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At the outset of Italy's struggle for political regeneration religious differences divided American opinion as to the justice of the Italian demands and continued to color that opinion throughout the years that followed. Before the election of Pius IX to the Papacy, Americans had read and heard a great deal about the tyranny of the various despotic governments of Italy after the Congress of Vienna. Books of travel, memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, accounts of newspaper correspondents in various cities of the peninsula, stories told by returning travellers and by Italian exiles in America had painted a most gloomy picture of the spiritual and physical conditions under which many liberals were suffering in the dungeons of the despots who had been restored to power after the downfall of Napoleon. Nowhere were conditions worse, it was believed, than in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and in the Papal States.

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