Thomas DiLorenzo’s article of August 12, “Lincoln’s Kind of ‘Soldier,’” is a valuable contribution to aspects of the U.S. Civil War that are rarely touched upon by academic and other historians. He details several revelatory events and encounters unknown to most readers, even many passionate Civil War devotees.

Perhaps none of those anecdotes is more fascinating than, after the disastrous defeats sustained by the Union in two of the first major battles of the war, the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) and the Battle of Fredericksburg, the disclosure that President Abraham Lincoln had invited Giuseppe Garibaldi to assume command of the Union army. At that time, in 1862, Garibaldi had led military units in the civil wars in Brazil and Uruguay starting in the 1830s (in the second campaign he raised a force of Italian fighters known as the Redshirts) and played a decisive military role in the war for Italian unification starting in 1848 and ending in 1860. Garibaldi: Invention o... Riall, Lucy Best Price: $17.01 Buy New $28.15 (as of 03:15 UTC - Details)

DiLorenzo cites and links to an article in the Guardian by Rory Gallagher in 2000 titled “Garibaldi asked by Lincoln to run army.”

A paragraph in that article not quoted by DiLorenzo reads as follow:

“According to [historian Arrigo]Petacco, the rebel [Garibaldi], who in the 1850s had led an army in Uruguay and travelled through the US, was also a mason. The international masonic lodge successfully lobbied for him to be granted American citizenship.”

Garibaldi had earlier paid a visit to the U.S. – to New York in 1850 – where, according to a 1975 essay by Herbert Mitgang in the now defunct American Heritage magazine, he “took the first three degrees of Freemasonry in a local lodge, and declared his intention to become an American citizen.”

Although Garibaldi did not take Lincoln up on his offer, eight years later he fought for another, in this case fledgling, republic, France’s Third Republic, after having opposed France under Napoleon Bonaparte until his defeat and capture at Sedan in 1870. The Third Republic was established under the shadow of Prussian military occupation and was commonly referred to at the time derisively as a republic without republicans. The Problem with Linco... DiLorenzo, Thomas J. Buy New $29.99 (as of 11:50 UTC - Details)

Giuseppe Garibaldi’s intriguing political and, especially, military trajectory highlights the seemingly inextricable link between the republicanism of the past two and a half centuries and Freemasonry.

I recently read one of Alexandre Dumas’ novels about the French revolution, Ange Pitou/Taking of the Bastille, part of the Marie Antoinette romances – said event, by the way, once described as an “orgy of Freemasonry” – in which three different characters mention an army of “three million men” in North America and Europe ready to expand the Masonic experiment in the Thirteen Colonies to France and then to all of Europe. Later Garibaldi, O’Higgins, Bolivar and San Martin would add to that effort throughout the Western Hemisphere south of the Rio Grande. Dumas says Lafayette was the connection between the American and the French revolutions.