When the United States declared independence from Great Britain in 1776, the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were independent and sovereign states. The King of Naples recognized the United States in 1796, 20 years after the declaration of independence, and diplomatic relations between the two countries were established in 1832.
Kingdom of Naples Recognition of the United States 1796
The Kingdom of Naples recognized the United States when it accepted the credentials of U.S. consular agent John S. M. Matthiew, who was appointed to the position of U.S. Consul in Naples on May 20, 1796.
U.S. Consular Agents
The first U.S. consular agent appointed to what became the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was John S. M. Matthiew on May 20, 1796, who was assigned to Naples. Frederick Degan was assigned as consul on March 20, 1805, during Congressional recess. He was confirmed by Congress on January 17, 1806. He was succeeded by Alexander Hammett, appointed on April 7, 1809, and confirmed on June 21, 1809. Hammett was appointed specifically to the King of the Two Sicilies on April 20, 1816.
The first Consul of the United States for the island of Sicily was Joseph Barnes, who was appointed on February 10, 1802. On January 17, 1806, Abraham Gibbs and John Broadbent were commissioned as Consuls at the Sicilian cities of Palermo and Messina, respectively.
The first representative from the Two Sicilies in the United States was Count Ferdinando Lucchesi. On May 30, 1826, his exequatur as Consul General of the Two Sicilies at Washington, D.C. was signed by U.S. President John Quincy Adams.
Establishment of Diplomatic Relations 1832
Although the first diplomatic interaction between the United States and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies occurred with the reception of U.S. Special Minister Plenipotentiary to Naples William Pinkney in 1816, this did not result in the establishment of full diplomatic relations at the time. Pinkney was commissioned on April 23, 1816, with the mission to negotiate a treaty to pay reparations to U.S. merchants for items lost during the reign of Murat. Pinkney’s mission was unsuccessful, and in October 1816 he departed for his post at St. Petersburg, Russia.
Full diplomatic relations were established when the first U.S. Chargé d’Affaires to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies John Nelson presented his credentials to the King of the Two Sicilies on January 25, 1832. The first U.S. Minister Resident at Naples was Robert Dale Owen, who presented his credentials on September 20, 1854.
On December 7, 1846, the Chevalier Rocco Martuscelli presented his credentials as the Chargé d’Affairs at Washington of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. From then until 1861 the Government of the Two Sicilies was almost continuously represented in the United States by a Chargé d’Affaires. The last of these representatives was Giuseppe Anfora dei Duchi di Liccignano, Consul General, who acted as Chargé d’Affaires ad interim from September 24, 1860, to December 15, 1861.
From the United States historical archive: A Guide to the United States’ History of Recognition, Diplomatic, and Consular Relations, by Country, since 1776: Two Sicilies.
Naples and the USA, the Birth of Western Democracy
The picture on the rigth shows the desk of Gaetano Filangieri in the library of Palazzo Como, the Filangieri Museum in Naples, which houses the precious letters between Benjamin Franklin, father of the American Constitution, and the universal jurist Gaetano Filangieri of the Enlightenment in Naples.
The American colonies had Benjamin Franklin of Boston as the most energetic lawyer, honored by both the British Crown and his countrymen, whose ideals he was increasingly absorbed. Received in triumph in Philadelphia in March 1776, immediately after participating in the Declaration of Independence he went on a diplomatic mission to Paris, where he remained until 1785 as plenipotentiary of the North American Republics.
In that period, and exactly in 1780, the first volumes of the Science of Legislation by Gaetano Filangieri were published, which emerged on the international scene by formulating an important reform of the Kingdom of Naples with which it was introduced, for the first time in the history of world justice, the obligation to give reasons for legal judgments and the prohibition of interpretation. The work was read with admiration in Europe and beyond and immediately opposed by the Church and the great monarchical regimes of the old continent because it denounced the exploitation of religion for purposes of power and accused the dispossession of the Indies and the Americas by the hegemonic nations of Europe. Below is a significant and far-sighted passage.
“Wealth has thus become the first instrument of war, and gold and silver are the levees or vehicles of conquests. (…)
In a corner of America among a free and merchant people, child of Europe, but whom oppression has made the enemy of his mother, among this people, I say, a voice rises, which tells us: Europeans, (…) our independence, the fruit of your injustices, and of our resentment, (…) will make us the arbitrators of the destiny of America, and of the fate of Europe: we will be able, with ease, to snatch the sources of your wealth from your hands ; (…) Your colonies finally either will become our provinces, or they will break their chains with the aid of our alliance which we will never deny when the voice of freedom against tyranny is required. Deprived then of America, and consequently of Asia, which seeks only our silver, you will return to the darkness and barbarism from which you came, and your poverty alone will be able to guarantee you from our righteous ones, but not profitable revenge.
This is the fatal intimation that the Anglican colonies can do to Europe, and a people like this (…) can today become the object of her fears. ”
Benjamin and Gaetano
Benjamin Franklin, from Paris, in 1781, read the Science of Legislation and appreciated certain invectives against England, but also against France and Spain, and started a very dense correspondence with Gaetano Filangieri. This is an example of a letter sent by Gaetano Filangieri to Benjamin Franklin from the USA national archive: To Benjamin Franklin from Gaetano Filangieri, 24 August 1782.
The Science of Legislation impressed Franklin to such an extent that it was adopted as the source text for the drafting of the Constitution of the United States of America, in which he participated while receiving and reading subsequent volumes. The constitution was promulgated in the USA on June 21, 1788, exactly one month before the death of the thirty-four-year-old Filangieri, in Vico Equense on July 21, just a few days after receiving a copy of the US Constitution from Philadelphia sent to him by Franklin, who returned from Paris, to assure the inclusion of the “right to happiness” taken from “Science of Legislation”.
In 1789 the Code of the laws of San Leucio was promulgated, an enlightenment statute founded on public happiness, wanted by Ferdinand of Bourbon and Maria Carolina of Habsburg, inspired by Gaetano Filangieri.
The commission that compiled the Napoleonic Code, the first modern civil code, also made use of the “Science of Legislation”. Napoleon defined Filangieri as a “teacher for all of us”.
Someone wrongly claims that the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America is the daughter of Filangieri’s ideas. In reality, it is exactly the Constitution of the United States of America that has a Neapolitan inspiration, the one that has marked the history of democracy by influencing the subsequent constitutions of many other modern nations.
It is no coincidence that the first and oldest US representation in Italy was inaugurated in Naples, the seventh in the world. It was December 16, 1796, when official diplomatic relations between the Kingdom of Naples and the United States of America were born. A Consulate that became an Embassy in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1832, then closed in 1861 to become a Consulate in Southern Italy after Garibaldi marched to “free” the South, strictly in quotation marks, just as the State Department writes in the short official story of the diplomatic relationship between the USA and the Two Sicilies.
The Library of Congress sponsored a conference on Gaetano Filangieri and Benjamin Franklin. The Neapolitan Gaetano Filangieri, with his work on the Science of Legislation, greatly influenced the birth of the U.S. Constitution and the birth of the United States of America. See Filangieri & Franklin: The Italian Enlightenment and the U.S. Constitution.
Giving Credit. The information described has been obtained from this Facebook post: Il legame tra gli USA e Napoli, culla della democrazia occidentale by Mr. Angelo Forgione.
