American contact
with Italy
goes back a long way. True, that probable native of Genoa
named Columbus
came to the New World not for Italy
but as a captain for Spain,
and Giovanni da Verrazzano was in
the service of Francis I of France
when he sailed into New York
Harbor in 1524. But in
1610, only three years after Jamestown
was founded, a settler named Albiano Lupo landed there
and, unlike many other new Virginians, survived and prospered. The Taliaferros,
a family of Genoese origin, arrived in Virginia
by 1647 and became prominent in my familys home county, Gloucester; one Taliaferro became a
Confederate major general...
The number of
Italian Americans however remained small for centuries. As late as 1850 the
census showed only 3,645 Italians among the more than two million American
residents born abroad. Nor were the Americans who visited Italy at first
very numerous. One early visitor was Thomas Jefferson, who went down to
Piedmont from Paris
in 1786-1787, seeking seeds for American farmers of the superior Piedmont rice.
The question
arose whether the new American republic should send official representatives -
though not to "Italy", which politically did not exist. In the early
1800s the Italian peninsula was divided into seven pieces, of which one was
under the Popes and another under the Austrians. In the
northwest, the Savoy family
ruled over the misnamed Kingdom
of Sardinia. Their
holdings included that island but their kingdoms center was Piedmont, Turin was their handsome capital, and Genoa was their biggest port. Trade with the
American republic began to develop - the Piedmontese
liked American tobacco to smoke and American cotton to weave - and an American
consulate opened at Genoa
in 1798. The Savoys
were unsure whether they wanted to open diplomatic as well as consular
relations. Consuls were supposed to concentrate on trade and shipping problems;
diplomats were involved with political questions. Whether American democracy
was contagious or not , it was something an autocratic
monarchy needed to think about.
In 1838 the
two countries finally agreed to exchange diplomatic representatives, and the first American
envoy arrived in Turin
in 1840. His name was Hezekiah
Gold Rogers, and it soon became clear that he was seriously
unbalanced. The Sardinian authorities told the chief nurse of Turins insane asylum
to do his best to help him. Then it turned out that the consul at Genoa, John Bailey, was a notorious
bankrupt. The new Sardinian envoy in Washington
was instructed to say politely to the State Department that his government
believed it wrong to leave a madman and a bankrupt as Americas
chief representatives in the kingdom. Eventually they were replaced.
American
envoys were also sent to the Papal States in Rome and to the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies, which despite its confusing name was Sicily plus southern Italy
and was ruled by despotic Bourbon kings in Naples. Those were different days in
diplomacy. It was not just that Americans were dealing with European kings
rather than democrats; for our diplomats those were halcyon days of
independence. The trans-Atlantic telegraph did not begin to function until
1866. Before that, an American envoy was sent to a post in Europe
armed with general instructions from the State Department. Further correspondence
between him and headquarters would take two to three weeks in either direction.
When a crisis arose he must deal with it as he thought best, without Washington dictating
every move. True, there were no world wars back in the 1800s; but there were critical
moments.
One day in
April 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi called on John
Moncure Daniel, the American envoy in
Turin. The
previous year Garibaldis corps of volunteers had done wondrous service in
the war that took Lombardy from Austria
and added it to the Savoy
kingdom. Victory was won with the help of a large French army, and now Napoleon
III was asking Vittorio Emanuele II for the reward the Savoy king had agreed
to: the hand of the kings 15-year-old daughter for the emperors much
older, dissolute cousin, and the cession to France of the duchy of Savoy and
the city of Nice.
Garibaldi, a native of Nice, was enraged, and was not mollified when the
king told him that if he was losing the cradle of his own family, Savoy,
Garibaldi could bear to see Nice go.
If Nice declares
independence, Garibaldi asked Daniel, will the United
States provide it protection (from France, he did
not need to say) and assistance?
Daniel thought
fast. He was a democrat as well as a Democrat and he did not care for the
self-made French emperor. But the United States
was not looking to go to war with France. If he consulted Washington it could take
six weeks for an answer.
Daniel told
Garibaldi that the United
States would have nothing to do with the
matter.
American policy was to recognize all governments that succeeded in establishing
themselves, but there was no chance that little Nice could prevail against big France.
Garibaldi said, no doubt with a sigh, that he had anticipated Daniels
reply. He left his home town to its fate, and instead sailed out of Genoa the next month with a thousand volunteers, bound for
Sicily.
Daniel wrote to the State Department that if Garibaldi succeeded in landing on
the island he would succeed in his plans. Few if any others thought so; the
plans were grandiose; but they succeeded. Garibaldi and his famous Thousand
captured Sicily, marched north to Naples, put an end to the Bourbon kingdom,
and then handed it all to Vittorio Emanuele II, who proclaimed that he was no
longer king of Sardinia but of Italy. Just as well, I always thought, that
Minister Daniel had not waited to hear from Washington what he should tell il Liberatore
about Nice.
There was,
however, a later case when Washington
had to be consulted about Garibaldi. In January 1861 a Republican named Lincoln won the White
House. He would obviously replace all Democrats, including John Daniel. More
importantly, Southern states began to secede from the Union
- and Daniel was a proslavery Virginian. He resigned his commission and went
home to Richmond
to become a fiery Confederate editor.
He was replaced
by an abolitionist from Vermont named George Perkins Marsh, who
arrived in Turin just as Confederate and Union
armies met at Bull Run. Marshs main job
when he reached Turin
was to dissuade the Italian government from recognizing the Confederacy. He
succeeded; these Italians might be autocrats, but they did not like slaveowners. Four years before the Civil War began, in
1857, Marshs racist predecessor Daniel had been angered by a ballet he saw
in Genoa called
Bianchi e Negri. The ballet was said to have been
inspired by Uncle Toms Cabin, which had been translated into Italian soon
after its appearance in America
and had sold well in Piedmont. The
ballets first scene was at a plantation in the American South, where white
ladies danced with white gentlemen. In the last scene the ladies were dancing
with liberated black slaves.
A difficult
problem for Marsh came when Giuseppe Garibaldi grandly told the Americans that
he was willing to come back to America "he had once lived on Staten
Island" to become commander-in-chief of the Union forces. The
answer to that obviously had to come from Washington, and soon enough it did: an offer
to the Liberator of a commission, but only as major general. Garibaldi refused.
Marsh wrote Secretary of State William H. Seward that he was relieved; it would
be difficult to employ a general who thought himself on a par with governments
and sovereigns.
It took me a long
time to gain a full appreciation of George Perkins Marsh. Often, in the years I
worked at the Rome embassy, I would pass through
the protocol office just off the top of the grand staircase in the Palazzo
Margherita and, in passing, I would glance at the
photographs of our old envoys to Italy. The one with the best beard
and longest term of service (21 years!) was someone named Marsh. He was not
Ambassador, but Minister, to Italy.
Until 1893 America
had ministers who headed legations instead of ambassadors heading embassies,
the latter being, it was thought, too high-level for a republic that avoided
(or said it avoided) entangling relationships abroad.
[... George
Perkins Marsh. wrote Man and Nature which was the first important
American work on the environment and, is still in print. ]
Both Marsh and
his predecessor Daniel suffered from leaks, of a sort perhaps not very
different from the ones we read about today.
Daniel arrived in
Turin in 1853
when he was twenty-seven, unmarried, unwell, and homesick. He wrote to Arthur Peticolas, a close friend back home in Richmond, that the Piedmontese
were simply not as good as the Americans, and the
girls were uglier. Counts who stank of garlic "as
did the whole country" had sponged on him for seats in his box at the
opera. He was meeting diplomats who had "titles as long as a flagstaff,
and heads as empty as their hearts." These were strictly private comments,
Daniel told Peticolas, and none of it should get into
the papers. All of it did, in Richmond and soon
in Turin. Now
it was not garlic but what people called 'the garlic letter" that caused a
stink. Daniel offered to resign. Secretary of State William Marcy wrote back to
him that the matter had been discussed by President Franklin Pierce and his
cabinet; no one thought Daniel should give up his post. He stayed, for seven
years, and became arguably Americas
ablest diplomat in Europe. He saw himself
becoming envoy not just to part but to all of a new, reunited Italy - until Lincoln and secession came on the scene.
Marshs leak
was different. The State Department carelessly published in one of its annual
volumes on Foreign Relations of the United States
a secret dispatch from Marsh commenting (not incorrectly) that Italy followed
the dictates of Napoleon III. Marsh was much admired in Italy, and
although there was a small storm he weathered it. He was fortunate that the
press never learned of a letter that he wrote in 1865 to his friend Spencer
Baird, the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. The new Kingdom
of Italy had moved its
capital from Turin to Florence. Foreign embassies and legations
necessarily moved, too, and Marsh did not like his new home one whit. Florence, he wrote Baird,
was a place of "Vile climate, detestably corrupt society, infinite
frivolity."
In 1871 the capital
moved to Rome.
Marsh liked that better, and spent his final eleven years there. He died in Italy, aged
eighty-one, in 1882, full of honors and accomplishments both large and small.
Whenever I go into Washington and gaze at the Washington Monument I recall that it was George
Marsh who pressed, successfully, for an obelisk - without the plan that had
been urged, to surround the obelisk with 100-foot marble columns.
Marshs
successor in Rome,
William Waldorf Astor,
had a different fate. Astor was the great-grandson of John Jacob Astor, a boy
from a German village called Waldorf who built a fur-trading empire in America. Like
Marsh, Astor never returned to America
from Italy; but while Marsh
always remained a democrat and an American, Astor moved from Italy to England, became a British citizen,
and after applying some of his immense wealth to public causes was made a
baron.
Ones fate is
really unknowable - which reminds me that once, on a visit to Palermo, my wife went to see the Capuchin
cemetery and catacombs. This is, in the view of many, a weird place. One finds
on display the embalmed and mummified remains of almost a thousand persons, lay as well as religious, that were placed there
between 1600 and 1920. One of the gentlemen is, or was, an American vice consul named Paterniti who died in Palermo in 1911.
Paterniti was not, one might say,
the only American consular officer to go underground in Italy. During
World War II the young consul at Nice, Walter Orebaugh,
was taken prisoner by the Italians. He escaped, and joined the Italian
partisans for a harrowing year and a half in Tuscany
and the Marche.
Decades later, Orebaugh told his rather heroic story
in a memoir called Guerrilla in
Striped Pants.
I can sometimes
wish to have lived in older times-though not in order to lie mummified under Palermo, or to present
diplomatic credentials to cruel kings. The question is,
what will the future bring diplomacy? That great Italian Giuseppe Mazzini " true patriot if failed republican" warned his
countrymen, "Slumber not in the tents of your fathers. The world is
advancing."