Unanswered Prayers: Cuban Confederate Colonel

Unanswered Prayers
September 1, 2003

South Carolina’s Ambrosio Jose Gonzales (1818-1893) was a transplanted Cuban. As a youngster his family sent him to the United States to study at the French Institute in New York City, a semi-military school, where a classmate turned out to be future Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard. Gonzales would tie his career to Beauregard the rest of his life. It would not be a happy career. Indeed it would be a career spent seeking careers.

Antonio Rafael de la Cova, assistant professor of Latin American Studies at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana, has written a very readable biography of this obscure Cuban Carolinian: Cuban Confederate Colonel: The Life of Ambrosio Jose Gonzales (University of South Carolina Press, 2003).

Early on in life, Gonzales became embroiled in several efforts by Cubans and Americans to “liberate” Cuban from Spanish rule and to annex it to the United States. Many “filibustering” efforts prior to the Civil War, “invasions” similar to the aborted United States effort of 1961, were organized, manned primarily by American volunteers from Mississippi, Kentucky, and Louisiana, and failed. Gonzales participated very actively in two such abortive attempts, serving as “general” and aide to General Lopez (who would later be executed when his fourth invasion attempt failed). Some very prominent Americans were involved in these futile excursions, most especially Mississippi Governor Quitman. In many of the sorties, networks of Freemasons coordinated the planning and protected one another.

Wounded in his second Cuban invasion, Gonzales settled in South Carolina, lobbied endlessly for government jobs, and married into the large and affluent Elliott family. The family, which had ambivalent feelings about this man, became the safety network upon which he relied to sustain himself in a long and frustrating life.

An outspoken advocate of southern rights, states’ rights, and slavery, Gonzales spent the Civil War unsuccessfully seeking military rank. He made such a nuisance of himself with Jefferson Davis that he earned his presidential scorn. The fact that Gonzales’ self-promoting petitions for promotion to general were often supported by Beauregard, whom Davis disliked, did not help Colonel Gonzalez at all.

So Gonzalez spent the Civil War working with artillery units in and around Charleston and Savannah. He seemed to have some skill in located scarce armaments and in designing fortifications, and his scheme for mobile guns that could scoot back and forth along railroad tracks was quite innovative. Charleston and Savannah did not fall until very late in the War (after Sherman’s March), and probably some of the credit for that achievement rightfully belongs to Gonzalez.

The war destroyed his in-laws’ plantations and resources, and Gonzalez spent the reconstruction years in a series of menial positions in several places, usually quite separated from his wife and children. In his old age, some of the family estrangements were patched up, and despite his neglect of his sons, three of them went on to become the founders and publishers of the State newspaper in Columbia, which survives today as the statewide newspaper for South Carolina. (Noted SC historian Lewis Pinckney Jones wrote his 1952 Ph.D. dissertation on “Carolinians and Cubans: The Elliotts and Gonzales, Their Work and Writing” and published a book, Stormy Petrel: N. G. Gonzales and His State, in 1973, about one of the Gonzalez sons.)

De la Cova has succeeded in using a biography of a neglected citizen to illumine Cuban history, southern filibustering politics, Civil War coastal battle lines, internecine Confederate politics, and Reconstruction hardships. It makes for interesting reading.