English Travellers and Italian Brigands. A Narrative of Capture and Captivity/Prison-Life in the South: At Richmond, Macon, Savannah, Charleston, Columbia, Charlotte, Raleigh, Goldsborough, and Andersonville, During the Years 1864 and 1865
By . New Yor : Harper and Brothers.
Prison-Life in the South: at Richmond, Macon, Savannah, Charleston, Columbia, By . New York : Harper and Brothers.
THE narrative of Mr. Moens, so far as it relates to the general subject of brigandage in South Italy, will hardly present anything novel to those who have at all studied the history or character of that scourge. In fact, Italian brigandage is a very simple affair, about which it is hard to say anything new. Given a starving, beaten, superstitious population in a mountainous country, destitute of roads, and abounding in easy refuges and inaccessible hiding-places, and you have brigandage naturally. Given centuries of weak, cruel, and corrupt government, and you have the perpetuation of brigandage inevitably. From time immemorial, the social and political conditions in Naples have been deprivation and oppression ; and cause and effect have so long been convertible, that it is often difficult to know one from the other. The prevalence of brigandage demands measures on the part of the government compared with the severity of which martial law is lax and mild ; and the crime which provokes these harsh measures has revived again from the disaffection which they produce. All authorities on the subject are agreed that brigandage finds its shield and support in the fears of the people, and the complete system of espionage which the robbers are enabled to maintain through their accomplices in society. These are sometimes priests and persons of station, but more commonly peasants whose friends or relatives are brigands. During the French-republican rule of Naples, when Manhès was at the head of the troops assigned the duty of extirpating brigandage, the robbers were for once destroyed by the terrible measures taken against their accomplices. No one suspected of communicating with them in any way was spared. Men were shot for selling them food. Women and children taking food into the fields to eat while at work were shot, under an order forbidding this custom lest the provisions should fall into the hands of the robbers. For once, the authorities outbid the brigands for the terror of the wretched inhabitants, and annihilated them. But it was natural, in a country where every peasant is a possible brigand, and only waits for a lawless impulse or lawless deed to make him an actual brigand, that brigandage should flourish again as soon as the rigid procedure against it was relaxed. The returning Bourbons found it on every hill ; and though they combated it with fitful severity and unremitting treachery, they left it essentially unimpaired to the Italian government in 1860. It is by no means true — as Mr. Moens asserts upon the authority of Murray’s Guide-Book — that the late Bourbon government did anything towards effectually suppressing brigandage. The brigands were put down in one place to spring up in another, and they swarmed everywhere after a lean harvest. They never were effectually suppressed, except by Manhès ; and, as the Italian government has mercifully refused to adopt his course for their destruction, it is probable that they will exist until the country is generally opened with roads, and the people educated, and, above all, Protestantized. For it must never be forgotten that, since the union of Naples with Italy, brigandage has been fostered by the Bourbons and the Papists, and that the Italians have had to fight, not only the robbers in Naples, but Francis II. and Pius IX. at Rome.
To the readers of the newspapers, the name of Mr. Moens is known as that of the English gentleman who was taken by brigands in May of last year, on his return from a little pleasure excursion to Pæstum. He and his party—consisting of his wife and the Rev. Mr. Aynsley and wife—had trusted too implicitly in the notice given by their landlord that the road from Salerno to the famous temples was free from brigands, and guarded by troops. Near a little town called Battipaglia, the military having been withdrawn temporarily to permit the families of some captives to negotiate their ransom with the band of Giardullo, the band of Manzo swooped down upon the unhappy tourists, and carried off both the gentlemen of the party. The troops appeared almost immediately after the capture, but the brigands escaped with their prisoners, one of whom they released a few days later, that he might return to Naples, and raise the ransom demanded for himself and his friend. The book, from this point, is the relation of Mr. Moens’s trials and adventures with the bandits, and Mrs. Moens’s hardly less terrible efforts and anxieties for his release. It was decided by the band that their captive was a Milord, and they demanded a ransom of $ 200,000 for him, subsequently reducing the sum to $ 30,000, which was paid them in instalments, and which having received in full, they released their prisoner after a captivity of four months. All the negotiations for the ransom of Mr. Moens had to be carried on in defiance of Italian law, and by indulgence of its officers ; for to supply the brigands with food or money is an offence punishable with twenty years in the galleys. Generous English friends at Naples interested themselves in the affair, and the aid which Mrs. Moens received from Italians in private and official station was no less cordial and constant. Indeed, the business of Mr. Moens’s recapture became of almost international importance. All the Italian troops in the region were employed in pursuit of Manzo’s band ; and a British man-of-war was sent to a certain point on the coast, in the hope that the bandits could be induced to go on board by the promise of impunity, and transfer to England.
In the mean time Mr. Moens remained with his captors, sharing all their perils and privations, and making perforce the most faithful study ever made of their life. It must be confessed that the picture has few features attractive to people at peace with society. Most of the brigands are men who have placed themselves beyond the law by some hideous crime, — or misfortune, as they would call it in Naples, — and in other cases they are idle ruffians, who have taken to robbery because they like it. They generally look forward to a time when, having placed a sufficient amount of money at interest, they can surrender themselves to the authorities, pass a few comfortable years in prison, and issue forth ornaments to society. To be sure, this scheme is subject to chances. They are hunted by the soldiers, day and night, like wild beasts ; and, if taken under arms, arc shot without trial. Half the time they are without food, and suffer the agonies of hunger and thirst; and they are always without shelter, except such as trees or caverns can give. When they have anything, they “ eat their bread with carefulness, and drink their water with astonishment,”—quarrelling over it a good deal, and trying to steal from one another. When they have nothing, they buckle their belts tighter, and bear it as best they may.
Mr. Moens, who fared no better than the rest, does not seem to have fared much worse. Indeed, he was much more comfortably situated than the ladies of the band, who, being dressed as men, were armed and obliged to fight like their comrades, and yet had no share of the spoils, but received many more cuffs and hard words than we, who have only seen them in pictures, can well associate with the idea of brigandesses.
Being poor ignorant peasants originally, and being afterwards poor ignorant robbers, the brigands inflicted little unnecessary suffering upon their prisoner. Occasionally, to be sure, they struck him ; but this was in hot blood, and he was allowed to strike back and restore the balance of justice. These wretched creatures, imbruted and stained with innumerable murders, seem to have had very little idea of the usages of civilized people in regard to captives ; and any one who will compare the story of Mr. Moens with the narratives of the prisoners given in Mr. Abbott’s book, will see how absurdly the bandits neglected their advantages. After all, it is your high-toned Southern gentleman, compact of the best blood of tire Cavaliers and the Huguenots, and presenting in this unhappy hemisphere the finest reflection of the English nobleman’s character, who understands best how to use a prisoner. There is nothing like having in your power from childhood a number of helpless human beings, to teach you how to treat a captured enemy; and we cannot help thinking that Mrs. Moens, who will not spare the American Unionists a sneer in the first chapter of her diary, would have understood us better if her husband had been in the hands of Captain Wirz instead of Captain Manzo, Had Mr. Moens been a soldier of the Union, taken while fighting to defend his country against rebellion, he would have been carried into the midst of a people inured to the practice of cruelty by slavery, and all the more abominable because they believed themselves Christian and civilized. There he would have been thrust into a roofless close, already densely thronged With thousands of famished, sick, and maddened men. He would have had no shelter from the blazing sun or drenching storm, except such as the happier wild creatures make themselves in holes and burrows. Guards, emulous in murder, would have been set over him, with instructions to shoot him, if he reached, in the delirium of famine, across a certain line to clutch a bone, or stooped to moisten his lips in a pool less filthy than those at which his comrades quenched their thirst within the bounds. In the mountains of Naples, the brigands gave him to eat and drink of their scanty fare, and shared with him the hist crust and the last drop. In Georgia, in the midst of plenty, his keepers would have slowly starved him to death, and would have driven away, with threats and curses, any that offered to succor his distress. If he escaped, they would have hunted him with bloodhounds, and so brought him back ; and if he sickened under his torture, they would have left him, naked and unsheltered, to languish with wasting disease and devouring vermin, — to die, or to rot and drop away piecemeal while yet alive.
Other writers on brigandage, besides Mr. Moens, relate anomalous facts concerning it, which can, perhaps, be matched only in this country, where alone the cruelty and impunity of Italian brigandage can be matched. It is well known that for a long time the heirs of Fra Diavolo received from the government a pension bestowed in recognition of that distinguished chief’s services to humanity. The retired chief, Talarico, is now in the undisturbed enjoyment of the gains of brigandage upon his place near Naples; and Count Saint-Jorioz, in his interesting work, It Brigantaggio alla Frontiera Pontificia, declares that in some cases the employes of the Italian government in the Neapolitan provinces are men known to have been in other times manutengoli, or accomplices of brigands ; nay, that sometimes the very courts of law have favored, instigated, and connived at brigandage. Similarly, in our own country, we find men guilty of the cruelties of Andersonville and Columbia, and stained with treason, in the enjoyment of offices and honors throughout the South, while the servants of the law lend themselves to violence and murder with a boldness unheard of in Naples, where there is some show of decency in these things. At least, we have not read of the sindaco and policemen of any town of the Abruzzi who have openly applauded and joined the brigands in hunting and slaughtering peaceable inhabitants, as happened lately in New Orleans and Memphis ; and we feel quite sure that, if they had committed such an offence, it would not have been passed over in silence by the head of the Italian people. But, then, with all their errors, the Italians have not yet intrusted great power to the hands of a peasant of the class which produces brigands; whereas we have taken for our chief magistrate a man in whom everything generous and noble seems to have been extinguished by the hard conditions of a poor white’s life at the South.