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By Root 1647 0

on that long-ago afternoon of his arrival survive today mostly as microfilmed ghosts. Even so, their pages glow with life. The story getting the most attention that day was not, in fact, the impending presidential election in the United States. Rather, it was the triumphant march through southern Italy of General Giuseppe Garibaldi (“the Italian Washington,” the Daily Advertiser called him) and his red-shirted comrades, an army of liberation and national unification. The reactionary regimes of popes and princes seemed to crumble before the youthful crusaders with hardly a shot fired. On the front page of the Boston Evening Transcript, a brand-new poem by William Cullen Bryant, America’s most revered literary figure, hailed the newly unchained inhabitants of those medieval fiefdoms: “Slaves but yestereve were they, / Freemen with the dawning day.”

Other noteworthy news came from even farther afield. The Advertiser’s front page carried a dispatch just received from the sloop-of-war USS Constellation, on patrol along the coast of Angola. It reported the recent capture of several slave ships by vessels of the U.S. Navy’s West African squadron. Commander LeRoy of the USS Mystic had just seized two slavers: the Triton out of New Orleans and the brig Russell of New York. Off the mouth of the Congo River, Commander Dornin of the USS San Jacinto had intercepted the brig Storm King of New York and, on boarding her, found 619 slaves, likely bound for the sugar plantations of Cuba. Another New York ship taken the same day had no fewer than a thousand unfortunate souls packed in her hold. The newly freed men, women, and children were sent on to Liberia. It might have seemed odd to some Boston readers that their national government was liberating slaves across the Atlantic while zealously protecting the property rights of slaveholders closer to home. Not long after Congress abolished slave importation in 1807, however, U.S. and British naval vessels had begun to roam the African coasts and the waters of the Caribbean, assiduously (or sometimes not so assiduously, depending on who was in charge back in Washington) suppressing the trade, occasionally even bringing the captains and crews back to stand trial under federal law. It was one of many such contradictions born of compromise that Americans took for granted, while foreign travelers viewed them, like so much else in this land, with astonishment.

All the Boston papers that day covered two related stories that had transfixed the nation: the travels of the first official Japanese delegation to visit America (now on its way home) and, even more exciting, the tour of these states by the Prince of Wales. The Japanese envoys had been cordially received at the White House and fêted at a grand ball in New York, but their enjoyment of the trip had been dampened somewhat by the fact that their “translator” spoke only broken English and not a single American citizen, as yet, spoke Japanese. Still, they had been impressed by how frequently Americans combed their hair and by the ingeniousness of Western bathroom facilities—though the envoys had caused a near scandal at their Washington hotel when several were found naked together in the same bathtub, a Japanese, though apparently not American, custom. (Some of the envoys, for their part, were shocked when they visited a Washington brothel and found multiple couples having sex in the same room—an American, though clearly not Japanese, custom.) Several of the diplomats kept diaries of their journey; one noted that in America, “anyone of good character except a negro may be elected president.”8

Prince Albert Edward’s tour, on the other hand, seemed so far to have been an unqualified success, and mostly unhampered by language barriers. (The public was unaware, however, that Queen Victoria’s eldest son, later to become King Edward VII, was sometimes inwardly appalled at the jostling rudeness of American crowds. While paying his respects to a statue of Washington, for instance, he was greeted with jeers of “He socked it to you in the Revolution!” and