Operating in a rural Piedmontese community where his crimes were initially attributed to wolves, Orsolano carried out a sequence of attacks against children over roughly a year, each followed by deliberate concealment of remains. His eventual exposure came not through investigative method but through a surviving physical clue and a coerced confession. The postmortem treatment of his body — dissection and retention of anatomical specimens by the University of Turin — reflects the period's nascent criminological interest in locating the origins of violent behavior in physical form.

As president of the Confederacy, he led a government whose founding explicitly centered the preservation and expansion of slavery, making him the political face of a secessionist project that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. His prior decades of federal service — as a U.S. Army officer, congressman, and Secretary of War — gave him the institutional knowledge and credibility to organize a sustained military resistance against the Union. The Confederacy he led ultimately failed, but the ideological cause he championed left a durable imprint on American political and social history.