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1. General Ambrosio José Gonzales
(Cuban revolutionary general who battled for oppressive
rule of Spain.) |
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Ambrose E. Gonzales was not only an illustrious journalist but a businessman who, against tremendous odds, kept afloat and saw flourish The State newspaper, which he and his brother, N. G. Gonzales, founded. Ambrose Elliott Gonzales was born May 27, 1857, in Paulo Parish, South Carolina, the son of General Ambrosio José and Harriet Rutledge Elliott Gonzales. His father was a brilliant and adventurous Cuban revolutionary general who battled the oppressive rule of Spain. His mother was the daughter of an erudite Lowcountry planter, William Elliott. But he grew up in the poverty spawned by Reconstruction, learning early the work ethic. The Civil War had been costly to the Elliott and Gonzales families. William Elliott died in 1863, and Sherman's troops destroyed the Elliott family plantation home, Oak Lawn. After the death of his wife, the general returned with his six children to Charleston, where they were reared by their grandmother and their mother's two sisters.By age 15, Ambrose was already known for his manners, scholarship, and his blend of practicality and idealism. He was a second father to his brothers and sisters. N. G. Gonzales, who was two years younger than Ambrose, helped his older brother by cutting wood, building fences, planting, and churning. Educated mostly at home, Ambrose Gonzales managed brief stints in private schools in Virginia, Charleston, and Beaufort, where he early showed his business acumen by buying and selling poultry, cutting crossties for sale, and tending to matters at his family's plantation ruins.He and N. G. landed meager jobs as telegraphers at Grahamville, South Carolina—an experience that nudged them toward careers in journalism. And the brothers became Wade Hampton's first "Red Shirts" at Grahamville. In 1885, he joined his brother at the Columbia bureau of the Charleston News and Courier, and as general agent, he rambled all over the state and emerged as a popular figure in small towns, where his story-telling capacity, his rich baritone voice, and his generosity became legendary. In 1891, Ambrose and N. G. Gonzales founded The State as an outspoken Columbia daily newspaper. In 1893, Ambrose became business manager, president, treasurer, and general manager of The State Company, as well as publisher of the newspaper. He retained these positions until his death.The controversial enterprise struggled at first. It taxed Ambrose Gonzales' considerable financial skills to keep it going while his brothers, N. G. and William Elliott Gonzales, who joined the staff shortly after the paper started, concentrated on the news and editorial phases. N. G. Gonzales died January 19, 1903, four days after being shot by the lame-duck lieutenant governor, James Tillman, across the street from the State House. Ambrose was devastated. The day after his brother's death, he ended a signed editorial with these words: "With heavy hearts his work is taken over by those who loved him well, and in his name The State is pledged anew to the principles for which he gave his life." Ambrose Gonzales kept The State alive and crusading. Gonzales never lost his interest in writing. He made a unique and lasting contribution with his famous sketches employing the Gullah dialect. Although he had appeared in a number of light operas, he never sang in public again after the death of his brother. Even so, he retained a keen sense of humor and an abiding interest in subjects ranging from farming to opera, while devoting 35 years to the growth and health of the newspaper, which became the state's largest. If Gonzales had a fault, it was his excessive generosity. This quality, coupled with his loyalty and devotion to the state and to Columbia, involved him in many promotions to improve the city and state. He boosted all endeavors and subscribed to everything he could afford and some he couldn't. The fiery William Watts Ball, who served as acting editor of The State and later as editor of the News and Courier, in 1932 wrote that Gonzales was "the most important and greatest South Carolinian since Governor Hampton, though South Carolinians do not yet know it." In his own biographical sketch, written at the request of his editors, Gonzales dwelled on his writing far more than on his business leadership. On July 10, 1926, the day before he died, he heard bad news about his farm. He replied: "I am the most hopeful man in the world. If I knew I were to die tomorrow, I should plant seed today." Gonzales died July 11, 1926. He never married. He was inducted into the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame in 1986. |
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Abstract: Elliott and Gonzales families of Beaufort and Colleton districts, S.C. Prominent family members included planter, state legislator, and writer, William Elliott (1788-1863); Phoebe Waight Elliott (d. 1855); Ann Hutchinson Smith Elliott (1802-1877); Mary Barnwell Elliott Johnstone (1824-1900); Ralph Emms Elliott (1834-1902); Harriett Rutledge Elliott (1838-1869); Ambrosio Jose Gonzales (b. 1818); Ambrose Elliott Gonzales (1857-1926); Narciso Gener Gonzales (1858-1903); and William Elliott Gonzales (1866-1937). The Elliotts owned cotton and rice plantations, a houses in Beaufort, and Adams Run, S.C., as well as a summer home in Flat Rock, N.C. Ambrose Elliott Gonzales, Narciso Gener Gonzales, and William Elliott Gonzales founded "The State," a newspaper published in Columbia, S.C. Chiefly correspondence, but also financial and legal papers, account books, maps and plats, a few writings of William Elliott and others, and a small amount of other material. The bulk of the material before the Civil War is correspondence of William Elliott about South Carolina politics; sectional differences; his travels to Saratoga Springs and other health resorts, the northern states, and Europe; plantation management; rice and cotton crops; slaves; the education of children; summers at Flat Rock, N.C.; and various family matters. Only a few letters document William Elliott's career as a writer; four are from William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870). Correspondence during the Civil War years discusses the lives of civilians and soldiers in South Carolina and in western North Carolina. Post-Civil War correspondence reveals the Elliotts' financial difficulties, their struggles to educate the Gonzales children, and their efforts to rebuild their plantations. It also documents the education and early professional lives of Ambrose and Narciso Gonzales. There are a few letters about the early years of their newspaper "The State". |
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_______________________ |
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Harriett Rutledge Elliott married, in 1856, Ambrosio
Jose Gonzales (b. 1816), a Cuban revolutionary in exile in the
United States. The Gonzaleses had six children: Ambrosio Jose,
Jr., (1857-1926); Narciso Gener (1858-1903); Alfonso Beauregard
(1861-1908); Gertrude Ruffini (1864-1900); Benigno (1866-1937);
and Anita (b. 1869). The children of Harriett Rutledge Elliott
and Ambrosio Jose Gonzales all used more than one name in the
course of their lives: Ambrosio usually signed his letters as
"Brosie" and was known in adulthood as Ambrose Elliott Gonzales.
Narciso was known affectionately in the family as Nanno, called
himself Elliott during his school days, and used his initials, N.
G., professionally. Gertrude Ruffini was called Tulita as a
little girl, and was later known as Trudie. Alfonso Beauregard
was alternately called Fonsie, Beaury, or Bory. Benigno changed
his name to William Elliott and was called Minnie as a boy,
Willie as a young man, and Bill as an adult. Anita's name was
changed to Harriett Rutledge soon after her mother's death, and
the family often called her Hattie.
Before the Civil War, Harriett Rutledge Elliott Gonzales and Ambrosio Jose Gonzales lived primarily in Washington, D. C., although Mrs. Gonzales spent considerable time with her family in South Carolina. During the war, Harriett Gonzales and her children stayed at Oak Lawn with the Elliott family while Ambrosio Jose Gonzales served in the Confederate army. After the war, Gonzales bought Social Hall plantation from the Elliotts and moved his family there. In 1869, the Gonzaleses moved to Cuba, where Harriett Elliott Gonzales died of yellow fever in October 1869. After their mother's death, Ambrosio Jose Gonzales took four of his children to Oak Lawn, leaving Narciso and Alfonso in Cuba with friends for a year. In 1870, he moved the two boys to Oak Lawn as well, where all the Gonzales children were raised by their grandmother, Ann Hutchinson Smith Elliott, and their aunts, Ann and Emily Elliott. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Elliotts and Gonzaleses at Oak Lawn struggled to regain title to their land and to make a living from their plantations. Lack of funds limited the formal education of the Gonzales children. The two older boys, Ambrose and Narciso, worked as telegraphers and then as correspondents for the Charleston News and Courier to help support the family in the 1870s and 1880s. Ambrose, Narciso, and William Elliott Gonzales are best known for establishing and publishing a daily newspaper, The State, in Columbia, S. C. They started the paper to lead the opposition to Benjamin R. Tillman after Tillman was elected governor in 1890. "The State" took outspoken positions against lynching, for child-labor laws, for better education, and for other social and political reforms, but the anti-Tillman campaign overshadowed all other issues. In 1903, N. G. Gonzales died from a gunshot wound inflicted by Tillman's nephew, Lieutenant Governor James H. Tillman, who blamed Gonzales for his defeat in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1902. After N. G. Gonzales's death, Ambrose Elliott Gonzales assumed additional editorial responsibilities and, with his brother William Elliott Gonzales, continued to publish "The State." William Elliott Gonzales published the paper until his death in 1937. For additional information about members of the Elliott and Gonzales families, see Lewis Pinckney Jones, Carolinians and Cubans: The Elliotts and Gonzales, Their Work and Their Writings, Ph. D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1952, and L. M. Matthews, N. G. Gonzales, Ph. D. dissertation, Duke University, 1971; as well as biographical sketches of William Elliott and Ambrose Elliott Gonzales in the Dictionary of American Biography; of various Elliott, Skirving, and Smith family members who served in the state legislature in Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives; and of N. G. Gonzales in the Encyclopedia of Southern History. |
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