8 Italians
Early Italian Presence in the Americas
According to immigration historian, Roger Daniels, “no other ethnic group in American history” immigrated in such large numbers in so short a time as did the Italians; more than 4.1 million Italians entered the U.S. between 1880 and 1920. Curiously enough, “Italians, like the Chinese, had a strong migratory tradition,” and Italians had emigrated to a wide variety of destinations outside of Europe, including to North Africa and South America. But prior to the late 1800s, only a scattered few thousand Italians had come to North America.[1]
And yet, the few who came did leave an impression. In his book, Coming to America, Daniels runs through a list of notable Italians starting with Cristoforo Colombo (Christopher Columbus). Then there was Amerigo Vespucci from Florence, after whom the Americas were named. Vespucci explored the coast of South America, but he never made it to North America. A Venetian, Giovanni Caboto, was the first European to explore the New England coast, although students of American history often mistake Caboto as an Englishman because of the anglicized spelling of his name (John Cabot) that often appears in English-language accounts. And another Florentine, Giovanni da Verrazzano, was the first European to sail into New York Harbor. These Italian explorers, however, were all working on behalf of other European powers—Colombo for Spain, Vespucci for Spain and later for Portugal, Caboto for England, and Verrazzano for France.[2]
In addition to these Italian sea captains, Italian soldiers accompanied the Spaniard De Soto on his trek across the South and into the Southwest as well as the Frenchman La Salle on his forays around the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi River. And Italian priests were among the first Catholic mission fathers to establish settlements in the Southwest when it was still part of the Kingdom of New Spain. “All told several hundred Italians participated in the exploration and conquest of North America.”[3]
There were Italians present in the British colonial era and throughout the U.S. national era as well. For example, as early as 1622, there were several Venetian glassblowers in Jamestown. In 1656, a community of more than a hundred Waldensians (Italian Protestants) settled in the Dutch colonies of New York and Delaware. And when Thomas Jefferson built Monticello—his plantation home near Charlottesville, Virginia—he recruited Italian stonemasons to help. Later, after he had become president, Jefferson recruited Italian musicians to form the core of the first United States Marine Band. During the American War of Independence, Italian soldiers served in the revolutionary armies, and a wealthy Italian fur trader, Giuseppe Maria Francesco Vigo, provided provisions and crucial wartime intelligence to American military leader George Rogers Clark, operating in the Western frontier in Illinois during the Revolutionary War. (Nearly a hundred years later, during the