Ambrose Elliott Gonzales was an American newspaper publisher and writer of negro dialect stories from South Caroline.
Background
Ambrose Elliott Gonzales was born on May 27, 1857, on a plantation in Colleton County, South Carolina.
His father was Ambrosio José Gonzales, a Cuban patriot in exile, and his mother was Harriet Rutledge Elliott, of a family long established in the South Carolina low country. The ravages of the Civil War and the fall of the Confederacy having left the family destitute, young Ambrose early in life became accustomed to hard work.
Scarcely in his teens, he entered manfully into the task of helping his family reëstablish the ancestral home which had been destroyed by Sherman’s men.
Education
Gonzales's formal schooling consisted of a few months at the public school in Beaufort, South Carolina, and one year at a private school in Virginia. At sixteen, he learned telegraphy.
Career
Gonzales went to Grahamville, South Carolina, a small station on the Charleston & Savannah Railway, where he worked four years. Something of his aspirations and genius is indicated by the fact that while there he and his brother, N. G. Gonzales, “printed” with pen and ink a small “newspaper, ” the Palmetto. Each issue totaled two copies, but those two had a remarkable circulation throughout the village.
After working several years as a telegraph operator in New York City and a few months in New Orleans, Gonzales returned to South Carolina and served as a traveling correspondent on the Charleston News and Courier. His brother was working for the same paper.
In 1903, N. G. Gonzales, because of his strenuous newspaper campaign against the Tillman régime, was shot down by Lieut. -Gov. James H. Tillman, nephew of Ben Tillman and candidate for governor. Ambrose Gonzales then assumed the additional responsibilities incurred by his brother’s death, continued, with another brother, William Elliott Gonzales, to publish his paper, and lived to see it achieve a national reputation.
In 1922, he suffered a stroke which impaired his strength and affected his speech. It was after this time, however, that he produced the works upon which his claim to literary recognition rests. His friends had long since urged him to enlarge a newspaper contribution which he had made years before in the form of African-American dialect stories.
Drawing upon newspaper sketches previously published, and writing a great many more that he had been wanting to write, he produced four volumes of stories in the unusual dialect of the low-country or Gullah negroes.
Politics
Gonzales and his brother took an interest in politics, and both had ideas as to what type of leadership the state needed to set it back on the road to progress. When, in 1890, Tillman was elected governor, many of the ablest men in the state felt that affairs had become intolerable.
They believed that there was now as much necessity for redeeming the state from a certain white element as there had once been for redeeming it from the African-American. With the moral and financial support of such men, Gonzales and his brother began in 1891 to publish the State, at Columbia, South Carolina.
The paper’s outspoken opposition to lynching, its plea for child-labor laws, better schools, compulsory-education laws, and its fight for wholesome politics won for it a high esteem among liberal people, but made many bitter enemies for its editors.
