Cuban Confederate Colonel: The Life of Ambrosio Jose Gonzales (review)

Abstract

Antonio Rafael de la Cova. Cuban Confederate Colonel: The Life of Ambrosio Jose Gonzales. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. 537 pp.Confederate Colonel Ambrosio Jose was the highest ranking Cubanborn officer on either side in the American Civil War. Despite consistently outstanding service, he was denied promotion to brigadier general six times by President Jefferson Davis. Born in Matanzas in 1818 to a prominent family of educators and landowners, was schooled in New York and joined Venezuelan-born filibuster Narciso Lopez as his adjutant general in the ill-fated 1850 expedition to the United States. Wounded at Cardenas, retreated with Lopez and the surviving expeditionaries to Florida. was recuperating in Georgia when Lopez sailed without him on his last, fatal expedition to Cuba in 1851. Handsome, cultured, affable, and an expert marksman, Gonzales was well received in Southern society; he married the teenaged daughter of a wealthy South Carolina family in 1856 and settled on a plantation near Charleston. A naturalized U.S. citizen since 1849, sided with South Carolina when his adopted state seceded from the union in 1860.Antonio Rafael de la Cova has written an excellent book. Cuban Confederate Colonel: The Life of Ambrosio Jose is the portrait of the man in his era, rendered in rich, pointillist detail. Dazzling contrasts and contradictions define the protagonist and his grotesquely mutating environment. An aspiring liberator, considered slavery an economic necessity for both Cuba and the southern United States. He and his South Carolina compatriots shamelessly employed the rhetoric of freedom to expand the territory of slavery in the United States, designated liberty's country by General Lafayette. The aged doyen of the liberal international, on his last visit to South Carolina in the 1820s, could not persuade the descendants of his revolutionary comrades to abandon their unseemly attachment to slavery. In the 1830s the abolitionist Grimke sisters and John C. Fremont left Charleston for good. The last audible voice for reason in the state fell silent when Joel R. Poinsett died in 1851. About that time, Ambrosio Jose appeared on the scene. Poor South an observer lamented: small for a republic, too big for an insane asylum.For virtually the entire Civil War, was chief of artillery for the Confederate department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida under General P. …