The Role of Nicholas Brown in the Roman Revolution of 1848–1849

David I. Kertzer

I recount here the story of Nicholas Brown and the role he played in the Roman revolution of 1848–1849. At the time that the revolution began, with the assassination of the pope’s chief government minister, Pellegrino Rossi, on November 15th, 1848, and the pope’s escape from Rome shortly thereafter, Brown, as the American consul to Rome, was the only representative of the United States government based in the city. The archival documents that allow this story to be told derive from Nicholas Brown’s papers which, via two different routes, ended up at his alma mater, Brown University. A portion of these were given to the University in 1927–28 and soon catalogued, although their existence has, until recently, been little known to Italian scholars of the Risorgimento.¹ Another trove of Nicholas Brown’s papers held by the Brown Library were, as recounted in the preceding chapter, unknown even to the University librarians until their recent rediscovery.

Before turning to the story of Nicholas Brown and the Roman revolution, I offer a brief background on Nicholas Brown himself. As the protagonist of our story here was Nicholas Brown III, it is worth briefly noting his eponymous forebears. His grandfather, Nicholas Brown, together with his grandfather’s younger brothers, established what would become a successful family business in Rhode Island. Involved in major transatlantic commerce (including the slave trade), they were among Rhode Island’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens. In 1764, Nicholas Brown became one of the founding trustees of what was known at the time as the College of Rhode Island, the seventh university to be established in the American colonies. The son of that original Nicholas Brown, Nicholas Brown II, born in 1769, graduated from the new college and joined the family business. It would be his gift of $5000 that would lead the College to change its name in his honor, and so the College of Rhode Island became Brown University. Nicholas III, his eldest son, was born in Providence in 1792, and he too went to Brown University. In 1845, when Brown was fifty-two years old, President James K. Polk named him the United States consul to Rome. At the time, the U.S. had no diplomatic relations with the Papal States, and so there was no ambassador.²

Nicholas Brown (I dispense with the "III" from this point onwards) was, in some ways, a classic American figure of the time. Independently wealthy and a member of New England’s elite, he fancied himself a champion of what he took to be the core American Enlightenment, republican values. Yet, before attaining his post as consul in Rome, he had achieved little in life. “Moody and rancorous,” as the Brown family historian, Sylvia Brown, describes him, he “was…an unusually angry, embittered, and ungrateful man.” Nicholas had been excluded from the family business by his father, who found him unsuitable for it. Indeed, he would spend much of his life bickering with his father, as he regularly asked for more money from him. When his father died in 1841, still excluding Nicholas from the management of the family business, Nicholas was further enraged. In a letter the following year, he claimed that he would have to pawn his watch for fifty dollars, adding, “I did hope that on his death whether I lived here or elsewhere, I should no longer be compelled to live in the miserably straightened manner I had done for years previous to his exit.”³

James Buchanan, the U.S. secretary of state (and future president), informed Nicholas Brown of his appointment as U.S. consul to Rome in July 1845. The fact that Brown spoke no Italian was apparently no bar.⁴ He arrived in Rome later in that year, but his first dispatch of any length to Buchanan came in April 1846, when he asked permission to absent himself from Rome during the months when, as he put it, it is “not considered healthy for foreigners to remain.” Brown interpreted the malaria season in a rather liberal manner, remaining absent from Rome from May through September.⁵

The new American consul did not feel it necessary to return to Rome when, on June 1, 1846, Pope Gregory XVI died. Few Romans lamented the passing of this reactionary pope, who had reigned for fifteen years, and fears of revolt aimed at ushering in secular, democratic rule were widespread among church leaders. Hoping to find someone who could calm the people and preserve the theocratic government, the cardinals elected the 54-year-old bishop of Imola, Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti, who took the name Pius IX.⁶

Following his return to Rome in the fall, Brown’s initial report to Secretary of State Buchanan reflected widespread enthusiasm for the man seen as a pope eager to bring the Church into the modern age: “Pius 9th is very popular with his subjects,” Brown wrote, “having granted a free pardon to all [political] prisoners …& granted permission for railroads through his territories.”⁷ Indeed, this enthusiasm was shared by President Polk, who recommended that diplomatic relations be established with the Holy See. In March 1848, the U.S. Congress passed the necessary appropriations and a chargé d’affaires, Jacob Martin, was appointed to represent the U.S. in the papal court. Showing more enthusiasm for his job than Nicholas Brown—but less prudence—Martin arrived in Rome at the height of the malarial season in early August 1848. He was dead by the end of the month.⁸ As a result, over the following crucial months, only Nicholas Brown would represent the United States in Rome.

Yet, since his appointment, Brown had not felt it necessary to spend much more than the winter months in Rome, and had in 1846, 1847, and 1848 left Rome in April and returned only in the fall, leaving the consulate in 1847 and 1848 in the hands of a Frenchman resident in Rome, Antoine Ardisson.⁹

Pius IX’s slide from popular hero to villain took place with frightening speed. The Risorgimento was gathering force. Partisans of a modern Italian nation—at least many of the moderates among them—had hoped that the new pope could be the symbolic center around which Italians could unite and drive out the Austrians. The entire northeast of Italy was then part of the Austrian empire, which controlled much of the rest of the peninsula through marriages and alliances. Some Italian patriots dreamed of a federation of Italian states under the leadership of the pope himself.¹⁰

The patriotic fervor surrounding Pius IX quickly dissolved when, in April 1848, he declared that he could not support efforts to drive the Austrians out of Italy. Nor, he said, could he approve of a government of the Papal States that would be under lay control, a key demand of the reformers. On November 15th, insurgents murdered the pope’s chief minister, Pellegrino Rossi, in the middle of Rome, an assassin’s knife slicing through his neck.¹¹ Thousands crowded into the piazza outside the pope’s Quirinal palace, aiming a cannon at its gate, and demanding their choice of government.

Abandoned by his cardinals, who had fled for their lives, Pius IX found himself alone. A week later, with the aid of the Bavarian and French ambassadors, he slipped out the back door of his palace. Disguised as a simple priest, he escaped to the fortress town of Gaeta, in the Kingdom of Naples. Events moved rapidly from then on. The pope refused to meet with the delegation dispatched by the remaining government in Rome to urge him to return. In response, the rebels called an election, based on universal (male) suffrage, to elect a Constituent Assembly to determine a new form of government for the Papal States. In early February, the body gathered in Rome and, on February 9th, 1849, proclaimed the birth of the Roman Republic. The form of the government, the founding articles announced, would be “pure democracy.”¹²

While Rome’s elite fled the city in horror, Nicholas Brown found the events intoxicating. On December 12th—having, after months away, returned to Rome only following Rossi’s assassination and the pope’s escape—Brown sent a long report to James Buchanan. His rather flowery account of the murder of the pope’s chief minister showed remarkably little sympathy for his Italian colleague. “The sun of truth & liberty has risen on the horizon of Italy, & however the fogs of superstition, & the clouds of obscurantism may, for a while, hide its bright orb, yet shall its vivifying influence in time disperse them.” In referring to the assassination, he wrote: “The keystone of the arch of corruption thus removed, the edifice fell at once to the ground.” He painted a rosy picture of Rome in the wake of the pope’s departure: its people content, order maintained, and men of character at the helm of the government.¹³

In mid-January 1849, the pope had sent a scathing protest to all of Rome’s foreign diplomats. Brown sent an English translation to Buchanan, with a cover letter skewering the pope’s plea. “In spite of the anile, tautologous prolixity of this extraordinary document,” explained Brown, “I have thought it better to transmit it entire…than to attempt an abridgement, which could hardly do justice to its imbecility.” He continued: “Comments upon its contents must even to the enlightened citizen of our great republic appear superfluous. The whole proceeds upon the assumption, hardly to be conceived in the nineteenth century, that the throne of this country, & the despotic rule over its three millions of inhabitants, is vested in the Papal Chair. But these absurdities are quite out of date.”¹⁴ Two weeks later, Brown reported enthusiastically to Buchanan on the results of the election for Rome’s Constituent Assembly. While the pope and his partisans were painting a picture of chaos and violence in Rome, Brown concluded his account with a starkly different view of life there. “Order & peace,” he reported, “never reigned more profoundly, within her ancient walls.”¹⁵

All the foreign ambassadors to the Holy See had left Rome to join the pope in Gaeta, as the pope had demanded, but Brown stayed where he was, as did several of the other consuls to Rome. No other nation recognized the legitimacy of the newly proclaimed Roman Republic, but Brown saw no need to await instructions from Washington. On February 5th, the newly elected members of the Constituent Assembly marched through Rome to their new seat. “I thought it my duty, as an American citizen,” Brown informed Buchanan shortly afterward, “to do homage to the principle of popular sovereignty, of which our glorious republic is the living incarnation. Accordingly, I accompanied the splendid procession in my official uniform.” On the following Sunday, Brown participated in a special mass of thanksgiving organized by the Roman Republic’s leaders, held in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.¹⁶

Unable to contain his enthusiasm, Brown sent a letter on February 11th to Carlo Emanuele Muzzarelli, the interim president of the Constituent Assembly, congratulating him on the proclamation of the Roman Republic and the end of papal rule. While, he wrote, he was not yet in a position to make any official statement on behalf of the U.S. government, he felt no “hesitation in stating to you that it has ever been a cardinal principle, uniformly, & under all circumstances, acted upon by the Govt. of the United States of America, to acknowledge, as supreme, any Govt. which a people may choose to institute…So thoroughly known is this great truth,” he informed the leaders of the Roman Republic, “so deeply rooted in every American heart the love of liberty, that the nation will at once hail with joy the independence of the Roman Republic, long before their diplomatic agents have had time, in due official form, to give expression to the generous sentiments of their constituency.”¹⁷ A week later, Brown wrote to the foreign minister of the Roman Republic, Carlo Rusconi, expressing his enthusiasm for the newly proclaimed republic, and promising that the United States would quickly afford it official recognition.¹⁸

It is from these heady first days of the Roman Republic that we have one of the remarkable documents found in the John Hay archives: a note from Charles Bonaparte, one of the key figures in the Roman Republic, nephew of the French emperor and cousin of the newly elected president of France, Louis Napoleon. A prominent natural scientist who had spent years living in the United States, he was the Roman Republic’s loudest rabble rouser, and vice president of the Constituent Assembly.¹⁹

Charles Bonaparte wrote his note in English, accepting Brown’s invitation to a dinner honoring Washington’s birthday, February 22nd, 1849: "Ch. Bonaparte accepts with pleasure the Consul of the U.S.’s polite invitation at dinner at six o’clock on Thursday 22. anniversary of the birth of the first in war, the first in peace, the first in the hearts of his countrymen. 20 febr. 1849."²⁰

Yet amidst the excitement in Rome, some presentiment of impending doom began to spread. From his refuge in the fortress of Gaeta in the Kingdom of Naples, the pope urged the Catholic powers of Europe to send their armies to restore him to power. On March 7, Brown lamented all that would be lost if the Roman Republic fell: the ending of the Inquisition and the freeing of its prisoners; freedom of the press; the placing of schools and universities under lay control. To exist as a temporal power, Brown explained in a report to the U.S. secretary of state, the papacy “must be a Theocracy, & thus radically different from any civilized government now established in the world.”²¹

While Nicholas Brown’s public identification with the leaders of the Roman Republic and with the anti-papal cause was making him a popular figure in Rome, it was provoking increasing unease in Washington. To rein him in, in mid-February the President named a new envoy to the Papal States, filling the vacancy left several months earlier by Martin’s sudden death. Buchanan instructed the new chargé d’affaires, Lewis Cass, Jr., not to recognize the Roman Republic, which Buchanan was convinced would soon succumb to Europe’s invading armies.²²

Arriving in Rome on April 2nd, 1849, Cass began sending his own reports to Washington.²³ While his dispatches clearly reflect his republican sentiments (his father had, the previous year, been the unsuccessful Democratic Party candidate for President of the United States), Cass’s tone was dramatically different from Brown’s. Where Brown’s reports were filled with praise for the great virtues of the Roman Republic and invective against the evils of theocracy, the new American chargé d’affaires offered a much more sober view. “Italy,” he observed, “is in a state of confusion and misery she has not witnessed since the middle ages.” In all likelihood, he predicted, Austrian troops would soon march south to restore the pope.²⁴ At the same time as Cass was sending Washington his initial report, Brown was participating in the latest prayer ceremony sponsored by the Roman Republic in St. Peter’s.²⁵

The contrast between Nicholas Brown’s panegyrics to the Roman Republic and Cass’s more cautious reports to Washington only became more marked as events approached their bloody conclusion. On April 24th, Brown received an urgent message from Alfred Lowe, the U.S. vice consul in Rome’s port city of Civitavecchia, containing dramatic news. General Charles Oudinot had just landed there with 1,320 French troops.²⁶ The next day Lowe sent a new message to Brown. Thirteen French war ships had arrived and thousands more French troops were disembarking. A French flag had been hoisted alongside the Roman Republic flag over the seaside fortress.²⁷ On April 28th, Lowe sent Brown the fateful news that thousands of these troops had begun moving out at 7 a.m. and were said to be marching on Rome.²⁸

In the wake of this news, and the subsequent French assault on Rome, Brown sent a dramatic plea to Washington. The excuses given for not recognizing the legitimacy of the Roman Republic, he declared, were baseless. The “hopeless anarchy” that the clerical party claimed had engulfed Rome, and its argument that there was little popular support for the republican cause, were mere calumnies. “Never truly did Rome see more calm, more order,” wrote Brown. “So much for that anarchy which has never existed but in the imaginations of frightened and fantastic dreamers, or in the reports of interested calumniators & mendacious hirelings.” The truth, urged Brown, was that the majority of Romans were “in favour of this govt. of self-government—of all those liberties so dear to every American…” That the powerful French army was capable of conquering Rome for the pope, Brown acknowledged, was difficult to doubt. “But,” he added, “the hearts, the minds, the judgement of the Romans will still, in silence & secrecy…revere & cherish the memory of the lost Republic; as the fond mother, whose offspring has been massacred before her tearless eyes by the ruthless hand of the blood-stained barbarian, cherishes…her grief & her aspirations for revenge.”²⁹

Contrast this with Cass’s reports of the same time. With the French army preparing to march on Rome, he wrote on April 27th, he could not imagine the Romans putting up any serious resistance. The Roman government, he wrote, “appears embarrassed, and undecided as to what course to pursue. This vacillation…has elicited from the people several riotous expressions of contempt and aversion.”³⁰ Yet it was Brown whom subsequent events proved the more prescient, for in fact, when the French army arrived at Rome on April 30th, they were met with unexpected ferocity by the defenders of the Roman Republic, led by the swashbuckling Giuseppe Garibaldi. The French were sent into a hasty, embarrassing retreat.³¹

One of the more remarkable documents found in the Nicholas Brown papers at the John Hay library is a May 3 message to Brown, signed by the Triumvirate ruling the Roman Republic: Giuseppe Mazzini, Carlo Armellini, and Aurelio Saffi. That they found the time to write to Brown only three days after the French attack offers one sign of the importance they attached to his support. They wrote the note in French: “We are profoundly touched, Sir, by the sentiments you have expressed for the Roman Republic and for the efforts you have made to get your government to recognize it. We expected no less of a man whose great intelligence is equaled by his noble character.”³² For the black sheep of the Brown family, this must have been heady stuff.

Mazzini was more of a prophet than a politician, but with the French army now camped nearby awaiting reinforcements, while the Neapolitan and Spanish armies marched north toward Rome, and the fearsome Austrian army readied its march south on the Papal States, he realized that only one thing could save his Roman Republic from speedy defeat. The French National Assembly had never authorized a war to return the pope to power.³³ If, prompted by popular protests in Paris, the Assembly would vote out the government, the French army’s mission might be transformed. Instead of coming to put an end to the republic, it might use its firepower to protect the Republic from the autocratic foreign governments intent on destroying it.³⁴

One of the documents in the John Hay collection offers precious insight into this mindset. On May 10th, Alfred Lowe, the vice consul in Civitavecchia, sent Nicholas Brown a letter advising him of the latest French troop reinforcements to arrive there. Yet he added a further note: “There is a rumour current here of the greatest excitement prevailing in Paris consequent upon the attempted forced entry of the French Troops at Rome: and fears, or otherwise are entertained that another Revolution must take place.”³⁵

That the great prophet of Italian unification, and leader of the Roman Republic, Giuseppe Mazzini, came to rely on Nicholas Brown in these fateful days is clear from various documents found in the John Hay collection. A letter Mazzini wrote to him on May 11th begins: “You have shown yourself so favourable to our cause, that I do not hesitate to ask you if you can render us a great service by granting two American passports…” He went on to explain that he needed the passports for envoys tasked with an important mission abroad and who would be carrying a large sum of money.³⁶

Three days later, as we now know thanks to the John Hay manuscript collection, Mazzini again asked for Brown’s help, this time in getting an American passport for his friend Adriano Lemmi, a key figure and fund-raiser for Italian Unification and later head of Italian Masonry.³⁷ Throughout the month, Brown received fresh reports from Lowe in Civitavecchia, telling of the size of the various landings of French troops and weapons. Lowe’s May 15th report also noted the arrival the previous day of a French ship, the Pomona, having on board, in addition to 390 men and 36 guns, the new French emissary, Ferdinand de Lesseps. Lesseps, appointed at the insistence of the enraged French Assembly following the initial French assault on Rome, was about to embark on his ill-fated attempt to bring a peaceful end to the standoff there.³⁸

As an aside, the John Hay documents contain material sent to the Browns by the famed American journalist Margaret Fuller, who was experiencing her own personal drama in Rome while sending dispatches on the Roman revolution to the American press. She had recently given birth secretly, having fallen in love with—and perhaps married—an Italian who was fighting in the republican forces. In her May 27th newspaper dispatch she praised Brown, describing how the noblewoman Cristina Belgiojoso—perhaps the most prominent woman in the Italian Risorgimento—had recently gone around Rome soliciting funds to support her work in charge of medical care for wounded soldiers: “the voluntary contributions were generous…I am proud to say, the Americans in Rome gave $250, of which a handsome portion came from Mr. Brown, the Consul.”³⁹ In the John Hay archive we find a note written by Margaret Fuller to Mrs. Brown, who had extended a dinner invitation to her, perhaps that same month: "Dear Madam, A friend, who has a child very ill, expects me to stay with her this night. It is also difficult for me to make visits in the evening as I am alone and have no manservant. I shall see you again some day, when I can return at sunset."⁴⁰

Meanwhile, Nicholas Brown continued his stream of enthusiastic reports to Washington about the virtues of the Roman Republic. “The warmest feelings of humanity,” he wrote on May 19th, “animate the [Roman] population, after the battle [in which the French were repelled on April 30th]. The French wounded & other prisoners are treated with the utmost kindness…During this terrible crisis, public order remained undisturbed…Meanwhile, the Constituent Assembly…has steadily proceeded in its well-pondered and judicious career of reform.”⁴¹

On June 2nd, with Rome under siege, Brown received a laissezpasser from the chargé d’affaires of the French embassy in Rome to permit him, his wife, and their two children, along with the family doctor, to travel “in his own carriage and with his own horses” to the home of the American vice consul in Civitavecchia.⁴² It seems unlikely that he ever made the trip as, late that same night, the final French assault on Rome began.

Despite the heavy bombardment of the walls of Rome by the greatly reinforced French troops, and the death and maiming of many of Rome’s defenders, the city’s defenses initially held. De Lesseps, who had at the beginning of June come to a peaceful agreement with Mazzini and the Republic’s leaders, had been recalled and repudiated by Louis Napoleon.⁴³ On June 11th, eight days after the new French assault on Rome began, Lowe informed Brown of the arrival at Civitavecchia of two men: Francisque Corcelle, personal envoy of Alexis de Tocqueville, the new French foreign minister, and Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, secretary to the French embassy. Lowe reported that the two men left almost immediately for the French military headquarters outside Rome. He added: “but as to what instructions given them, or powers they are endowed with, we here are perfectly ignorant…Tomorrow it is said that an attack will be made by the French, that is to say they will make a Breach with their heavy artillery and attempt an entry by that, unless the abovenamed gentlemen bring counter orders, but on this score I fear there is little to hope for.”⁴⁴

Several days later, a demonstration in Paris protesting the war on the Roman Republic, viewed by the French government as an attempted uprising, was quickly repressed. It was now only a matter of time until the old wall surrounding the Eternal City would give way to the French bombardment. As the bombing intensified, a group of foreign consuls and chargés d’affaires in Rome decided to organize a joint protest, addressed to General Oudinot. Six of them sent a draft of the protest to Brown on June 24th and called on him, as the representative of “a great and civil nation,” to join in.⁴⁵ Charles Kolb, the consul of Württemberg, sent a note to Brown, in French, telling him that the consuls were meeting in his home that day and would then take their petition to Oudinot at the French headquarters outside the city walls.⁴⁶ The statement decried the continual nightly bombardment, which was raining terror on the city and damaging priceless historical buildings and monuments. Brown quickly signed on.⁴⁷ Oudinot was unmoved. He acknowledged that the bombardment of the city was causing considerable damage but told the consuls that the fault lay solely with the Romans, who stubbornly refused to surrender peacefully. The bombardment of Rome continued.⁴⁸

On June 29th, with the wall breached, Nicholas Brown submitted his letter of resignation to the U.S. secretary of state. He claimed that he had planned to resign following the election of Zachary Taylor several months earlier but had postponed the resignation due to the dramatic events in Rome. It appears, though, that Brown was forced out by the U.S. government, which was unhappy at his flouting of instructions not to appear as a partisan of either side in the Roman conflict. Indeed, his successor had already been appointed a month before he sent his resignation.⁴⁹ The new American consul, William Sanders, would arrive in Rome on August 20th.⁵⁰

On June 30th, the leaders of the Roman Republic, recognizing the hopelessness of their situation, ordered all efforts at defense halted. On July 3rd, French troops marched into the center of the city while Garibaldi and his ragtag army fled north. As Mazzini and other leaders of the Republic tried to escape, they again turned to Nicholas Brown, who provided American passports for many of them.⁵¹ Among the notable documents in the John Hay collection is a July 2nd letter to Brown, in French, from Giuseppe Avezzana, the Roman Republic’s Minister of War (and himself an American citizen), requesting five American passports. It would be one of the last documents to bear the stamp of the Roman Republic.⁵²

Two days later, Pietro Roselli, military commander of the Roman Republic’s army, sent a plea addressed to the “Citizen Senator” of Rome with a much broader request of Brown along with his English counterpart, John Freeborn. “To ensure the greatest good that one can for all those soldiers who cannot, without danger, return to their homes, I beseech you to immediately send someone to the English and American consuls, for the purpose of getting from them passports to allow them to go to the places in which they can live better, and remain with greater security.” That this letter, addressed to Rome’s Senator, ended up in Brown’s papers would suggest that the Senator did indeed send such an emissary to Brown.⁵³

The John Hay collection also contains two notes from the Countess Cristina Belgiojoso to Nicholas Brown dated July 6th, both written in English. One asks for free passage in an American ship for two brothers from an Italian family in Tunis who fought for the Roman Republic and now sought to return there.⁵⁴ The other is especially precious, for it sheds new light on Belgiojoso herself: Her note accompanied some letters which she asked Brown to mail for her. She added, archly: “I suppose that General Oudinot would like to peep in my letters, and I wish to escape that.”⁵⁵ The return address she gave in these two letters is especially surprising: “Quirinal”—the palace that was Pius IX’s seat until taken over by the revolutionaries. By the time she was writing these letters, it had been occupied by the French command.

But the most remarkable letter to be found from Belgiojoso in the John Hay collection is one without date, but likely written between July 4th and July 6th, 1849. As is the case with many of the other letters in these archives, Italian historians have apparently been unaware of its existence. She wrote this letter to Brown in Italian: "Mr. Consul, Knowing the recommendations that General Garibaldi made to you and trusting in the honor and the principles of the nation that you represent, I place all the wounded of the War of Roman Independence under the protection of those same principles."⁵⁶ This message is of interest for many reasons, not least in being the only evidence we have of Brown’s direct relationship with Garibaldi.

Nicholas Brown’s final Roman drama took place early in the evening of July 6th, when French troops invaded his residence. The facts are in dispute. In Margaret Fuller’s colorful account, when the French entered, “Mr. Brown, banner in one hand and sword in the other, repelled the assault, and…drove them down stairs…then he made them an appropriate speech, though in a mixed language of English, French, and Italian…the crowd vehemently applauded Mr. Brown, who already was much liked for the warm sympathy he had shown the Romans…he then donned his uniform, and went to [French General] Oudinot to make his protest.”⁵⁷

U.S. chargé d’affaires Cass, however, offered a very different account. It was true, he wrote, that twenty French troops invaded Brown’s home, but their action was understandable: When passing Brown’s home, the French soldiers were taunted by Brown’s servants. “From my own knowledge of the conduct of Mr. Brown’s servants,” Cass reported to Washington, “I have not the slightest doubt that their behavior was of the character represented. In the vicinity of the Consulate their rudeness and insolence…have long been notorious.”⁵⁸

Within hours of this incident, Nicholas Brown packed his bags and, with his wife and children, boarded a ship bound for Genoa. Yet even this departure proved dramatic, and again prompted a protest from a fellow American diplomat in Italy. Brown landed in Genoa on July 9th along with numerous veterans of the Roman Republic under his protection. Most notable among them was Pietro Sterbini, one of the leaders of the revolt against the pope, and widely suspected of being one of those behind the assassination of Pellegrino Rossi. Sterbini posed on the trip as Brown’s servant. As Sterbini was also persona non grata in the Kingdom of Sardinia, of which Genoa was a part, Brown traveled to the capital, Turin, to get approval for Sterbini and his colleagues to pass safely out of the country. The U.S. consul in Turin, appalled by Brown’s actions, wrote a detailed letter of complaint to Washington: "Mr Brown, our consul at Rome, arrived in Turin with his suite, among whom was the notorious Sterbini, in the character of a domestic servant. Mr Brown has given American passports to members of the political fugitives from Rome on the occasion of the entry of the French army, several of whom arrived in the port of Genoa, but notwithstanding the manifest disposition of this government to accord every proper consideration to the seal of the United States, it could not admit the right of these persons, of more than doubtful character, in all respects, to claim in virtue of it, admission to a residence on Sardinian soil. They were therefore refused admission, notwithstanding their American passports, which should in strictness, never be found in the possession of persons whom they cannot protect."⁵⁹

Yet Brown’s efforts, if unappreciated by the American consul in Turin, did not go unrewarded. Some indication of this is now discoverable in the papers at the John Hay archive. On arrival in Turin, Brown wrote to the prime minister, Massimo d’Azeglio, pleading on behalf of the refugees. D’Azeglio’s reply to Brown is found in these papers: “I presented the memo that Your Lordship addressed to me today to the Council of Ministers...The Council, in light of the sad position in which many Italian refugees find themselves, has decided to send someone immediately to Genoa to deal with the current emergency. I hope that Your Lordship will see in this act testimony of the great sympathy that the unhappy fate of so many Italians has caused us and will see our sincere desire to do everything for them that circumstances permit.”⁶⁰ Thanks to Nicholas Brown, Pietro Sterbini and his comrades, rather than languishing in the pope’s prisons, or worse, would make their way into foreign exile.

Brown himself made his way to Switzerland. There he belatedly received a remarkable letter, addressed to him in Rome, that was sent on August 3rd from Comacchio, on the northern Italian Adriatic coast, written by Carlo Carli, who described himself as the U.S. vice consul there. It told of Garibaldi’s landing on the night of August 2nd/3rd with five or six hundred of his men, in a makeshift flotilla of fifteen or twenty small fishing boats and rickety sailboats, as they fled the pursuing Austrian army.⁶¹ While, miraculously, Garibaldi would escape, his wife Anita would die the next day, and most of his men would soon be either captured or—like the Barnabite monk Ugo Bassi and the popular Roman hero Ciceruacchio and his two sons—summarily executed by Austrian troops.

Although the Roman Republic had fallen, and Brown would never return to Rome, in the following years he continued to stay in touch with, and do what he could to support, the republican leaders he had befriended in those heady days of 1848/1849. While in Geneva in August of 1849, Brown was angered to learn of a letter that Francisque Corcelle, Tocqueville’s personal envoy to Rome and to the pope, had written to the French government from Rome, which had recently been published in the European press. In it, Corcelle insisted that French troops had never bombarded Rome. Rather, he stated, the French had carefully confined their artillery fire to the city’s wall, aimed at making a breach through which they could enter. Among the documents in Brown’s papers is a draft, in French, of a heated letter he sent to Corcelle: “I have the honor of informing Your Excellency that, as the Consul of the United States of America in Rome, I signed the protest presented to General Oudinot to prevent the continuation of the bombardment of the City of Rome.”⁶² As an eyewitness, and with the credibility that came from being an official representative of the U.S. government, Brown sought to undercut the official French narrative of their surgical conquest of the city.⁶³

One of the more curious indications of Brown’s continuing contacts with Mazzini found in the Brown papers is a letter that Mazzini wrote, undoubtedly at Brown’s request, on behalf of Mrs. Brown. Addressed to the author George Sand, in Nohant, France, and written by Mazzini in French, it begins: “My friend, Madam Brown, an American, wishes to see you. She is a good and independent woman. She loves our cause….” Mazzini dated the letter “Geneva, September 9, 1849,” revealing that the Risorgimento prophet was then in the same city as Brown, where they presumably were in close touch.⁶⁴

The Brown papers also contain letters from Mazzini showing his hope, in the years immediately following the defeat of the Roman Republic, that Brown would continue to help advance his cause. This Brown did in various ways, including, in 1851, purchasing bonds issued by the “Comitato Nazionale Italiano,” signed by Mazzini along with, among others, his fellow Triumvir in exile, Aurelio Saffi.⁶⁵

Brown stayed in Europe another few years, traveling to Nice, Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris. His wife, Caroline Clements Brown, did some traveling on her own, including a trip to Naples, where she came to the unwanted attention of the police, who suspected her of meeting with radicals there. In 1853 the family finally returned to Rhode Island, where Nicholas Brown quickly returned to form, bitterly battling with family members over his father’s estate. Angered that various family properties had not been left to him, Brown built a large Italianate mansion on 200 waterfront acres near Providence, with lavishly appointed great halls, hand-painted English wallpaper, and a garden stocked with imported plants.

In 1854, a year before moving into his new home, Brown joined the anti-Catholic Know Nothing party. The party had been founded a decade earlier in response to the mass immigration of Irish fleeing the potato famine. The Know Nothings claimed that a “Romanist” conspiracy was underway, aimed at undermining civil and religious freedom in the United States. It was the patriotic duty of all native Protestants, they argued, to combat it. Two years after Brown joined the party, the Know Nothing governor of Rhode Island chose him to become Lieutenant Governor, a position he would hold for only a year, as in 1857 a new governor was elected. It was the only governmental position, aside from his four years as the American consul in Rome, that he would ever hold.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Nicholas Brown cast himself as a defender of American republican ideals against the retrograde powers of the papacy. He died only two years after his brief stint as Lieutenant Governor of Rhode Island, aged sixty-six.⁶⁶

Author’s Note: A shorter, earlier version of this presentation was given at the University of Bologna on June 13th, 2017, as part of the celebration of the 35th anniversary of the Brown University partnership with the University of Bologna. My thanks to Prof. Francesco Ubertini, rector of the University of Bologna, for hosting this event, and to my colleague Massimo Riva for his role in its organization. A longer version of that presentation was then published in 2019 by the Bononia University Press (Bologna) in both English and Italian, titled Nicholas Brown and the Roman Revolution of 1848/Nicholas Brown e la rivoluzione romana del 1848.