Celso Caesar Moreno

Celso Caesar Moreno (1830 – March 12, 1901) was an adventurer and a controversial political figure on the world stage, and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Hawaii under Kalākaua.

Born in Italy, he fought in the Crimean War and lived throughout Asia, Hawaii and the United States, often taking sides with the indigenous underdog against British imperialism (though a promoter of Italian imperialist dreams).

Moreno spent his final years living in Washington, D. C., trying to eliminate the padrone system that created slavery conditions within the Italian immigrant labor force.

[3] Moreno spent the years 1855-64 in Asia, where documentation is sparse to confirm his own self-promoting accounts, which show him always on the side opposing British (and Dutch) imperialism.

[5] Moreno claimed to have then journeyed to Rangoon, newly conquered by the British, where he sympathetically interviewed the captive last Mughal sultan, Bahadur Shah.

A good linguist, including in Arabic and Malay, he there called himself Mustafa Vizir, exploited his past links with Ottoman Turkey and anti-British Muslim India and even associated himself with the legendary Muslim kingdom of Rum (sharing the aura of Alexander the Great, ancient Rome, Byzantium and the Ottomans) by calling himself a citizen of Rome.

This certainly would have impressed the ruling Sultan Alauddin Ibrahim Mansur Syah 1859–1862, who had revived the 16th century Aceh link with Turkey and asked for its protection, as well as exploring an anti-Dutch alliance with France.

Moreno made much in the US and especially Italy of having married a beautiful princess, Ibrahim's daughter, but was quiet about the corollary of that evident fact, that he must have presented himself as a Muslim.

[6] Moreno claims to have left Aceh on foot, travelling through independent Batak territory in Sumatra's interior, before continuing his journey eastward to Vietnam and China.

[7] There we have an external source, Augustus Frederick Lindley, the American mercenary recruiting European soldiers to fight for the Taiping rebel cause.

He spent much of the next two years lobbying effectively for this scheme, impressing King Victor Emmanuel II with his descriptions of the waiting tropical paradise.

A newspaper mention inferred that Secretary of State William H. Seward, who had negotiated the 1867 Alaska Purchase, was in favor of the sale; however, nobody took Moreno up on the offer.

Senator Frederick Theodore Frelinghuysen introduced a bill on May 18, 1874, to grant a charter to Moreno and thirteen others for the construction and maintenance of the trans-Pacific cable.

[21] When Congress was considering Moreno's telegraph cable charter in 1874, Kalākaua was in the nation's capital as head of the Kingdom of Hawaii delegation negotiating the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875.

[24] Moreno arrived in Honolulu, November 14, 1879, on the Chinese steamer Ho-Chung as the official representative of the China Merchants' Steam Navigation Company, empowered to negotiate with the Kingdom of Hawaii.

Trying to make himself look more influential than he was, Moreno claimed to be a close associate of James A. Garfield, who was at that time a candidate (and subsequent winner) in the United States presidential election.

[28][29] His efforts at overturning Hawaii's stringent opium laws, and acquiring a monopoly on the manufacture and distribution of the drug for trafficking in the Pacific area, were almost successful.

When Liliuokalani tried to promulgate a new constitution, Colburn and the rest of her cabinet refused to sign it, an act that helped lead to the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii.

In spite of his role in those chain of events, Colburn penned a letter to Moreno in October 1893 expressing his hope for restoration of the monarchy and indemnity for the royalists who were loyal to Liliuokalani.

[44] He eventually returned to Washington, D. C. where he was active in the Italian community, trying to abolish the padrone system (a form of slavery) existent at that time in contract labor from Italy.

[45][46] In 1886, he persuaded Congressman Henry B. Lovering of Massachusetts to introduce a bill to ban importation of slave contact labor from Italy into the United States.

Moreno accused Fava of corruption in using his position and influence to perpetuate the trafficking of slaves from Italy, while also reaping financial benefits from the practice.