, had famously declared, ‘to govern is to populate’, Italians had also reworked the concept of ‘colony’ so that it meant to settle, to cultivate and to populate. A precursor to the colonial volunteer was Giacomo Durando, a Piedmontese exile in the constitutionalist army of Pedro II during the civil war in Portugal. In an address to the Lisbon parliament in August 1834, he proclaimed that the integration of foreign volunteers into the Portuguese nation would help regenerate decadent customs and virtues, improve agriculture and commerce and provide a military shield against absolutist counterrevolution.^{Footnote 72}

Risorgimento colonialism gained momentum following the First War of Italian Independence. Between 1848 and the mid-1850s, Greece, Anatolia and North Africa were home to diaspora colonization enterprises. Rich patriots founded ‘alternative homelands’ in foreign countries for émigrés. In 1849, the exile Ferrari Rodigino sought an agreement with the government of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, requesting financial help to found a colony of expatriates in Greece.^{Footnote 73} Later, the noblewoman Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso purchased a vast track of land close to Constantinople for 5000 francs with the aim of establishing a latifundia run by patriots.^{Footnote 74} Between 1852 and 1860, the Neapolitan radical Giovanni Mosciari sponsored an agricultural colony in Algeria, subsidized by Prince Luciano Murat.^{Footnote 75} In this spirit, Silvino Olivieri wrote a manifesto to be distributed in Europe, although it never arrived because of his death. He invited his ‘unlucky brothers’ to find ‘liberty and glory’ by reaching New Rome, a ‘reborn homeland’ forged by military agriculture.Footnote ⁷⁶ Taken as a whole, the Italian nation was portrayed as an imperial nation, an imagined community of destiny and descent, cemented by blood and brotherhood, whose mission was to implant civilization in foreign lands.Footnote ⁷⁷

By the 1850s, most colonization projects, like New Rome, were directed across the Atlantic. Since the Wars of Independence, Latin America had become a leitmotif within Risorgimento revolutionary discourse – a ‘promised land’ of freedom and progress, a myth strengthened by the cult of Garibaldi. Monarchical governments also contemplated similar projects, albeit with different objectives. To wealthy Europeans, America was a depository for the unwanted and a solution for pauperism. To this end, Pedro de Angelis, Consul of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies to the Argentine Confederation and former pro-Rosas journalist, proposed in 1855 to transfer 6000 Neapolitan prisoners to an agricultural colony.^{Footnote 78} Despite the mixed results of these and similar initiatives, hope burned eternal. In 1867, the radical Emilio Bosisio submitted a plan to Benito Juárez for an agricultural colony in Mexico, which, like much of Italy, had recently rid itself of its Habsburg monarch. He invited Italian farmers and workers to depart the ‘rancid Europe of monarchs’ to join in ‘common cause’ with republicans of the New World.^{Footnote 79}

The Legionnaires

Few groups have inspired such praise or provoked such anxiety as foreign legionnaires. While some have lauded their ideological purity and heroism, others have disparaged them as wanderers, corsairs or rogues in search of wages, women and plunder. Conflicting opinions abounded in the Río de la Plata. The British traveller Robert Elves described Montevideo during the siege as a ‘refuge of vagabonds, discontent with all the countries of Europe’ who were no more than ‘mercenaries calling themselves patriots’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Infamous on both sides of the Atlantic was the scandalous conduct of Garibaldi’s Condottieri in the quaint white church of Colonia de Sacramento. They were said to have cut the throat of the statue of the Virgin of the Carmen and turned the altar into ‘a table of orgies’.Footnote ⁸¹ The Confederation press characterized the motives of volunteers of the Military-Agricultural Legion as ‘necessity, a thirst for adventure and vice’.Footnote ⁸² Accusations of debauchery and hedonism differed markedly from adulatory descriptions such as ‘illustrious conquerors of South America’, patriots of the ‘plough and arms’ or the ‘civilized man’ destined by god to make art and agriculture flourish on the ‘virgin bosom’ of the Pampa.

By examining the legionnaires, it is possible to appreciate the extent to which democratic imperialism had popular support and how adventurism coexisted with political ideals and practical considerations. As was the case with many agents of colonization throughout the world, officers and ordinary soldiers had mixed motives. The amateur histories of the Legion are full of laudatory biographies of officers who published poetry, founded schools, designed bridges and imbued civilizational ideals among the troops. As might be expected, elite officers and organizers balanced their ideological convictions with business interests. Most striking was the case of John Le Long, the notoriously unscrupulous recruiter for the French Legion in Montevideo, who got his start in human trafficking by provisioning maids in Paris. After the siege, he organized the shipment of French and Swiss colonists to the Colonia San José in the province of Entre Ríos and remained active in such schemes for decades.Footnote ⁸³ Cuneo, although he enjoyed a better reputation, was involved in similar enterprises. During the siege of Montevideo, he collaborated with the veteran Italian volunteer from the Portuguese civil war, Francesco Anzani. In one letter, Anzani proposed the development of ‘speculation projects’ for diaspora merchants and commercial agents, offering ‘tools to double their financial capital’ in order to garner support for the Risorgimento.^{Footnote 84} Later in life, Cuneo worked as an immigration agent for the Argentine Republic in Italy.Footnote ⁸⁵

With respect to the ordinary soldier, an ample literature exists on the mixed motives of volunteers who are ‘pushed’ into enlisting for personal reasons and ‘pulled’ by ideology or the promise of wages, uniforms, arms, land and adventure.Footnote ⁸⁶ The foreign legionnaires of Montevideo, for example, exuded ideological zeal while also viewing volunteerism as a way to ease migration.Footnote ⁸⁷ It is crucial to stress that debauchery did not undermine popular republicanism. Gathering in taverns, chasing (and capturing) women and even engaging in thievery and other crimes, especially against the rich and privileged, were part of a highly masculinized political culture in which republicanism represented a libertine rebellion against the hypocrisy and femininity of bourgeois polite society. Political organizations founded upon the principles of Mazzinian cosmopolitanism that espoused Christian virtues and Kantian morals always made room for men fleeing debt collectors, police, vendettas, paternal obligations, bad marriages and government repression. It is no coincidence that Dumas, the author of the New Troy, also wrote redemptive adventure novels such as the Count of Montecristo (1844). In this tale, a group of sailors, smugglers and kidnappers from the Italian and French Mediterranean triumph over the corrupt and well-coifed elite of the July Monarchy in Paris. Along the way, they share in the pleasures of smoking hashish and enjoying the subservient attentions of Oriental women.

Even though the State of Buenos Aires attracted many hearty and enterprising immigrant families, it was also keen to recruit 1848 revolutionaries and sympathizers, demobilized troops and even rogue wanderers. It sponsored dozens of entrepreneurial ‘consuls’ in European cities from Liverpool to Hamburg to Palermo. Eager to relieve Malthusian pressures and to facilitate the emigration of ‘undisciplined adventurers’, European governments allowed such consuls to operate as ‘confidential agents’ even though they did not grant diplomatic recognition to the State of Buenos Aires.Footnote ⁸⁸ The consuls worked with immigration companies who advertised the virtues of ‘extremely high daily wages’, ‘the best meat at a half penny a pound’, and ‘where women were remarkably beautiful and where many of them wanted husbands’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Dumas’ New Troy, sometimes used as a recruiting tool, boasted that ‘Buenos Aires had the fame of having the most beautiful women in Latin America’.Footnote ⁹⁰ At the end of the 1850s, the Consul for Piedmont-Sardinia in La Plata, warned of the ‘uncontrolled release of passports’ towards Latin America.^{Footnote 91}

The Military-Agricultural Legion was comprised of many soldiers with previous experiences in legions known for their radicalism. Of the original cohort of 168 Italian soldiers and junior officers who initially arrived in Bahía Blanca, at least one-third had served in the Italian Legions of Montevideo or Buenos Aries and some had fought in the Italian Wars of Independence. The senior officers, for their part, were generally either military veterans or persons with recognized republican credentials. Some of the soldiers and officers had formed part of the 173 members of the Compagnia dei Lombardi, who left the port of Genoa in the early months of 1851 to serve in the Italian Legion of Montevideo. Of those who arrived in Bahía Blanca, it is possible to identify a handful of revolutionaries who had participated in the Milan insurrection or defended the Roman Republic in 1848.Footnote ⁹² Another group who joined the Legion were some of the men from the British-Italian Legion, stationed in Malta during the Crimean War. Politicians in Westminster had been eager to ship them off to the New World out of fear that they might stir up insurrection on the British Isles.Footnote ⁹³ Initially promised their own Military-Agricultural Legion in Entre Ríos, they arrived in Montevideo in January 1857 in a mutinous state. According to the Confederation consul, the rebellion was fuelled by ‘the arrival of some Italians who suggested that they could obtain better conditions by enlisting in the agricultural colony of Bahía Blanca’. The manifest of the ship that transported them across the Río de la Plata to Buenos Aires listed ‘100 passengers for the legion’.Footnote ⁹⁴

The Military-Agricultural Legionnaires did not leave memoirs, but they are one of the few groups of volunteers where documentation makes it is possible to trace social origins, marital status and literacy rates. Practically all recruits listed their status as single, but not all styled themselves as adventurers. The Legion was not comprised of men in the most desperate of situations. This supports the idea that political motivations must of weighed heavily. Revealingly, 85% of the recruits came from skilled, semi-skilled and white-collar professions and 71% were literate. The legionnaire was, on average, more literate and from a higher social class than the average European or North American immigrant volunteer in the Army or the average immigrant to Buenos Aires. This was not only true with respect to the legionnaires as a whole, but with respect to each constitutive nationality.Footnote ⁹⁵

Although the Legion began as a radical outfit under the leadership of the charismatic Olivieri, it suffered from the typical problems of other foreign legions, particularly attrition. When it left Bahía Blanca to join the campaign to occupy Salinas Grandes in the summer of 1857, only fifty soldiers and junior officers remained from the original cohort. A force that had swelled to some 600 individuals had shrunk to 240.Footnote ⁹⁶ Many members had rather mundane reasons for joining, and a few were even sent to finish prison sentences.Footnote ⁹⁷ One legionnaire was Ramali Nanjier, an illiterate manservant from India. Another was Thomas Godland, a sailor from Guernsey. The most common description on enlistment sheets, other than soldier, was ‘sailor’ (marinero), an occupation with low rates of literacy.Footnote ⁹⁸ This suggests that some men literally abandoned their ships in search of opportunity or adventure. Still, soldiers and sailors were some of the most revolutionary men of the Atlantic world. Fascinating life stories lay behind each legionnaire. One of the early volunteers was the 48-year-old blacksmith Giacomo Alighieri born in the town of Mandello on Lake Como. He signed up with his sons Giuseppe, aged 23 years, and Alessandro, aged 21 years, a blacksmith and a painter from the nearby Italian-speaking town of Lugano Switzerland. These three souls remained in the Legion even after most of the original cohort had deserted. Why did the Alighieri family move from Lombardy to Switzerland to Buenos Aires to Bahía Blanca? Unintimidated by the cold of the Patagonian frontier, were they political exiles or economic migrants or both?