Ambrose Elliott Gonzales (May 27, 1857 – July 11, 1926) was born on a plantation in Colleton County, South Carolina. Gonzales was the son of General Ambrosio José Gonzales and Harriet Rutledge Elliot. His father was a Cuban revolutionary leader, who opposed oppressive Spanish rule. His mother was the daughter of the wealthy South Carolina rice planter, state senator and writer, William Elliott.
Gonzales and his brother Narciso Gener Gonzales (1858–1903) were the founders of The State newspaper in South Carolina. Gonzales is well remembered in South Carolina today as a pioneering journalist and the writer of black dialect sketches on the Gullah people of the South Carolina and Georgia low country.
Gonzales grew up speaking the Gullah language with the slaves (and later freedmen) who worked on his family's rice plantations, and his knowledge of the language was considered extraordinary by other members of the low country planter class. After he published a few sketches in the Gullah language in his newspaper, public interest in his stories prompted him to author several books of Gullah dialect writings, including The Black Border (1922) and With Aesop Along the Black Border (1924). Gonzales won accolades as a publisher and journalist during his lifetime, but he was especially proud of his literary works based on the Gullah language.
Modern scholars have questioned the accuracy of Gonzales' representation of Gullah speech, but his books continue to be a valuable source of information on how the language was spoken in the 19th century. The frequent critical remarks Gonzales makes about the character of Gullah people in his books—decidedly racist by modern standards—take away, though, from the author's achievement.If any marked distinction were to be made between the two Gonzales brothers who founded The State nearly thirty years ago, Narciso Gener Gonzales might be called the steering wheel of the great newspaper, and Ambrose Elliott, its balance. Since March, 1893, the latter has been its president, treasurer and general manager, and since the death of his brother in January, 1903, he has ably borne unusual burdens and responsibilities.
While N. G. Gonzales was in close personal contact with politicians, statesmen and public men, his ardent nature ever responding, unless principle was involved, to the throbbing of the public pulse, and transferring it to the columns of the newspaper which they both loved, Ambrose E., with his jaws set, was straining in the managerial harness, and supervising a thousand and one mechanical and financial details involved in the publication of a growing and progressive journal far too ambitious for its field,—its very existence for years depending upon the ability of this one man to "take punishment." While one was adventuring in Cuba as a lieutenant of the native Army of Liberation, the other was serving with his usual energy and ability as captain and quartermaster in the armies of the United States at Santiago, their paper being turned over to the management of trusted friends, until Cuba had been freed.
It was an ideal combination—that of the brothers Gonzales—and made The State a powerful newspaper. And when the steering wheel was stilled by death, it devolved upon the balance wheel of The State to largely assume the functions of both.
Ambrose Elliott Gonzales was born in Colleton County, South Carolina, May 29, 1857, the eldest son of General Ambrosio Jose Gonzales, the Cuban patriot, and colonel of artillery in the Confederate army, and Harriett Rutledge Elliott, of Beaufort, that state. His main education was not derived from books. As a boy, he was instructed at home and received a brief year of schooling at a private institution in Virginia. Then, at the age of sixteen, he learned telegraphy and entered the employ of the Charleston & Savannah Railway Company, as agent and telegrapher at Grahamville.
The four years which he spent at that lonely railway station, in the middle 70's, were not free from danger and responsibility. The negroes in the community,—many of them turbulent and desperate fellows, full of their new-found freedom, outnumbered the whites nearly a hundred to one, and the boy in charge of large sums of railway and express money, working in an office without a safe and sleeping in a railway shack without locks on doors or windows, soon developed fortitude and self-reliance, invaluable training for the years to follow. (During his service at Grahamville he was an enthusiastic member of the Beaufort County Red Shirt Riders.)
Leaving the railroad in 1879, young Gonzales returned to the plantation where he spent two years farming.
Two years later, he went to New York to seek his fortune,—and found it, in the opportunity afforded him to get 17 to 18 hours' work each day, and here, save for a few months' similar service in New Orleans, he worked for the Western Union and Postal Telegraph Companies, always, to meet the elder brother's obligations, holding down two positions, one on the heavy press wires at the main offices through the night, the other on the Stock, Produce, or Petroleum Exchanges by day.
After four years of double work, impaired health forced him to seek outdoor employment and in 1885 he began his connection with South Carolina newspaperdom as general traveling agent for The Charleston News and Courier. He came to Columbia in 1890, as secretary of the State Department of Agriculture, and in January, of the follow1ng year, joined his brother in the establishment and development of The State. In this work, with the co-operation of a large and harmonious body of fellow editors and business associates, he is still engaged.
Mr. Gonzales has, off and on, in the few idle moments of a very busy life of fifty years—for, as shown, he has been a hard worker since boyhood— written many stories in the Gullah dialect of negroes in tide-water Carolina. It is a fallow field which few have cultivated.
The dialect of the South Carolina coast negro differs greatly from that of his fellow black in the interior of the state; from the Georgia negro, as immortalized by Joel Chandler Harris; from the negroes of Louisiana and the Gulf States; from the negroes north of Mason and Dixon's line—and, necessarily, from the negro of the minstrel shows, a darkey that "never was on sea or land." The charm of Mr. Gonzales' negro stories, their psychological and philological value, consist in the fact that he not only talks, but thinks as the negro. A master of English and an ardent devotee of nature study, he writes with exquisite charm and scientific accuracy of "all out of doors"; the changes of the seasons, the songs of birds, the ebb and flow of the tides and "the glory of the sunlight on the broad marshes" of Beaufort River and the Combahee—all are given in the English of the sea-coast planter of the old regime, and sometimes in the observations of Pompey, or Quakoo, in unadulterated Gullah. When Mr. Gonzales' book of Gullah stories appears, the philologist, the lover of negro folklore, the sociologist and the lover of wholesome humor, will find something really worth reading in the wilderness of modern bookdom. — Yates Snowden.
[From History of South Carolina - Vol 4, 1920 by Yates Snowden
***********************************************************
From Legacy of Leadership -
Ambrose E. Gonzales (1857–1926)
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.
But if he were alive today, Ambrose Gonzales might find himself a bit bewildered that he was chosen to the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame. He took pride in his journalistic accomplishments, but he was aware that he was sometimes a soft financial touch, although he rightly prided himself on his ability "to turn a sharp financial corner."
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.
Jobless and broke after the war, his father tried several unsuccessful enterprises, including farming at devastated Oak Lawn and operating a sawmill. He took his family to Cuba in 1869 to accept a college teaching position. However, his wife contracted yellow fever and died after a brief illness.
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.
Top of Page
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.
(© 1999 South Carolina Business Hall of Fame)
Gonzales and his brother Narciso Gener Gonzales (1858–1903) were the founders of The State newspaper in South Carolina. Gonzales is well remembered in South Carolina today as a pioneering journalist and the writer of black dialect sketches on the Gullah people of the South Carolina and Georgia low country.
Gonzales grew up speaking the Gullah language with the slaves (and later freedmen) who worked on his family's rice plantations, and his knowledge of the language was considered extraordinary by other members of the low country planter class. After he published a few sketches in the Gullah language in his newspaper, public interest in his stories prompted him to author several books of Gullah dialect writings, including The Black Border (1922) and With Aesop Along the Black Border (1924). Gonzales won accolades as a publisher and journalist during his lifetime, but he was especially proud of his literary works based on the Gullah language.
Modern scholars have questioned the accuracy of Gonzales' representation of Gullah speech, but his books continue to be a valuable source of information on how the language was spoken in the 19th century. The frequent critical remarks Gonzales makes about the character of Gullah people in his books—decidedly racist by modern standards—take away, though, from the author's achievement.If any marked distinction were to be made between the two Gonzales brothers who founded The State nearly thirty years ago, Narciso Gener Gonzales might be called the steering wheel of the great newspaper, and Ambrose Elliott, its balance. Since March, 1893, the latter has been its president, treasurer and general manager, and since the death of his brother in January, 1903, he has ably borne unusual burdens and responsibilities.
While N. G. Gonzales was in close personal contact with politicians, statesmen and public men, his ardent nature ever responding, unless principle was involved, to the throbbing of the public pulse, and transferring it to the columns of the newspaper which they both loved, Ambrose E., with his jaws set, was straining in the managerial harness, and supervising a thousand and one mechanical and financial details involved in the publication of a growing and progressive journal far too ambitious for its field,—its very existence for years depending upon the ability of this one man to "take punishment." While one was adventuring in Cuba as a lieutenant of the native Army of Liberation, the other was serving with his usual energy and ability as captain and quartermaster in the armies of the United States at Santiago, their paper being turned over to the management of trusted friends, until Cuba had been freed.
It was an ideal combination—that of the brothers Gonzales—and made The State a powerful newspaper. And when the steering wheel was stilled by death, it devolved upon the balance wheel of The State to largely assume the functions of both.
Ambrose Elliott Gonzales was born in Colleton County, South Carolina, May 29, 1857, the eldest son of General Ambrosio Jose Gonzales, the Cuban patriot, and colonel of artillery in the Confederate army, and Harriett Rutledge Elliott, of Beaufort, that state. His main education was not derived from books. As a boy, he was instructed at home and received a brief year of schooling at a private institution in Virginia. Then, at the age of sixteen, he learned telegraphy and entered the employ of the Charleston & Savannah Railway Company, as agent and telegrapher at Grahamville.
The four years which he spent at that lonely railway station, in the middle 70's, were not free from danger and responsibility. The negroes in the community,—many of them turbulent and desperate fellows, full of their new-found freedom, outnumbered the whites nearly a hundred to one, and the boy in charge of large sums of railway and express money, working in an office without a safe and sleeping in a railway shack without locks on doors or windows, soon developed fortitude and self-reliance, invaluable training for the years to follow. (During his service at Grahamville he was an enthusiastic member of the Beaufort County Red Shirt Riders.)
Leaving the railroad in 1879, young Gonzales returned to the plantation where he spent two years farming.
Two years later, he went to New York to seek his fortune,—and found it, in the opportunity afforded him to get 17 to 18 hours' work each day, and here, save for a few months' similar service in New Orleans, he worked for the Western Union and Postal Telegraph Companies, always, to meet the elder brother's obligations, holding down two positions, one on the heavy press wires at the main offices through the night, the other on the Stock, Produce, or Petroleum Exchanges by day.
After four years of double work, impaired health forced him to seek outdoor employment and in 1885 he began his connection with South Carolina newspaperdom as general traveling agent for The Charleston News and Courier. He came to Columbia in 1890, as secretary of the State Department of Agriculture, and in January, of the follow1ng year, joined his brother in the establishment and development of The State. In this work, with the co-operation of a large and harmonious body of fellow editors and business associates, he is still engaged.
Mr. Gonzales has, off and on, in the few idle moments of a very busy life of fifty years—for, as shown, he has been a hard worker since boyhood— written many stories in the Gullah dialect of negroes in tide-water Carolina. It is a fallow field which few have cultivated.
The dialect of the South Carolina coast negro differs greatly from that of his fellow black in the interior of the state; from the Georgia negro, as immortalized by Joel Chandler Harris; from the negroes of Louisiana and the Gulf States; from the negroes north of Mason and Dixon's line—and, necessarily, from the negro of the minstrel shows, a darkey that "never was on sea or land." The charm of Mr. Gonzales' negro stories, their psychological and philological value, consist in the fact that he not only talks, but thinks as the negro. A master of English and an ardent devotee of nature study, he writes with exquisite charm and scientific accuracy of "all out of doors"; the changes of the seasons, the songs of birds, the ebb and flow of the tides and "the glory of the sunlight on the broad marshes" of Beaufort River and the Combahee—all are given in the English of the sea-coast planter of the old regime, and sometimes in the observations of Pompey, or Quakoo, in unadulterated Gullah. When Mr. Gonzales' book of Gullah stories appears, the philologist, the lover of negro folklore, the sociologist and the lover of wholesome humor, will find something really worth reading in the wilderness of modern bookdom. — Yates Snowden.
[From History of South Carolina - Vol 4, 1920 by Yates Snowden
***********************************************************
From Legacy of Leadership -
Ambrose E. Gonzales (1857–1926)
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.
But if he were alive today, Ambrose Gonzales might find himself a bit bewildered that he was chosen to the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame. He took pride in his journalistic accomplishments, but he was aware that he was sometimes a soft financial touch, although he rightly prided himself on his ability "to turn a sharp financial corner."
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.
Jobless and broke after the war, his father tried several unsuccessful enterprises, including farming at devastated Oak Lawn and operating a sawmill. He took his family to Cuba in 1869 to accept a college teaching position. However, his wife contracted yellow fever and died after a brief illness.
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.
Top of Page
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.
(© 1999 South Carolina Business Hall of Fame)
Ambrose Elliott Gonzales (May 27, 1857 – July 11, 1926) was born on a plantation in Colleton County, South Carolina. Gonzales was the son of General Ambrosio José Gonzales and Harriet Rutledge Elliot. His father was a Cuban revolutionary leader, who opposed oppressive Spanish rule. His mother was the daughter of the wealthy South Carolina rice planter, state senator and writer, William Elliott.
Gonzales and his brother Narciso Gener Gonzales (1858–1903) were the founders of The State newspaper in South Carolina. Gonzales is well remembered in South Carolina today as a pioneering journalist and the writer of black dialect sketches on the Gullah people of the South Carolina and Georgia low country.
Gonzales grew up speaking the Gullah language with the slaves (and later freedmen) who worked on his family's rice plantations, and his knowledge of the language was considered extraordinary by other members of the low country planter class. After he published a few sketches in the Gullah language in his newspaper, public interest in his stories prompted him to author several books of Gullah dialect writings, including The Black Border (1922) and With Aesop Along the Black Border (1924). Gonzales won accolades as a publisher and journalist during his lifetime, but he was especially proud of his literary works based on the Gullah language.
Modern scholars have questioned the accuracy of Gonzales' representation of Gullah speech, but his books continue to be a valuable source of information on how the language was spoken in the 19th century. The frequent critical remarks Gonzales makes about the character of Gullah people in his books—decidedly racist by modern standards—take away, though, from the author's achievement.If any marked distinction were to be made between the two Gonzales brothers who founded The State nearly thirty years ago, Narciso Gener Gonzales might be called the steering wheel of the great newspaper, and Ambrose Elliott, its balance. Since March, 1893, the latter has been its president, treasurer and general manager, and since the death of his brother in January, 1903, he has ably borne unusual burdens and responsibilities.
While N. G. Gonzales was in close personal contact with politicians, statesmen and public men, his ardent nature ever responding, unless principle was involved, to the throbbing of the public pulse, and transferring it to the columns of the newspaper which they both loved, Ambrose E., with his jaws set, was straining in the managerial harness, and supervising a thousand and one mechanical and financial details involved in the publication of a growing and progressive journal far too ambitious for its field,—its very existence for years depending upon the ability of this one man to "take punishment." While one was adventuring in Cuba as a lieutenant of the native Army of Liberation, the other was serving with his usual energy and ability as captain and quartermaster in the armies of the United States at Santiago, their paper being turned over to the management of trusted friends, until Cuba had been freed.
It was an ideal combination—that of the brothers Gonzales—and made The State a powerful newspaper. And when the steering wheel was stilled by death, it devolved upon the balance wheel of The State to largely assume the functions of both.
Ambrose Elliott Gonzales was born in Colleton County, South Carolina, May 29, 1857, the eldest son of General Ambrosio Jose Gonzales, the Cuban patriot, and colonel of artillery in the Confederate army, and Harriett Rutledge Elliott, of Beaufort, that state. His main education was not derived from books. As a boy, he was instructed at home and received a brief year of schooling at a private institution in Virginia. Then, at the age of sixteen, he learned telegraphy and entered the employ of the Charleston & Savannah Railway Company, as agent and telegrapher at Grahamville.
The four years which he spent at that lonely railway station, in the middle 70's, were not free from danger and responsibility. The negroes in the community,—many of them turbulent and desperate fellows, full of their new-found freedom, outnumbered the whites nearly a hundred to one, and the boy in charge of large sums of railway and express money, working in an office without a safe and sleeping in a railway shack without locks on doors or windows, soon developed fortitude and self-reliance, invaluable training for the years to follow. (During his service at Grahamville he was an enthusiastic member of the Beaufort County Red Shirt Riders.)
Leaving the railroad in 1879, young Gonzales returned to the plantation where he spent two years farming.
Two years later, he went to New York to seek his fortune,—and found it, in the opportunity afforded him to get 17 to 18 hours' work each day, and here, save for a few months' similar service in New Orleans, he worked for the Western Union and Postal Telegraph Companies, always, to meet the elder brother's obligations, holding down two positions, one on the heavy press wires at the main offices through the night, the other on the Stock, Produce, or Petroleum Exchanges by day.
After four years of double work, impaired health forced him to seek outdoor employment and in 1885 he began his connection with South Carolina newspaperdom as general traveling agent for The Charleston News and Courier. He came to Columbia in 1890, as secretary of the State Department of Agriculture, and in January, of the follow1ng year, joined his brother in the establishment and development of The State. In this work, with the co-operation of a large and harmonious body of fellow editors and business associates, he is still engaged.
Mr. Gonzales has, off and on, in the few idle moments of a very busy life of fifty years—for, as shown, he has been a hard worker since boyhood— written many stories in the Gullah dialect of negroes in tide-water Carolina. It is a fallow field which few have cultivated.
The dialect of the South Carolina coast negro differs greatly from that of his fellow black in the interior of the state; from the Georgia negro, as immortalized by Joel Chandler Harris; from the negroes of Louisiana and the Gulf States; from the negroes north of Mason and Dixon's line—and, necessarily, from the negro of the minstrel shows, a darkey that "never was on sea or land." The charm of Mr. Gonzales' negro stories, their psychological and philological value, consist in the fact that he not only talks, but thinks as the negro. A master of English and an ardent devotee of nature study, he writes with exquisite charm and scientific accuracy of "all out of doors"; the changes of the seasons, the songs of birds, the ebb and flow of the tides and "the glory of the sunlight on the broad marshes" of Beaufort River and the Combahee—all are given in the English of the sea-coast planter of the old regime, and sometimes in the observations of Pompey, or Quakoo, in unadulterated Gullah. When Mr. Gonzales' book of Gullah stories appears, the philologist, the lover of negro folklore, the sociologist and the lover of wholesome humor, will find something really worth reading in the wilderness of modern bookdom. — Yates Snowden.
[From History of South Carolina - Vol 4, 1920 by Yates Snowden
***********************************************************
From Legacy of Leadership -
Ambrose E. Gonzales (1857–1926)
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.
But if he were alive today, Ambrose Gonzales might find himself a bit bewildered that he was chosen to the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame. He took pride in his journalistic accomplishments, but he was aware that he was sometimes a soft financial touch, although he rightly prided himself on his ability "to turn a sharp financial corner."
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.
Jobless and broke after the war, his father tried several unsuccessful enterprises, including farming at devastated Oak Lawn and operating a sawmill. He took his family to Cuba in 1869 to accept a college teaching position. However, his wife contracted yellow fever and died after a brief illness.
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.
Top of Page
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.
(© 1999 South Carolina Business Hall of Fame)
Gonzales and his brother Narciso Gener Gonzales (1858–1903) were the founders of The State newspaper in South Carolina. Gonzales is well remembered in South Carolina today as a pioneering journalist and the writer of black dialect sketches on the Gullah people of the South Carolina and Georgia low country.
Gonzales grew up speaking the Gullah language with the slaves (and later freedmen) who worked on his family's rice plantations, and his knowledge of the language was considered extraordinary by other members of the low country planter class. After he published a few sketches in the Gullah language in his newspaper, public interest in his stories prompted him to author several books of Gullah dialect writings, including The Black Border (1922) and With Aesop Along the Black Border (1924). Gonzales won accolades as a publisher and journalist during his lifetime, but he was especially proud of his literary works based on the Gullah language.
Modern scholars have questioned the accuracy of Gonzales' representation of Gullah speech, but his books continue to be a valuable source of information on how the language was spoken in the 19th century. The frequent critical remarks Gonzales makes about the character of Gullah people in his books—decidedly racist by modern standards—take away, though, from the author's achievement.If any marked distinction were to be made between the two Gonzales brothers who founded The State nearly thirty years ago, Narciso Gener Gonzales might be called the steering wheel of the great newspaper, and Ambrose Elliott, its balance. Since March, 1893, the latter has been its president, treasurer and general manager, and since the death of his brother in January, 1903, he has ably borne unusual burdens and responsibilities.
While N. G. Gonzales was in close personal contact with politicians, statesmen and public men, his ardent nature ever responding, unless principle was involved, to the throbbing of the public pulse, and transferring it to the columns of the newspaper which they both loved, Ambrose E., with his jaws set, was straining in the managerial harness, and supervising a thousand and one mechanical and financial details involved in the publication of a growing and progressive journal far too ambitious for its field,—its very existence for years depending upon the ability of this one man to "take punishment." While one was adventuring in Cuba as a lieutenant of the native Army of Liberation, the other was serving with his usual energy and ability as captain and quartermaster in the armies of the United States at Santiago, their paper being turned over to the management of trusted friends, until Cuba had been freed.
It was an ideal combination—that of the brothers Gonzales—and made The State a powerful newspaper. And when the steering wheel was stilled by death, it devolved upon the balance wheel of The State to largely assume the functions of both.
Ambrose Elliott Gonzales was born in Colleton County, South Carolina, May 29, 1857, the eldest son of General Ambrosio Jose Gonzales, the Cuban patriot, and colonel of artillery in the Confederate army, and Harriett Rutledge Elliott, of Beaufort, that state. His main education was not derived from books. As a boy, he was instructed at home and received a brief year of schooling at a private institution in Virginia. Then, at the age of sixteen, he learned telegraphy and entered the employ of the Charleston & Savannah Railway Company, as agent and telegrapher at Grahamville.
The four years which he spent at that lonely railway station, in the middle 70's, were not free from danger and responsibility. The negroes in the community,—many of them turbulent and desperate fellows, full of their new-found freedom, outnumbered the whites nearly a hundred to one, and the boy in charge of large sums of railway and express money, working in an office without a safe and sleeping in a railway shack without locks on doors or windows, soon developed fortitude and self-reliance, invaluable training for the years to follow. (During his service at Grahamville he was an enthusiastic member of the Beaufort County Red Shirt Riders.)
Leaving the railroad in 1879, young Gonzales returned to the plantation where he spent two years farming.
Two years later, he went to New York to seek his fortune,—and found it, in the opportunity afforded him to get 17 to 18 hours' work each day, and here, save for a few months' similar service in New Orleans, he worked for the Western Union and Postal Telegraph Companies, always, to meet the elder brother's obligations, holding down two positions, one on the heavy press wires at the main offices through the night, the other on the Stock, Produce, or Petroleum Exchanges by day.
After four years of double work, impaired health forced him to seek outdoor employment and in 1885 he began his connection with South Carolina newspaperdom as general traveling agent for The Charleston News and Courier. He came to Columbia in 1890, as secretary of the State Department of Agriculture, and in January, of the follow1ng year, joined his brother in the establishment and development of The State. In this work, with the co-operation of a large and harmonious body of fellow editors and business associates, he is still engaged.
Mr. Gonzales has, off and on, in the few idle moments of a very busy life of fifty years—for, as shown, he has been a hard worker since boyhood— written many stories in the Gullah dialect of negroes in tide-water Carolina. It is a fallow field which few have cultivated.
The dialect of the South Carolina coast negro differs greatly from that of his fellow black in the interior of the state; from the Georgia negro, as immortalized by Joel Chandler Harris; from the negroes of Louisiana and the Gulf States; from the negroes north of Mason and Dixon's line—and, necessarily, from the negro of the minstrel shows, a darkey that "never was on sea or land." The charm of Mr. Gonzales' negro stories, their psychological and philological value, consist in the fact that he not only talks, but thinks as the negro. A master of English and an ardent devotee of nature study, he writes with exquisite charm and scientific accuracy of "all out of doors"; the changes of the seasons, the songs of birds, the ebb and flow of the tides and "the glory of the sunlight on the broad marshes" of Beaufort River and the Combahee—all are given in the English of the sea-coast planter of the old regime, and sometimes in the observations of Pompey, or Quakoo, in unadulterated Gullah. When Mr. Gonzales' book of Gullah stories appears, the philologist, the lover of negro folklore, the sociologist and the lover of wholesome humor, will find something really worth reading in the wilderness of modern bookdom. — Yates Snowden.
[From History of South Carolina - Vol 4, 1920 by Yates Snowden
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From Legacy of Leadership -
Ambrose E. Gonzales (1857–1926)
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.
But if he were alive today, Ambrose Gonzales might find himself a bit bewildered that he was chosen to the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame. He took pride in his journalistic accomplishments, but he was aware that he was sometimes a soft financial touch, although he rightly prided himself on his ability "to turn a sharp financial corner."
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.
Jobless and broke after the war, his father tried several unsuccessful enterprises, including farming at devastated Oak Lawn and operating a sawmill. He took his family to Cuba in 1869 to accept a college teaching position. However, his wife contracted yellow fever and died after a brief illness.
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.
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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.
(© 1999 South Carolina Business Hall of Fame)
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