Nicholas Brown and the U.S. Consular Service in the Italian Revolutions of 1848

Simeon Andonov Simeonov

Introduction

Were claims to popular sovereignty compatible with assertions of divinely ordained authority? With the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, this question provoked contentious debate throughout Europe, but nowhere more so than in the realm of the Papal States, a small Italian polity under the direct rule of the Pope. The Papal States faced the first of many daunting revolutionary challenges in the late 1790s, when French republicans led a comprehensive campaign against the Pope, whose political authority they regarded as profoundly illegitimate. The spirit and language of French republicanism quickly spread across the Alps to Italy, where French generals such as Napoleon Bonaparte inspired local populations to rebel against their rulers and cast away the vestiges of ecclesiastical authority.

It was in this context that Giovanni Battista Sartori, a native Roman merchant, became the first U.S. consul to the Papal States in 1798. Finding himself amidst revolutionary tribulations, Sartori received his first consular instructions from Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, who recognized the utility of consular establishments in containing French radicalism. In his letter to Sartori, Pickering expressed his desire to see republicanism triumph in the seat of papal power: “Would to God that the Roman Republic was a self-governed state; and that all the republics which the French boast of erecting on the ruins of monarchs and despots were not subjected to a tyranny tenfold more terrible and oppressive than any which their arms have overturned.” Frightened by the radical turn of the French Revolution, Pickering viewed U.S. consuls as instruments of containing radicalism while also promoting the ideals of American republicanism. “Not one republic now existing in Europe is free,” Pickering lamented in 1798, adding that “France itself never felt despotism so dreadful as that under which it now groans.”¹ A popular republic at the heart of ecclesiastical power—what better challenge to the Old Regime in Europe, and what better proof of the dawning of a modern age in which the separation of church and state, that cornerstone of American republicanism, would become a universal principle among the nations of the Earth?

Pickering’s words turned out to be prophetic indeed. Precisely half a century after he uttered these instructions to Sartori, another U.S. consul found himself confronted with the situation Pickering so presciently foresaw: a Roman republic on the cusp of a French invasion. Excited at the prospect of a new secular republic at the heart of papal power, consul Nicholas Brown, of Providence, Rhode Island, could not contain his emotional response to republican victories in the revolutionary year 1848, even though he knew this would aggravate the U.S. secretary of state. U.S. consuls’ duty, according to their instructions from Washington, was “to ‘respect the powers that be’; and under every change of government, use their endeavors to protect the persons and property of American citizens.” In other words, U.S. consuls were not to meddle in the internal affairs of foreign states; they had to focus on the protection of U.S. citizenship and commerce rather than on political affairs, which were reserved for ambassadors, the only persons invested with diplomatic character.²

Even though consuls’ non-diplomatic character nominally precluded them from recognizing foreign governments, their public status nonetheless made them important political figures who shaped the course of international events. In the Age of Revolution, a period of political struggles for independence and democratic participation lasting from the outbreak of the American Revolution to the European revolutions of 1848, consuls actively contested the boundaries of diplomatic exclusion prescribed by the nascent field of international law. From the Caribbean and the new South American republics to the Apennine peninsula, consuls participated in a series of quiet and tumultuous revolutions—from the extension of social policy beyond the realm of the nation-state to the conclusion of consular conventions stipulating the terms of international commerce—that remade the diplomatic and global political order.³

Nicholas Brown thus began his consular career in a period marked by profound transformations of the consular institution and ongoing negotiations of its relationship to republican independence, on the one hand, and diplomatic authority, on the other. Brown’s actions in the events of 1848 fit into a broader geographic and historical pattern of political contestation of consulship which characterized the Age of Revolution. Though nominally excluded from the diplomatic realm by the reactionary powers of Europe, consuls claimed an ever-expanding array of public functions over the early nineteenth century, with some international legal scholars championing granting consuls diplomatic authority.⁴

In few other places did the contestation of the consulship role go further than in the case of consul Nicholas Brown, who not only extended the purview of consular authority but, in fact, pursued a policy of recognizing the Roman Republic in direct contradiction of his instructions from Washington.⁵ Although Brown’s recognition of Roman independence was unusual in reversing the longstanding policy of non-recognition of revolutionary polities, it would be erroneous to interpret his political agency in revolutionary Rome as a mere curiosity. Instead, this article situates Brown in the context of an expanding U.S. consular and ministerial network, embedding his consular tenure within a longer chronological trajectory and a wider geographic scope. When read in this institutional context, Brown’s actions in 1848–1849 highlight a novel rethinking of the diplomatic character of consular establishments even as they accentuate the deep entanglement of the early Republic with the question of republican sovereignty.

Nicholas Brown, Vice-Consuls, and the Roman Revolution

The profound historical relationship between revolution and consulship has so far eluded academic analysis.⁶ While some scholars have chronicled the activities of consular agents in the Age of Revolutions, they have largely failed to pose and answer the more important question of why consulates expanded during revolutionary periods and how precisely these institutions affected the trajectory of revolution itself. Italy is a particularly fruitful case study for answering these questions. Judging by the available evidence of the U.S. consular footprint on the Apennine peninsula, for example, one can conclude that revolution was a powerful engine for expanding consular relations in the early nineteenth century.

The timing of U.S. consular establishments in Italy corroborates this observation, for while Italian merchants had expressed interest in trading with North America as early as the 1780s, it was only with the outbreak of the French Revolution that the United States and some Italian polities established consular relations.⁷ Timothy Pickering’s interest in establishing consulates in Italy and other parts of the Old World reflected the tribulations of the revolutionary 1790s, when warfare, naval blockades, and North African piracy put great pressures on tenuous transatlantic commercial networks.⁸ As an agency of the state, the consulship provided the promise of alleviating the bilateral risks of long-distance shipping. But it also played an important political function as well. As an ostensibly non-diplomatic agency, the consulship could “cloak” the political recognition of a revolutionary polity by another state without necessarily putting either party in open confrontation with an imperial overlord claiming sovereignty over rebelling provinces.⁹

It is for similar reasons—namely, to boost dwindling international commerce and negotiate the thorny question of political recognition—that the consulship resurfaced as an important commercial and political agency across the Italian peninsula in the 1840s, as popular movements again posed some of the very same questions the 1790s had failed to resolve. While Nicholas Brown went further than most of his colleagues in his support of Roman republicanism (and Italian independence), he was by no means the sole U.S. agent grappling with the consequences of revolutionary change on the Italian peninsula.

Brown operated in a wide and dense network of communications stretching across the entire peninsula and comprising ten consulates as well as dozens of vice-consulates reaching far into the Italian hinterlands. The main U.S. consular establishments in Italy—those in Rome, Genoa, Livorno, Naples, and Trieste—relied on an extensive system of vice-consulates for their everyday operations. In the increasingly complex duties consuls had to fulfill, they came to rely on vice-consuls throughout their districts as their informants, agents, and even substitutes in the frequent cases of vacancy or absence.¹⁰ Vice-consulates filled the spatial and institutional vacuum surrounding the consular institution, and their fluid relationship with consulates is crucial to understanding how exactly U.S. consuls in Italy—and especially Nicholas Brown in Rome—negotiated power and authority on the eve of revolution.

Like his colleagues in other parts of the peninsula, Brown depended on the auxiliary services of his vice-consuls at Ancona, Civitavecchia, and Commachia to keep abreast of the political developments in his district and faraway parts of Italy.¹¹ These vice-consuls supplied him with necessary information, but they also could assume Brown’s consular station as deputies in case he had to leave the capital. Brown frequently took advantage of this prerogative and conferred his consular authority to his vice-consul and consular secretary, Antoine Ardisson, “a French man” who, in Brown’s assessment, could “not speak a word of English.”¹² With Brown being outside Rome for much of the time from 1847 to 1849, it was the local vice-consul who fulfilled the consular functions of issuing passports, registering commercial turnover, surveying the local press, and corresponding with the authorities. Ardisson wrote extensive reports on Pope Pius IX. and followed the political events, using his superior command of French and Italian to transmit important communications and insights to Brown.

Ardisson’s correspondence with the Department of State demonstrates how damaging Brown’s absence from the consulate was to maintaining regular transatlantic communications. In December 1847, for example, Secretary of State James Buchanan first referred to Ardisson as Brown’s consular substitute in Rome in a letter to two private citizens. They had informed him of a meeting at Broadway Tabernacle, expressing “the earnest sympathy, with which the American people regard the efforts of Pope Pius IX. and the Italian people for National Independence & constitutional Liberty.” Buchanan tasked the citizens with transmitting this information to Ardisson, who would then seek an audience with the Pope to communicate this important piece of evidence for U.S. public opinion vis-à-vis Italian independence.¹³ Yet, four months later, Buchanan addressed a letter to Nicholas Brown in which he refused to cover an account signed by “Antoine Ardisson, Secretary of the U.S. Consulate” on the grounds of “[n]o such officer being known to the Dep[artmen]t.”¹⁴ Whether Buchanan’s claim to be unaware of Ardisson’s appointment was sincere or not—that is, whether Buchanan chose to dissociate himself from Ardisson to avoid covering his claim, or whether the government clerks failed to make notice of Ardisson’s post—it is highly suggestive of the problematic state of communications between the Department and its consular officials, placing the latter in a precarious financial condition but also opening up new opportunities to explore the lack of strict government oversight.

Ardisson was not the only vice-consul who represented Brown amidst the revolutionary tribulations. On July 5th, 1849, following Brown’s involvement in the Roman uprising and his subsequent recall, Joseph Mozier, the U.S. vice-consul in Ancona, took over the Roman consulate. Having moved to Italy in 1845, this former merchant had studied sculpture in Florence for several years before moving to Rome to supplement Brown’s efforts in the midst of the Roman revolution. As a republican sympathizer, Mozier witnessed the French army’s entry into Rome (July 3rd, 1849) with great dismay. “The French were received by the Roman people with no demonstration of pleasure,” he wrote, “but on the contrary most of the Citizens withdrew in their houses shutting their windows, and closing their shops and other places of business or resort.” The first to suffer the consequences of the French occupation were foreigners, mostly from Lombardy, who had to surrender their arms and return to their countries, where they faced harsh penalties, including capital punishment. “This,” Mozier continued, “induced the English Consul and Mr. Brown the American Consul here, to afford those unfortunate soldiers a species of passport, which is irregular according to the strict instructions of their different Governments; Humanity alone, was consulted, in offering those men the only apparent means left to escape the severe fate by which they were threatened.”¹⁵

On this occasion, foreign consuls in Rome acted in unison to project a notion of humanitarianism, manifested through the issuing of irregular passports, as a measure to protect citizens whose only “crime (…) [had been] that they fought for the liberties of their Country against Austria and France.” To demonstrate the notion that what made consulship particularly potent in the context of this military occupation—namely, the perception that its humanitarian internationalism could restrain state violence—Mozier adduced the example of the French consul in Barcelona, who, “when that City was besieged, [had given] a similar protection to subjects of different Governments, as were proffered here, by the English and American Consuls.”¹⁶ In issuing passports to foreign immigrants, then, Nicholas Brown was not acting to favor U.S. citizens or to contest French authority; rather, he acted in the tradition of universal humanitarianism that distinguished the consular institution from the power of the authoritarian nation-state.¹⁷

To reinforce the consulate’s transcendent power over the nation-state, Mozier also reported the transgression of the restored political authorities over the consular establishment, which took place on July 6th, 1849. On that day, according to his testimony, “the Consulate dwelling was entered by from twenty to thirty French soldiers with fixed bayonets, with an officer at their head.” The U.S. flag, he continued, “was flying above the balcony of the residence, and our arms were over the door of entrance at the time.” The intruding soldiers, wrote Mozier, “were informed before coming into the house that it was the Consulate of the United States of America.” Taking no notice of the warning, “they rushed in and mounted the stairs, and were about entering the principal saloon, where the [Brown] family resided, and were at the moment.” Mrs. Brown, Mozier related, “met them at the door and remonstrated with them at the violation of the premises,” whereupon the officer “menaced her with his drawn sword threatening [sic] others of her household aiding her to prevent the soldiers from coming in.” Finally, the soldiers began retreating down the stairs, “but within the hall upon going out of the house, they took two persons who were [sic] waiting there for their passports, prisoners.” The two arrestees were men who had allegedly taken part in the defense of Rome.

Mozier witnessed the proceedings personally, as he was in the office “employed in the duties of the Consulate,” and learned about what was happening from one of Brown’s children who ran to him in tears. Thereupon, Mozier immediately rushed to the balcony and made the soldiers aware that they had committed an insult upon the U.S. flag by entering the consulate. “Mr. Brown, being wholly incapable to act in the matter,” he continued, “desired me to take the affair into my own hands…This I did,” Mozier proudly proclaimed to the Secretary of State. “Putting on my Consular uniform I proceeded at once to the headquarters of General Oudinot.”¹⁸

This scripted event—a break-in to the consular edifice and a subsequent consular remonstrance to the local authorities—was far from a peculiar occurrence in the Age of Revolution. Similar events had taken place as far as Pernambuco and throughout Spanish America, triggering an array of vindictive publications throughout the North Atlantic public sphere.¹⁹ In similar cases, authorities later excused their actions by stating that they were not really directed against the consul himself but against people in his surroundings. The Roman incident was no exception, for the French authorities claimed that “some of the people about the [consular] house,” that is, “Emigrants,” had “crowed like cocks,” thereby insulting the French officer.²⁰ In other similar incidents, the consular uniform had acted as the ultimate badge of protection for the consuls, the employees at the consular office, and the people who found refuge in the building from the excessive threat of violence on the part of local authorities.²¹

The lack of explicit international legal stipulation of consuls’ diplomatic immunity is what made such events possible; the public perception of the violation of international law is what made them notorious and newsworthy. Nicholas Brown was well aware of this, and despite his recent recall, he strategically used the authority of his substitute Mozier to protest against this perceived violation of international law. “Complaining of the treatment we have received,” Mozier summarized, “as a gross violation of the usages of civilized nations, asking for such reparation as was expected from other Christian powers under similar circumstances and instancing the honorable amende made to the French Consulate at Leghorn by the Austrians which occurred a month since, for a similar insult to the French flag, General Oudinot acknowledged the reason we had to complain and the serious nature of the aggression.” In response to the consular remonstrance, Oudinot promised reparation for the incident.²²

Nicholas Brown within the U.S. Consular Network in Revolutionary Italy

Ardisson’s and Mozier’s dispatches reveal vice-consuls’ intimate knowledge of power relations across the peninsula and their significance to the unfolding events in the Italian revolutions of 1848. At the same time, their actions, as well as Nicholas Brown’s activities in that period, fit within a larger peninsular pattern of U.S. consular and diplomatic agents not merely reacting to calls for democratization and secularization, but also shaping the trajectory of these demands and disseminating knowledge about the revolution throughout Italy. To comprehend the scope and significance of these consular and vice-consular activities in the papal capital, it is instructive to contextualize them within the institutional framework of the U.S. consular network across the Apennine peninsula. This approach will enable us to comprehend the stakes of Brown’s actions and ascertain their meaning and efficacy at the intersection of information brokering, changing notions of political legitimacy, and regional claims to self-government.

Rome was the seat of papal power, but it was hardly the most potent Italian polity, and hopes for Italian independence naturally gravitated around its northern peer, the Kingdom of Sardinia. Ruled by the Savoyard King Charles Albert, the Kingdom of Sardinia comprised the eponymous island and the northwestern part of the Italian Peninsula, where its capital of Turin was located. As a prominent peninsular power, the king of Sardinia followed the Roman revolution with great interest. In the spring of 1847, Ardisson reported that the occupation of the papal town of Ferrara by the Austrian forces had “excite[d] the minds” and had “even reached the sovereigns.” “The king of Sardinia,” as the most potent among the sovereigns, had “issued a protestation against the Austrian [sic] threatening them if they do not evacuate Ferrara, to send troops upon the States Lombardo Veneto and occupy [sic] them in a military way.”²³

Due to its relative military and political preeminence among the Italian polities, the Kingdom of Sardinia became an important beacon of hope for democratization that, “like the electric current, traversing the seas,” would bring about a transatlantic “communion of feelings” and the reign of national liberty.²⁴ Relations between Sardinia and the United States dated back to 1838, when Nathaniel Niles, a native of Vermont, had helped sign a commercial treaty with the Sardinian king. One of the important clauses of the treaty was its provision for the establishment of U.S. consulates throughout the realm who would ensure the safe passage of vessels, assist in shipwrecks, provide asylum for mariners, promote the abolition of duties, and facilitate the passage of U.S. citizens through Sardinian territory. The U.S. consul in Genoa described the treaty as a transformation in U.S. relations with Italy, as its free-port provisions and quarantine deregulations would enable Genoese ship owners to fit out transatlantic mercantile expeditions from Livorno.²⁵ Although Niles left the diplomatic service shortly after the conclusion of the 1838 treaty, his mission proved successful enough to secure him a new appointment at the embassy in Turin ten years later. His second term in Turin coincided with Italian efforts to establish representative governments throughout the peninsula.²⁶

Niles’s response to the revolutions across the peninsula forms an interesting counterpoint to Brown’s, and suggests the complex relationship between extraterritorial officials’ tasks as brokers of information and as transnational mediators of power. In his encounter with the Sardinian foreign minister, Niles articulated the main principles guiding U.S. foreign policy in the context of the Italian revolutions: both the “deep feeling of interest entertained by the American Government and people in the struggles (…) for the establishment of a common national independence” but also “the fixed policy of [the U.S.] government to avoid all interference” in foreign nations’ internal affairs.²⁷ It was with great dismay that Niles witnessed the failure of the short-lived Venetian republic of 1848–1849 to form “a prompt union with Sardinia,” its only chance of “escaping from the inexorable alternative of submission to the Austrian yoke."²⁸

Niles’s assessment of the Roman Revolution of 1848–49 was similarly bleak. Unlike Nicholas Brown, who had stood firmly on the side of the Roman people, Niles lamented the missed opportunity to unite the Italian people under the papacy. In his harsh appraisal of republican governments, Niles believed that it was necessary to keep the Pope at the helm of Roman politics so as to preserve the “moral influence of the Catholic faith” against “the prevailing disorders of the social system and the dissolving influence of irreligious doctrines.” The Pope was Catholic Europe’s chief antagonist to “the greater hazards of those distracting theories of communism and socialism which threaten most unfortunately to sweep away the liberties if not the civilization itself of the neighboring republics.”²⁹

In Niles’s assessment, the Kingdom of Sardinia was Italy’s only hope for political independence and democratic self-government. “It is to be remarked,” he wrote, “that the people of Sardinia are the Yankees of the Italian race, and the puritans of the Catholic faith, or in other words that they are eminently a people of order, enterprise, and religious convictions – qualities not to be found in the pleasure-loving, thoughtless, or profane inhabitants of lower and Southern Italy. Constitutional freedom may therefore work well here and yet fail in Tuscany, Rome and Naples.” It was only under a monarchical form of government with a standing army, and not in a republic divided by partisan allegiance, that Italians could hope to achieve independence from their foreign overlords.³⁰

Niles was a diplomat, not a consul, and as such possessed a stronger claim to publicly representing the United States in Italy. Unlike Rome, where consul Brown’s alienation from the papacy could be mitigated by the activities of a newly appointed U.S. ambassador, Turin did not host a U.S. consulate, which meant that Niles could act as the sole representative of his nation without having to fear a public confrontation with an unruly resident consul. He did, however, preside over a U.S. consul in Genoa and two U.S. vice-consuls in Spezia and Cagliari, although communications between the embassy and these agencies were sporadic at best. The fact that the U.S. embassy and consulate-general in the Kingdom of Sardinia operated in two separate cities—and continued to do so for most of the nineteenth century—had tangible repercussions for how both of these representative agencies worked and for how they negotiated their relationship with local political authority. Similar considerations about the relationship between ambassadors and consuls, or between various political and commercial centers within a single jurisdiction, characterized consular affairs in other parts of Italy as well.³¹

Unlike Rome, which concentrated the political and economic power of the Papal States, the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia, Turin, could only claim political authority over Genoa, but it is this latter city that defined the kingdom’s prosperity and its economic relationship to the wider Atlantic world. Further accentuating this disparity between the two cities, the U.S. consul in Genoa, John McPherson, pursued a very different policy toward the Italian revolutions of 1848 from that of ambassador Niles. Boasting a proud republican legacy, the Genoese populace did not simply stand by as other Italian locales mounted campaigns for political independence. In November 1848, consul McPherson reported “some commotion” in Genoa, as “several thousands of the people pulled down the two large Forts that commanded the city, inside the great outer walls.” These Forts, he continued, “were intended to keep things straight in the City, and cost ½ Million Dollars: they drove off all the Jesuits, burn’t the Police papers and dissolved the Police, numbers have of late been crying aloud in the Streets, at night, for a Republic, and down with the King etc.” These cries for republican independence reflected popular memories of eight centuries of Genoese republicanism prior to the Napoleonic conquest of 1797 and the Savoyard takeover of 1814. McPherson reported the deployment of 14,000 regulars and 12,000 national guards against 18,000 unarmed men for the quelling of the unrest. Still, despite the casualties, the popular cry for republican freedom went on “repeated[ly] several times, at night.”³²

Although McPherson did not mention the possibility of interceding on behalf of the republicans, he did support the private requests of U.S. citizens inimical to the ruling regime. Despite his lack of official diplomatic authority, the consul availed himself of the opportunities of his consular practice to make a political contribution to the struggle for Italian independence. On August 1st, 1848, he approved a petition by a Neapolitan noble named O. de A. Santangelo to reject his U.S. citizenship in order to assume parliamentary office “whilst a desperate war is waging by Italy against Austrian tyranny and usurpation.” In a language quite unusual for a petition to revoke U.S. citizenship, Santangelo called the Neapolitan king, Ferdinand II, “the gratuitous butcher of his own subjects and an unprovoked traitor of Italian Independence, thus acquiring the nickname of bombardatore from the latter, and a much less flattering from myself.”³³ Although McPherson could have advised the petitioner to modify his language in order to avoid potential embarrassment in case his letter was intercepted, he certified Santangelo’s identity and supported his request. In this case, the consul sanctioned the U.S. citizen’s critique of the excessive violence the king had exercised against his own people. McPherson’s assessment provides a striking parallel to the outcry provoked by the French bombardment of Rome in 1849, which prompted the consular body to congregate and promote a new humanitarian opposition to the use of military violence against civilians.³⁴

McPherson’s support for Santangelo’s petition and his later correspondence with the Department of State reveal his sympathy for the cause of Italian independence. In late 1848, the consul enthusiastically embedded the revolutionary events in Genoa within a broader European context. “France is firmly fixed as a Republic (…) Vienna has again revolutionized, and drove out the Emperor of Austria and his Troops from the city with great loss, and the people of Vienna have had the city in possession for the last 15 days.” Italy, too, was experiencing widespread social and political upheaval. Despite Austria and Sardinia making “great preparations (…) to take Lombardy” and the French and English fleets encircling Sicily, McPherson enthused, “Leghorn is in possession of the people, and all Sicily except Messina. All Europe has been in commotion and likely to continue some time.”³⁵ The events unfolding in Turin and Genoa were part of a truly Italian and European revolution which challenged the Restoration established by the Congress of Vienna more than three decades earlier. Having been a main pivot of this restoration of the ancien régime, Rome also became a primary battleground in the revolutions of 1848–1849.

As the revolutionary wave swept across the peninsula, U.S. consuls confronted the increasingly difficult task of negotiating their stance vis-à-vis the local authorities while continuing to prioritize the interests and security of U.S. citizens. Nicholas Brown learned how important this was from his experienced vice-consul, Ardisson, and from his immediate predecessor as Roman consul, fellow Providence man George Washington Greene, whose propensity for collecting extra fees on consular visas and passports had alienated him from U.S. citizens in Rome, precipitating his recall to the United States.³⁶ This notorious event likely influenced Brown’s approach to consulship, raising his awareness of the importance of his functions in the context of revolutionary activism. In May 1849, for example, Brown used his defunct consular authority to issue a passport for Adriano Lemmi, a key supporter of the Italian revolutionary cause sent on a diplomatic mission to Europe by Giuseppe Mazzini.³⁷ Following the French conquest of Rome in early July 1849, Brown’s exertions on behalf of Roman refugees provoked the ire of Nathaniel Niles in Turin, who castigated the fraudulent practice of issuing passports to persons “of more than doubtful character.”³⁸ In fact, Brown himself took advantage of U.S. consular visa-issuing policies to escape persecution and detention on his way to Sardinian territory.³⁹

Sardinian officials’ refusal to recognize U.S. consular passports on the grounds of the refugees’ political allegiance shows the extent to which the independent, and at times contradictory, policies at the various branches of the U.S. consular system in Italy entangled local political contestations with the realm of international affairs. Generally speaking, consular passports provided the only legitimate means of escaping political persecution, forcing even the most counter-revolutionary regimes to consider the repercussions of refusing admission to foreign citizens in possession of a consular passport. But in the case of the Roman refugees of 1849, the Sardinian authorities did not need to go that far to justify their policy of non-admission. The fact that Brown did not possess consular jurisdiction at the point of issuing their passports, coupled with consul Niles’s anti-immigrant sentiment, meant that Sardinia could refuse admission without openly breaking international conventions or even having to fear U.S. consular interference. Thus, even the last of Nicholas Brown’s activities in Italy—his issuing of passports to Roman refugees—can only be meaningfully understood if we take a broader view of the political processes and U.S. consular activities in other parts of the peninsula.

Conclusion

Nicholas Brown’s experiences as U.S. consul at Rome during the revolutionary events of 1848–1849 lend themselves to two generalizations. On the one hand, they provide an extraordinary example of a U.S. official’s ability to transcend the boundaries of his public authority in his commitment to republican ideals. On the other, they serve as a window into exploring the larger question of what it meant to be a foreign consul in a profoundly tumultuous period marked by the constant intersection of local contestations and international affairs.

Adopting this perspective suggests new ways of thinking about Brown’s experience within a larger peninsular and international framework. As we have seen, problems of unclear authority and jurisdictional limits pervaded the U.S. consular service during the Italian Risorgimento, directly influencing the mode of operation of the variety of ministerial, consular, and vice-consular stations. Although the status of certain political centers such as Rome, Livorno, or Turin might appear to have conferred upon them a crucial advantage over their peripheries, in terms of consular establishments, the reverse seems to have been the case. Vice-consulates were not mere subordinates to consulates, but in fact could equal and supersede them in terms of their commercial, political, or diplomatic significance.⁴⁰ Importantly, vice-consulates were crucial safeguards of the rights of U.S. citizens, all too often exposed to the abuses of local magistrates.⁴¹ To understand what U.S. consular authority in the Italian Risorgimento meant, we have to investigate the complex, shifting, and strategic relationship between vice-consulship, consulship, and diplomatic ministry.

Unsurprisingly, it was precisely the unclear character of consuls’ and vice-consuls’ public authority that rendered them threats to local order. In Rome particularly, the contested nature of political authority during the Risorgimento raised the stakes in the clash over the meaning of consular authority. The semi-diplomatic status and elusive recognition of foreign consuls stood at the heart of why these officials became particularly threatening to the political status quo. Nicholas Brown realized the possibilities of the consular office to their full extent in the tumultuous events of the Italian revolutions of 1848. The more conservative reactions of U.S. consuls elsewhere on the peninsula to popular claims for democratization demonstrates that Brown, though not the first to treat consulship as an instrument of transnational democratization and humanitarian protection, was among the agents with the most progressive vision of how consulship could remake the international order in the Age of Revolution.