Antonio Rafael de la Cova. Cuban Confederate Colonel: The Life of Ambrosio José Gonzales. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. xxviii, 537. $59.95.
 
This volume describes thoroughly the career of a relatively minor figure in dramatic events on an extensive historical stage. Ambrosio José Gonzales (1818–1893), born in Matanzas, Cuba, received his secondary education in New York, and served as an organizer of three filibuster expeditions from the United States between 1849 and 1851 against Spanish rule in Cuba. In these preparations, Gonzales served primarily as interpreter and political intermediary for Narciso López (1797–1851), a former Spanish general who traveled extensively in the United States seeking funds, troops, and equipment. The conspiracy's goal was Cuba's independence, probably to be followed quickly by annexation to the United States as a slave state. As Antonio Rafael de la Cova notes, many affluent Cuban backers of López "favored annexation because it would guarantee their chattel property" (p. 6). Gonzales, a U.S. citizen since 1849 and styled as adjutant general to López, took part in a May 1850 landing in the town of Cárdenas on Cuba's north coast. The invading troops, largely from the U.S. South, were able to remain ashore less than twenty-four hours, as Spanish troops approached and no local recruits flocked to the invaders' banner. Following the failure of these insurgent efforts, Gonzales fruitlessly pursued federal diplomatic appointments in Latin America, and in 1856 married into an affluent South Carolina family, the Elliotts of Oak Lawn.
      Within the politics of antebellum South Carolina, Gonzales is described by de la Cova as a Unionist who viewed slavery as economically necessary. Maintaining both these views became untenable as secessionist enthusiasm prevailed in the state in 1860, and Gonzales immediately volunteered his talents to the Confederacy as a military organizer. Appointed colonel of artillery, he energetically arranged (and worked to procure) the ordnance that helped to prevent Union conquest of Charleston for nearly four years, despite northern desires to punish the rebellious city in exemplary fashion. Paroled a few weeks after Appomattox, Gonzales sought to provide for his wife Hattie and for the six children they had together. Reconstruction visited unfamiliar privation on the Gonzales and Elliott families. Their efforts at farming and lumber production never yielded appreciable returns, and (in a turn of fate perhaps tinged with poetic justice) several branches of the family lived for years in former slave quarters, the only plantation structures to survive wartime destruction. Ambrosio, Hattie, and the children tried life in Cuba in 1869, but Hattie died of yellow fever within a year. Returning to the United States, Gonzales was separated from his children as he again took up his never successful search for government patronage. He shuttled among Washington, Baltimore, New York, and North Carolina, relying on brief assignments as interpreter, teacher, stock trader, and translator. He was reconciled with his children in his last years, which also witnessed a laudatory 1892 meeting in Key West with José Martí and the leaders of Cuba's 1868 rebellion against Spain. Gonzales died in relative obscurity in New York less than a year later.
      De la Cova's account displays a number of strengths. By meticulous research in correspondence and published hotel registers, he reconstructs Gonzales's travels with López within the United States, and their contacts with other filibuster conspirators. These chapters demonstrate the broad appeal of Cuban annexationism in the South around 1850 and the importance of Masonic ties among the plotters. The reader also gains insights into Gonzales's personality and character. The Cuban-born colonel could be an energetic organizer and military subordinate, but at times he also showed vanity and poor judgment. He alienated Confederate President Jefferson Davis with an impolitic letter in 1861, although his long acquaintance with Davis might have warned him of the dangers in adopting such a tone. Turned down (six times!) for military promotion, in later years Gonzales awarded himself a courtesy title of "general," referring to his briefly held rank as a filibuster. Gonzales was a devoted husband, however, and after the Civil War he also reconciled with Davis and with many northerners.
      Logically, the author emphasizes Gonzales's private life during the Reconstruction years, and this vivid and distressing account emphasizes how cultural prejudice from within his adopted family added to the miseries of regional depression and unemployment. Following Hattie's death (for which they sometimes blamed Gonzales), many of the Elliotts sought to cut him off from his children, two of whom they even rechristened with less Cuban names. Though possessed of a Micawberish perennial optimism, Gonzales had an uncanny knack for falling victim to historical misfortunes, moving to Cuba just as the Ten Years' War (1868–1878) broke out, and obtaining a job on Wall Street only to lose it in the Panic of 1873.
      The book's shortcomings must also be noted. First, it is often difficult to grasp the general setting and background for events that are recited in profuse detail. The comings and goings of annexationist conspirators are recorded painstakingly, but we learn little of the changing views and motivations of the participants in these gatherings. This volume also records what must be all of Gonzales's recommendations for placement, upgrading, or abandonment of every Confederate artillery piece in the Charleston area during the Civil War, but scant indication is provided of the tactical or strategic criteria underlying these decisions.
      Second, readers may well differ with de la Cova's overall assessment of Gonzales's motives, which bear considerably on the colonel's historical significance. The author approvingly quotes Jefferson Davis's assessment of Gonzales (p. xvii) as "a soldier under two flags but one cause; that of community independence." Yet one might observe with equal justification that in both Cuba and South Carolina, Gonzales served the cause of slaveholding, although he did not personally own slaves. Separation from Spain (which was feared to be planning to liberalize or abolish slavery in Cuba) was, for many annexationists, simply a means to an end. Both Cuban annexation and Confederate secession failed. Although true Cuban independence was ultimately achieved, Ambrosio Gonzales's commitment to that cause during the 1840s and 1850s is, at the least, quite debatable.

Christopher Mitchell
New York University