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Historians in recent years have tried hard to intf.rnationai.izf. the study of America's past. They have brought transatlantic and borderland perspectives to bear on events ranging from the eighteenth-century "age of revolution" to the rise of modem Progressive reform, showing how developments stateside interacted with, succored, and drew from currents and practices in other parts of the world.1 Although these scholars' insights have visibly altered the state of the field, they have been applied unevenly-for example, more to the era of the Enlightenment and to the twentieth century than to the antebellum period and even more particularly the Old South.2
Close study of one relatively neglected figure in southern history- the Kentucky-born editor, political operative, and intelligence agent George Nicholas Sanders-offers an opportunity to engage these historiographical trends in a time and place into which they have not penetrated so deeply. Sanders's career highlights the connections between southern and European history in the 1840s and 1850s in a tantalizingly counterintuitive way that points to the southerner's quest to find his place not only within the nation but also in the larger world. Examination of Sanders's international profile also suggests problems and contradictions in the ideology of romantic nationalism that animated so many of his generation.
Sanders remains an understudied actor in southern history, in large part because of the fragmentary nature of the evidence about him, but a number of scholars have penned books and articles that explore various aspects of his career. Tying together this existing literature is the assumption that one cannot take Sanders's thought at face value, that he remained a self-interested manipulator or "wire-puller" who sought riches and influence more than republican government and universal revolution. This article challenges that conceit, interpreting Sanders's commitments both to the South and to European dissidence as genuine rather than merely instrumental. No doubt George Sanders sought to profit handsomely from his lifelong pursuit of various political causes; and yet his own interest and the national interest-his self-aggrandizement and his ideological devotion to free government- curiously intertwined. The premise of this article is that political and intellectual historians should treat Sanders's thinking as an important illustration of key problems in Civil War-era southern internationalism, particularly the clash between southern racism and European republicanism. This path...