The Nicholas Brown Project: From Archival Odyssey to Digital Reincarnation

David I. Kertzer

The Origins of the Nicholas Brown Project

Nicholas Brown, Brown University graduate and son of the man whose donation gave the university its name, was one of the most colorful—if underappreciated—figures in the revolution of 1848 in Rome.

As U.S. consul to Rome, he was the only American diplomat based there when the pope was driven from the city, the end of the thousand-year-long Papal States declared, and a Roman Republic established, proclaiming freedom of religion, of speech, and the press. Much to the dismay of both the U.S. secretary of state and the president, Nicholas Brown decided to play an active role in supporting the new republic, a role that only now can be fully appreciated with the recent rediscovery of the papers he left to Brown University.

That a valuable trove of Nicholas Brown’s papers was left to the University has long been known. In 1928, the Brown University Librarian reported the donation that year from one of Brown’s descendants of “two portfolios of autographic material…mostly consisting of letters received by Nicholas Brown when Consul at Rome.” The University Librarian added, “This is one of the most valuable gifts of autographs, outside those of the Lincoln Collection, ever made to the Library.”¹ This material eventually found its way to the John Hay Library’s special collections, and years ago, when I began working on my book on the Roman revolution,² I was struck by the richness of these documents. They contain correspondence between Nicholas Brown and many of the major figures in Italian history, documents almost completely unknown to Italian historians. Yet I was in for a bigger surprise, for it turns out that these were not the only precious documents from Brown’s time in Rome.

I learned of the existence of these documents not on the Brown University campus, but thousands of miles away, in one of the most colorful—or at least, colorfully located—archives in the world. As part of my research on nineteenth-century Italian history, I had gone many times to the historical archive of Rome’s Museum of the Risorgimento. Although it could not have a more central location in Rome, getting to it is not so simple, for it is housed just under the roofline of the Victor Emmanuel Monument, sometimes known as Rome’s “wedding cake.”

To reach the Museum—there is no indication anywhere to show it is to be found there—one has to enter a side door at the base of the Monument, walk up what seems like an endless set of wide marble staircases past museum exhibits, before then going outside to a high terrace that runs around the monument. Walking around, looking down over the Campidoglio and the ruins of the Roman Forum, one comes to an inconspicuous door that—even when it is supposed to be open—is often locked. Gaining entry through the door, one finds an antique elevator which conveys little hope that it could still possibly work. After offering a brief prayer that it will not shut down on route, one steps into its open steel cage, as the antiquated machinery comes to life and one traverses what seems an exceedingly long distance to the very top of the monument—the elevator’s only stop. There is to be found the archive of the Museum, with its rich collection of Risorgimento documents.

When I went up there in June 2017, I was putting the finishing touches on the manuscript of my book on the Roman Revolution. As I customarily do, I went to greet the archive’s vice director, Marco Pizzo. Pizzo mentioned that, as part of a new catalogue digitization project at the archive, they had recently catalogued thousands of documents that had not been previously processed. The new catalogue was not yet available to users; on my request, Pizzo kindly agreed to see if any of the new documents involved Nicholas Brown. Pizzo then discovered that, indeed, the newly catalogued materials included two folders filled with Nicholas Brown correspondence. I was surprised at the news, but was soon in for a much bigger surprise.

When the folders arrived at my table at the archive, I was disappointed to see that they did not contain original documents, but only blackened copies—a primitive kind of photostats—of the originals. My first thought was that perhaps at some point in the past, someone had made copies of some of the documents from the Brown University Library. Yet, as I read the first document, I was surprised to find that while it was similar to those in the Library's John Hay collection, I had not seen it before. I noted, for example, that along with the letters from Vice Consul Alfred Lowe to Nicholas Brown from Civitavecchia found in the existing Brown University collection, reporting the landing of French troops there in late April 1849, there were other such letters from Lowe to Brown, recounting the landings and subsequent troop movements. The mystery deepened: How had these letters become separated from the other Nicholas Brown papers? Where were the originals to be found? And how did these copies end up at the Roman archive?

The first step toward solving these mysteries did not take long. As I turned over the first document to focus on the second in the pile, I saw out of the corner of my eye that something was written on the back of the previous one. When I glanced back, what I saw came as such a shock that for a moment I felt disoriented. I was perched high over the Roman Forum, with a folder filled with dark reproductions of historic documents before me, materials long buried in the archive, yet what I saw on the back of the document was a purple stamp that said “Annmary Brown Memorial.” Looking quickly through the documents in the two folders, I saw that they all bore the same stamp.

The Annmary Brown Memorial is a building on the Brown University campus that I had walked by every day for the previous quarter century, without ever having an inkling it contained Nicholas Brown’s papers from his time in Rome. The Nicholas Brown collection at Brown, as far as anyone at the University then knew, was limited to the carefully catalogued documents found in a scrapbook housed in the John Hay Library.

The building housing the memorial is, indeed, rather odd: a windowless, squat structure of cement blocks, with impressive bronze doors. It was built by Rush Hawkins (1831–1920) as a memorial to his wife, the daughter of Nicholas Brown. (It is not the only memorial at the University to one of Nicholas Brown’s daughters, as Carrie Tower, on the corner of the Front Green, was built to honor Annmary’s sister, Carrie.)

In addition to intending to use the Annmary Brown Memorial as a crypt for his wife and himself—and indeed they are both entombed there—Rush Hawkins also wanted them to be surrounded by his art and rare book collection, for which he was famous. The Annmary Brown Memorial remained an independent institution until 1948, when it became part of Brown University.³

Back atop the King Victor Emmanuel II Monument on that June day, I created an inventory of the newly-unearthed document copies found there. On returning to the U.S., I contacted the Brown librarians and the hunt for the original documents began. It turns out that, along with his collecting, Rush Hawkins—a Civil War hero, a member of the New York legislature, and an obsessive collector—put together scrapbooks of many of the items he amassed (for more on this subject, see Deidre Lynch’s essay in this volume). In one of those scrapbooks, these dozens of his father-in-law’s letters from Rome were found. How they became separated from the others—the ones that were given in the 1920s to Brown University—remains a mystery which we have yet to solve. This scrapbook remained for many decades unnoticed in the bowels of the windowless monument, until it recently became part of a pile of material that the Library decided to catalogue; the librarians I'd contacted found the scrapbook in that pile awaiting processing.

While we were unable to discover how and when Nicholas Brown’s correspondence became separated into the two collections, we were able to determine how the photographic copies of the documents ended up in Rome’s Risorgimento archive. Among the papers of Margaret Stillwell—the woman who oversaw the Annmary Brown Memorial in the first decades of the twentieth century—were, we discovered, extensive correspondence with H. Nelson Gay, a famous American bibliophile based in Rome. Born in 1872 in Newton, Massachusetts, Gay had moved to Italy in 1898, a few years after his graduation from Harvard College, and remained in Rome for the next three decades.

It appears that the existence of the Nicholas Brown-related papers in the Annmary Brown Memorial was known to at least one member of the Brown University faculty in 1925, and that that faculty member, Professor George, was familiar enough with the papers to know that they contained correspondence involving Giuseppe Mazzini, theorist of the Italian Risorgimento and leader of the short-lived Roman Republic in 1849. Presumably in an encounter with Nelson Gay in the summer of 1925, either while Gay was in New England for a summer visit or in Rome (where Gay hosted visiting American and British scholars at his home), Professor George mentioned the collection to Gay.

On September 25 of that year, Margaret Stillwell addressed a letter to Gay in Rome, referring to Professor George’s inquiry on Gay’s behalf. Recognizing that Gay was “desirous of obtaining photostats” of Mazzini’s letters and related materials, she enclosed a list of thirteen Mazzini items in the collection and offered to have “any or all of them reproduced” for him, suggesting that twenty-five dollars might cover the costs. The list included thirteen items, including two letters addressed by Mazzini to Nicholas Brown, along with a number involving Rush Hawkins’ American Mazzini support group, the Universal Republican Alliance, of the 1860s (on this, see Daniel Banks' essay in this volume).

Early the next year Gay, having learned of other Mazzini materials in the Rush Hawkins collection, informed Stillwell he was working on an article examining Mazzini’s relations with the exiled Italian patriot Antonio Gallenga and asked for copies of relevant materials from the Annmary Brown Memorial.⁴ On February 12, 1926, Stillwell wrote back to him, reporting that the collection did indeed contain a considerable number of letters involving Gallenga and Mazzini and that she was having photostatic copies made for him. Gay also mentioned that he was planning to write an article on Nicholas Brown’s time as U.S. consul to Rome and asked for copies of related material.⁵ In March, Stillwell provided a list of the seven letters in the collection that Alfred Lowe had written from Civitavecchia to Nicholas Brown, along with other letters to and from Brown. Following Stillwell’s sending of the latest batch of photostatic copies from the collection, Gay wrote her from Rome on May 4, 1926 on the stationery of the Library for American Studies in Italy, of which he, a founder of the Library, served as honorary president:

My dear Miss Stillwell,

The fine parcel of forty-one photostats came the same day as your kind letter of April 16th. Many thanks for all the interest that you have shown in my work and for the trouble you have taken. This last lot contains some excellent material that will be the most valuable for me in the preparation of my sketch of Brown. His figure grows in interest with the material. I feel now as if I had in hand all that I can ever expect to get with regard to his life in Rome… There are several letters in the recent volumes of Mazzini’s correspondence, that contain brief references to Brown as a tried friend.

I enclose my cheque for seven dollars and seventy-five cents which I understand to be the amount of my indebtedness for the photostats and for the portrait of Brown that is on the way.

Mussolini continues to interest us here and the news of the great English strike distracts us from historical work. English troubles help us to appreciate Mussolini better…

Following further correspondence, Gay wrote his last letter to Stillwell at the Annmary Brown Memorial on October 20, 1926. It ended with both a glimpse into the scale of Gay’s Risorgimento collection and a flash of false modesty: “I trust that I am not imposing upon you. This period of Italian history interests me immensely and I may say that, as my private library consists of some fifty thousand volumes and pamphlets upon it, I am not entirely ignorant of the subject.”

Gay would die six years later. As his obituary in the New York Times noted, he “was said to possess the best library in existence on the history of Italy between 1815 and 1870.”⁶ Gay bequeathed the bulk of his manuscript collection to the Italian government through its Ministry of National Education, which then entrusted it to the Royal Institute for the History of the Risorgimento, in whose archive it would end up being deposited. The collection consisted of over three thousand original documents, including large numbers of letters from virtually all the major figures of the Risorgimento, from Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour, to Napoleon III and major figures of the Church (Pope Leon XIII, along with several cardinal secretaries of state of the period).⁷

But Gay did not want to leave his enormous collection of books, pamphlets, and other printed materials on the Risorgimento to either the Italian government or to an Italian library. In 1931, a year before his death, he donated the 43,000 items to his alma mater. In response to a letter of appreciation for the gift from the Harvard University Librarian, Gay replied: “I am very much pleased that you call the acquisition “wonderful”. It really is, though it may ill become me to say so…The Harvard College Library is now the best place in the world, no spot in Italy excepted, for the study of that period on published sources.”⁸

The Contents of the Nicholas Brown and Rush Hawkins Collections

If Nelson Gay expressed great interest in the Rush Hawkins papers it was for a good reason, for the Hawkins scrapbook contains a great wealth of otherwise unknown and unexamined primary sources written by and to many of the many figures of the Risorgimento. What Gay was apparently unaware of were the documents that were given to the Brown University Library in 1927. This digital project brings together both sets of documents. While many of the documents in the Rush Hawkins collection date to events that only occurred after Nicholas Brown’s death, events in which Hawkins himself was involved, they also contain many documents that clearly came from Nicholas Brown’s original collection. Perhaps the clearest example involves the series of reports that Brown’s vice consul in the port city of Civitavecchia began sending Brown on April 24, 1849, reporting the dramatic landing of French troops there and their subsequent reinforcement. The scrapbooks given to the Brown University Library in 1927 contained only two such letters, dated April 28 and May 10. The Rush Hawkins scrapbook contained an additional seven such letters, the first dated April 24 and the last June 26. Together they offer an exceedingly valuable firsthand account of these dramatic and consequential events.

The trove of original letters in the combined Nicholas Brown collection contain many from the major players in the Risorgimento, among them Vincenzo Gioberti, Prime Minister of the Savoyard Kingdom; Massimo D’Azeglio, who succeeded Gioberti as Savoyard Prime Minister during the French siege of Rome; Daniele Manin, leader of the 1848 uprising against the Austrians in Venice; and Cristina Belgiojoso, Italian aristocrat and perhaps the foremost woman associated with the Risorgimento. But the most valuable set of letters is that written by the most prominent theorist of the Italian Risorgimento—and influential philosopher of European nationalism and republicanism—Giuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini was also at the center of the dramatic events surrounding the Roman revolution, as he served as effectively the head of the troika leading the government of the Roman Republic. Together, the documents include eight letters Mazzini wrote to Nicholas Brown; one he wrote to Brown’s wife, Caroline Clements Brown; one to author George Sand; and twelve others in his hand, ranging in date from 1844 to 1867.

As discussed in Daniel Banks' essay in this volume, a further trove of valuable documents concerns Mazzini’s life and the republican revolutionary movement, which he continued to push for after the demise of the Roman Republic, while he was in exile in England. Rush Hawkins—no doubt influenced by his father-in-law’s experience and his wife—became active, in the years after his generalship in the American Civil War, in the New York-based Mazzinian organization, the Universal Republican Alliance. Dozens of documents in Hawkins’s collection offer precious insight into the nature of this movement and its relation to Mazzini.

The Essays

The essays that follow are aimed at providing historical context to help both to interpret the documents found in this unique, digitized archival collection,and to assess their significance.

“The Role of Nicholas Brown in the Roman Revolution of 1848–1849,” my second contribution to this volume, examines the role played by Nicholas Brown while he served as the United States consul to Rome, focusing on the months of the Roman Republic and the weeks immediately following its conquest by French troops in 1849. It provides insight into who Nicholas Brown was, the role he played during and immediately after the fall of the short-lived Roman Republic, and his relations with some of the major figures in the Republic, from the triumvirate that led it politically to its military leaders. It reveals the paradoxical figure that Brown presents: viewed earlier in his life as the black sheep of his wealthy and prominent New England family, with his father excluding him from the family business, he came to be regarded in Rome as a fearless paladin of American republicanism and champion of the battle against retrograde clerical forces.

“Nicholas Brown and the U.S. Consular Service in the Italian Revolutions of 1848,” by Simeon Simeonov, places Brown’s role as U.S. consul to Rome in the context of the nature and workings of the American consular service in the mid-nineteenth century. It pays particular attention to the evolution of the American consular service in the Papal States, and on the Italian peninsula more generally. Simeonov looks at the ways in which consuls, when facing revolutionary movements, as Nicholas Brown did, often overstepped their official roles, which were primarily aimed at fostering commercial relations and helping U.S. citizens abroad, while steering clear of sensitive political affairs. Simeonov also explains the role of vice consuls in the U.S. consular service of the time, important for making sense of their significance during Nicholas Brown’s tenure as the American consul in the capital of the Papal States. Simeonov concludes that Brown proved to be “among the agents with the most progressive vision of how consulship could remake the international order in the Age of Revolution.”

“Friends, Funds, Fame: What the Nicholas Brown and Rush Hawkins Collections Reveal about Giuseppe Mazzini’s Relationship to Britain and the USA,” by Daniel Banks, examines the rich trove of documents in these collections dealing with Giuseppe Mazzini’s relations with supporters in the U.S. and the U.K. Among Mazzini’s letters are many offering insight into just how he made his appeals, whether written in Italian, English, or French, and how he sought international financial as well as political support for his cause. Banks draws particular attention to the nine letters in Mazzini’s hand addressed to his fellow Italian patriot, Antonio Gallenga, a fellow political exile, in the years immediately preceding the Roman revolution. But the documents are just as valuable, Banks shows, in illuminating the nature and history of the Universal Republican Alliance of the 1860s, the Mazzinian organization of which Rush Hawkins was an organizer.

“The Roman Revolution in the Garibaldi Panorama” by Massimo Riva, explores the links between the history of the Roman revolution and the Roman Republic as revealed in the Nicholas Brown documents and their portrayal in the Garibaldi Panorama. The Panorama, an imposing artistic work nearly 300 feet long, five feet high, and painted on both sides, was produced little more than a decade after those events. It offered a way of illustrating (one might say mythologizing) the exploits of the military hero of the Italian Risorgimento, Giuseppe Garibaldi. Its audience was the British public of the early 1860s, a time when Garibaldi’s standing as an object of popular adulation in Britain was at its height. Riva links the depictions found in the Panorama with images being widely circulated in the illustrated press of the time, not only in Britain but throughout much of western Europe. The Panorama offered, in Riva’s terms, a kind of “war tourism.”

“The Rush Hawkins Scrapbooks and Book-Making in Nineteenth-Century America,” by Deidre Lynch, turns our attention to the scrapbooks that were the medium originally employed in collecting the documents that form the focus of the Nicholas Brown Project. These include both the two scrapbooks donated to the Brown University Library in 1927 and the curious artifact that is the Rush Hawkins scrapbook, whose existence, as discussed earlier in this introductory essay, was for decades forgotten. Lynch places these scrapbooks in the context of “book-making” practices in the United States in the nineteenth century. If the Garibaldi Panorama offered one way for people at the time to travel vicariously and experience the wonders of Europe’s past, such scrapbooks provided another. Lynch offers insight into not only how nineteenth-century Americans engaged in Italian history, but their attitudes to books and book-making. She examines both sets of scrapbooks, making sense of not only their collection of documents concerning major world events and world-famous political figures, but also, curiously mixed in, artifacts of a much more domestic, quotidian kind.

The essays assembled here provide only an initial step in tapping the enormous potential of the Nicholas Brown documents for historical research. The hope is that, in addition to providing helpful historical context in and of themselves, these scholarly contributions will encourage others to pursue the many topics that the historical documents illuminate.