Book Review

Cuban Confederate Colonel: The Life of Ambrosio José Gonzales. By Antonio Rafael de la Cova. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. xxx, 537 pp. $59.95, ISBN 1-57003-496-6.)
 
Most scholarship on United States–Cuban relations concentrates on the century after 1898 and emphasizes how United States influence grew on the island. The numerous contributions nineteenth-century Cuban expatriates made to North American politics, economy, and culture are all but forgotten. Antonio Rafael de la Cova's book offers an important correction through an examination of the life of one such expatriate, Ambrosio José Gonzales. 1
      Born in 1818 in Matanzas, Cuba, and educated in New York City and Havana, like many elite young men Gonzales became alienated from an arbitrary and repressive Spanish regime. By the 1840s, he and his fellow conspirators in the Havana Club actively supported Narciso López's filibustering ambitions. Gonzales rose in rank to become López's second in command, but when López sailed on his last, fatal expedition in 1851 Gonzales was sidelined with a bout of bilious fever. Under a death sentence in Cuba, Gonzales remained in the United States and spent the 1850s unsuccessfully pursuing a political appointment in the Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan administrations. In 1856, he married Harriet Rutledge Elliott, from a prominent South Carolina family, whom he met though his political and Masonic connections with her father. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Gonzales placed himself at the service of his adopted state. A brilliant military strategist, he developed a siege train that allowed him to defend Charleston, which he did successfully until the last days of the war. The Charlestonians adored their adopted leader and called him General Gonzales, but military accolades and an advanced rank eluded him. 2
      Although the book highlights the accomplishments of Gonzales's life, an aura of sadness and injustice pervades it. Once he was reconciled to exile, the Cuban cast his lot with the United States, but in spite of his education, talent, multilingualism, and charm he never gained the coveted political appointment that he so desperately sought. His military accomplishments in defending Charleston were marred by his continually being passed over for promotion because of his personal feud with Confederate president Jefferson Davis. The defeat of the Confederacy meant that after the war its officials and their families suffered impoverishment and humiliation by carpetbag governments. On a personal level, the greatest blow was the death of his beloved wife, and afterward he became the victim of the vindictiveness of his jilted sister-in-law, who made the alienation of Gonzales's children into a crusade. His last years were spent in New York, where he turned to spiritualism and charlatans in futile attempts to contact his deceased wife. He was ultimately reconciled with his children, and in death he was lauded by both the United States and Cuban notables such as José Martí. 3
      De la Cova's study is provocative and revisionist in the best sense of both terms. Implicitly set within the theoretical framework of Atlantic world history and transnationalism, this book is also an archival tour de force. The author has combed through sources as varied as private family letters, cemetery records, Masonic lodge proceedings, Spanish diplomatic and military sources, and nineteenth-century newspapers, in addition to consulting the appropriate resources in the National Archives. The information gleaned from these sources is rendered in painstaking and inexhaustible detail. 4
      This book is highly recommended for anyone who seeks to understand President William McKinley's assertion that ties of singular intimacy bound Cuba and the United States. De la Cova demonstrates convincingly how such ties were created. 5

Sherry Johnson
Florida International University
Miami, Florida