HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY
Karl Jacoby
The Strange Career of William Ellis, The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire
W.W. Norton & Company
Hardcover, 978-0-393-23925-6, 336 pages, $27.95
(paperback, ebook and audio versions available)
June 2016
Reviewed by Si Dunn
William Henry Ellis was a toddler in a slave family on a cotton plantation near Victoria, Texas, when Union soldiers brought news in 1865 that the Civil War was over and slaves were free.
Most of the newly liberated slaves would end up working as sharecroppers or laborers and living in poverty amid growing racial tensions. Yet, within just a few decades, William Henry Ellis would be both a millionaire and a trickster who was pulling cons against racial prejudices within the United States and Mexico.
Karl Jacoby’s excellent book explains how Ellis became fluent in Mexican Spanish as a child and later figured out a way he could move across tightly enforced racial lines. He would pass himself off in the United States as a Mexican native named “Guillermo Enrique Eliseo” and in Mexico as a rich American capitalist named William Henry Ellis.
Ellis indeed became wealthy in Mexico. He owned a furniture factory, sold French machine guns to Mexico’s army, and did other wheeling and dealing with “well-placed capitalists and politicians,” Jacoby notes.
The ex-slave later ventured to New York and became a Wall Street broker under his real name, yet lived in a hotel under his “Mexican” name, well outside Manhattan’s African American neighborhoods. When pressed hard about his origins, he sometimes claimed he was Cuban — or Hawaiian. People occasionally caught onto his two names, but Jacoby points out: “William…told his new acquaintances that he was an ethnic Mexican named Guillermo Enrique Eliseo and that ‘William Henry Ellis’ was just a translation of his name for the convenience of English speakers.” Meanwhile, his penchant for wearing fine, expensive clothes reduced suspicions.
The author contends that “it was Ellis’s particular genius to grasp the advantages that accrue to being a foreigner in whatever nation-state he happened to be inhabiting at the moment. If his alien status did not allow him access to local citizenship rights, it did permit him to step outside of the prevailing racial regimes in both the United States and Mexico.”
Still, Jacoby believes Ellis paid a personal price for his long years of masquerades. “Portraying himself as a well-to-do Mexican while in the United States and an American capitalist while in Mexico forced Ellis into the position of perpetual outsider in both countries, never truly at home in either.”
Well written and well researched, Jacoby’s work follows Ellis on a long trail of seemingly improbable endeavors, including getting involved in Texas Republican politics, creating problems in Mexico by recruiting African American workers for Mexican cotton fields, inserting himself into a U.S. diplomatic mission to Ethiopia and deliberately getting there ahead of the diplomat to cut deals, developing ties to President Theodore Roosevelt, being accused of murder, and even having his dual identity satirized in plays produced by New York’s “vibrant black theater…yet without unmasking him and leaving him vulnerable to the wrath of an unfriendly white world.”
The Strange Career of William Ellis is entertaining, engrossing, and definitely eye-opening reading.
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