The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

An incident occurred at this time which made Miss Cushman's position in regard to the quarrel with the consulate still more difficult. It was not long after the advent of the famous horse-tamer John S. Rarey, of whom she had been a pupil in America when he first came out. A person professing to be Rarey was touring Europe and teaching his manner of breaking horses, beginning at Copenhagen and following the seashore to Naples, whence he came to Rome and was received with great enthusiasm by Miss Cushman, for at that time, and while the war was in its critical stage, American lions were very rare in Rome. The horse-tamer was, on her authority, made the guest of the American community, breakfasted, dined, and fêted, and a large subscription was made for a class in horse-breaking. At this juncture I heard of a performance of the soi-disant Rarey at Naples, in which he had nearly killed a beautiful young mare, and, knowing that the system of Rarey did not include cruelty, I began to doubt the identity of the tamer. I called for the passport with which he had come, and which was, as usual, deposited at the police office, and discovered that it was issued by a "vice-consul pro tempore" at Dresden, an officer not recognized by our regulations, bad and loose as they were, and a man whose name, moreover, was not on the consular list, though the passport was on a regular form. I at once wrote to the police, requesting them to cause the said John S. Rarey to prove his identity.

The summons to the police office brought him to the consulate the next morning before I was out of bed (the office and my bedroom constituted the headquarters of the government of the United States of America at Rome), with a petition to me to request the police to delay the examination until the next day, as he had two friends who would identify him, but who were that day (it was Sunday) at Tivoli for the day. As an escape was impossible, and he was in a nervous trepidation which, it was clear to see, was awful funk, I wrote the note desired; and, before the day was out, he had gone to my English colleague, the amiable Severn, and confessed that he was an impostor, a Canadian, and asked for English protection. Severn replied that without my consent he could do nothing for him; he had come with an American passport and must abide by it, unless I gave him up. He was wilted, in such a fright as I never saw a man in before or since, and he had good reason, for the penalty of coming to Rome with a false passport was imprisonment in St. Angelo. Meanwhile Miss Cushman had gone into heroics over the insult I was offering so distinguished a man as to suspect his identity, and all her clique were united in abusing me; but on Monday the impostor slipped out of Rome by the connivance of Severn, the police, and myself, after I had attached the amount of the subscriptions for his class, which were still lying at the bankers', and pledged him to abstain in future from any similar impersonation. As Miss Cushman had stood sponsor for him, she having been a pupil of the real Rarey, his confession was a mortification which she visited on my head, but as it disarmed her I was tranquil over the consequences.

I was continually at war with the Confederate Americans, galled to extreme bitterness by the right I had of compelling them to take the oath of allegiance before renewing their passports. Amongst them was a very beautiful woman, a Virginian, and the wife of a commodore in the navy of the United States of America, then on service in the Potomac. She refused to take the oath, and insulted me in the grossest manner and in public, as an insulter of ladies, etc., etc. But all the influence she could bring to bear could not get her passport from the police without my visa; and at last, despairing of escape from Rome, she came to make her peace, meeting me at the bank, but unwilling to accept the degradation of coming to the consulate. "You are not going to make me come to your dirty little consulate, are you?" she said; to which I replied, "Oh, no; my secretary shall administer the oath to you in your bedroom, if you choose;" but, in the end, she had to take the oath and sign it, as did many of her compatriots. Amongst the Southerners who came under my administration was the wife of General Winfield Scott, commander-in-chief of our army, who actually died under my care, without a friend or relative near her.

This social warfare, the consequence of my official position, had the effect of giving me occupation and excitement, and I was sustained cordially by the loyal Americans in Rome, so that the position, though unremunerative, was rather pleasant than otherwise. In the course of the summer after my arrival, ex-Governor Randall of Wisconsin came as minister, his appointment being intended to "keep the place warm" for General Rufus King, a personal friend of Seward, to whom the place was promised whenever he should be tired of fighting, or qualified by glory for future political contests. Randall was a mere party hack; he knew nothing of diplomacy or good manners, or of any language but Western American. I took for him the house on the Pincian now known as the House of the Four Winds, a magnificent situation for the summer. He saw the sights, generally in a carriage, with a paper of fruit on the front seat and me as cicerone; was presented at the Vatican, presented me as chargé d'affaires, and, having his leave of absence in his pocket, departed for a tour of Europe, bequeathing to me the honor of paying his bills, rent, etc., down to the washing bill, to be settled on his return, and never appeared again. I was left to pay out of my empty pocket; and I never heard from him, though, a long time after, I succeeded in recovering from the Treasury the amount of those bills I had paid for Randall for which I could show vouchers; those for which I had none I had to put to account of profit and loss, which was, as long as I was in Rome, largely to the loss account, drafts on my brother making up the deficiency. I was also, until it suspended publication, Roman correspondent of John Bright's paper, which I think was called the "Star."

After an interregnum of some months came another bed-warmer for General King, this one a New York politician, also a friend of Seward's, an ancient politician, who had recently married a young wife desirous of a stay in some European capital, and, if possible, at the expense of the government. These at least were gentlefolk, and paid their bills without doing anything to scandalize the Romans. They spent the winter and went home, and finally came General King.

Finding that my fees and sales of pictures (for I had taken up my painting again and had sold a few small pictures) amounted to about six hundred dollars a year, and were slowly increasing, I decided to go home and bring my wife and child out. I had been absent more than a year, and several months after being in Rome had the news of the birth of a son. It was near being my death, for, on the evening of receiving the news, I had gone to make a call on an English lady who lived in the Villa Negroni, where the railway station now is, and close by the prison where all the political offenders were kept, and which was guarded by French soldiers. I was in a vein of profound meditation on the news I had just received, and absorbed to that extent that I kept on my course along the sidewalk in front of the prison, walking towards the sentry, and did not hear his challenge till it had been repeated three times, when I heard his rifle rattle as it came down to the take aim, and suddenly became conscious that I had heard a sound, the meaning of which must be "Qui vive?" I sung out lustily, "Ami" and was told that if I was a friend the other side of the road was my place.

I had discovered that the consular agent left by my predecessor at Civita Vecchia was engaged in a system of espionage on behalf of the Papal authorities, and had been issuing American passports to spies whom they were employing in Italian territory, and I at once dismissed him and informed the Italian government through Mr. Marsh, our minister to Italy, and received a letter of thanks from that government. From Washington a new consular agent was sent, and, putting him in charge of the consulate, I started for home, going by way of Turin, to see Mr. Marsh, and by diligence over Mont Cenis. Subsequent events brought me much in contact with that admirable diplomat and scholar, at that time the one bright feature of our diplomatic service on the Continent. Our government received great credit for sending such a man abroad to represent us, but the chance of it was in the fact that he was closely related to Senator Edmunds of Vermont, whose influence with the administration was sufficient to secure any single nomination he insisted on, and who did insist on the maintenance of Marsh in the diplomatic service. As Marsh had been conspicuous in the advocacy of the Italian cause during the unitary movement, he was designated by the circumstances for the American legation to Italy, in which he honored his appointment as few of our representatives at that epoch had done.

In fact, with the exception of Adams, at London, and Marsh, at Turin, we had hardly a representative abroad, either consular or diplomatic, who was a credit to the country. As the war continued, the importance of being respected in Europe became more evident, and a change took place; but the few men of respectable standing who were in foreign countries representing the United States of America were appointed on account of political pressure, and not on their merits. My colleague at Venice, Howells, one of Mr. Lincoln's most fortunate appointments, owed his position, not to his literary abilities, which were then unknown to the country at large, but to his having written a campaign life of Lincoln, a service which was always considered by the successful candidate as entitling the biographer to some appointment. A term of consular service was and is still considered the reward for campaign services, personal or vicarious, and at the next change of administration the consul was superseded by another, equally crude, and with all to learn in his business.

What the character of the Americans as well as of the government, as such, has suffered of derogation abroad from this political huckstering with public offices, no one can know who was not much abroad in the years preceding our war. Marsh was honored and beloved at Rome by both King and people, as was Adams by the Court of St. James, but the dead weight which the standing disrepute of our diplomacy imposed on both those distinguished men can hardly now be estimated. My predecessors at Rome, and the ministers before my time, had left a bad odor behind them. One of them was notorious for his devotion to a form of dissipation much and scandalously known at Naples during the reign of the Bourbons as a springtime sport, and which has since been the occasion of a noted crusade in England led by Mr. Stead. Of a minister of the United States of America found drunk in the streets of Berlin by the police, and a chargé d'affaires who, in an outbreak at Constantinople, hoisted the flag over a brothel he frequented, the memory is perhaps too old to have reached men born much later than I, but for the twenty years of my first knowledge of European matters our representation abroad was a disgrace to America.

I landed in New York the day after the battle of Gettysburg, and for the first time in the history of our trouble I felt assured as to the end, for I perceived that the attempt at invasion by the Confederacy showed that the government of it felt its affairs to be in a desperate condition, and the determination on the part of the North was evidently unshaken. From that time I never felt any anxiety as to the final result. I found my brother at the head of the construction department of the revenue service, his friend Salmon P. Chase being Secretary of the Treasury. He was desirous to keep me at home to assist him, with which desire I was ready to conform, but the opposition of his wife was so bitter that he had to decide against my staying, and, taking my wife and boy, I returned to Rome. My brother was already attacked by the malady of which, two years later, he died.