Ambrosio José Gonzales

Ambrosio José Gonzales (October 3, 1818 – July 31, 1893) was a Cuban revolutionary general who became a colonel in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. Gonzales, as a revolutionary, wanted the United States to annex Cuba.

During the American Civil War, he served as the Chief of Artillery in the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Early life Gonzales was born in the town of Matanzas, Cuba, in 1818. His father was a schoolmaster and the founder of the first daily newspaper in Matanzas. His mother was a member of a prominent local family. and later a professor for the University of Havana, where he taught languages (he claimed fluency in English, French, Spanish, and Italian). He was also well instructed in mathematics and geography.

Cuban revolutionary In 1848, Gonzales joined with a secret organization, the Havana Club, for Cuba to be annexed by the United States. That aim was actively shared by many Americans. The movement found encouragement from a surge of expansionism in the United States, particularly in its South, after the U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845. He was the paternal grandfather of Robert E. Gonzales.

American Civil War As secession approached in the late 1850s, Gonzales went into business as a sales agent for various firearms manufacturers, demonstrating and selling the LeMat revolver and Maynard Arms Company rifles to state legislatures in the South. Confederate President Jefferson Davis declined Gonzales's request for promotion to general six times. Davis disliked Beauregard, one of whose men had been Gonzales. Also, Davis did not consider Gonzales to be command material because of his experience with the failed Cuban filibusters and his contentious relationships with Confederate officers in Richmond, Virginia.

Later years After the war, Gonzales pursued a variety of vocations, all of which were marginally successful, but like many others, he never provided the security he sought for his extended family. His efforts were similar to those of other formerly wealthy Southerners, who sought to recover their estates and social status.

In 1869, Gonzales and his family moved to Cuba, where his wife, Harriet Elliott Gonzales, died of yellow fever. Gonzales returned to South Carolina with four of his children, leaving two children, Narciso and Alfonso, in Cuba with friends for a year. By 1870, the Gonzales children were all back in the United States, where they were raised by their grandmother, Ann Hutchinson Smith Elliott, and their aunts, Ann and Emily Elliott. Gonzales faced not only financial loss but also the death of his wife as well as his sister-in-law's successful efforts to poison the relationships between Gonzales and his children.

Gonzales became ill as he became older, and his sons sent him to Key West, where Gonzales attended meetings of the Chiefs of the War of 68 and the Delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. He was later interned in a hospital in Long Island, New York. Gonzales died on July 31, 1893, and is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City, Plot: Lot A, Range 131, Grave 20. Thus, Gonzales missed, by only a few years, the Spanish–American War of 1898, which achieved the cause that he had long championed, the liberation of Cuba from Spanish rule by US military intervention.