The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire

by Karl Jacoby

Overview

Winner of the Ray Allen Billington Prize and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award


"An American 'Odyssey,' the larger-than-life story of a man who travels far in the wake of war and gets by on his adaptability and gift for gab." —Wall Street Journal

A black child born on the US-Mexico border in the twilight of slavery, William Ellis inhabited a world divided along ambiguous racial lines. Adopting the name Guillermo Eliseo, he passed as Mexican, transcending racial lines to become fabulously wealthy as a Wall Street banker, diplomat, and owner of scores of mines and haciendas south of the border. In The Strange Career of William Ellis, prize-winning historian Karl Jacoby weaves an astonishing tale of cunning and scandal, offering fresh insights on the history of the Reconstruction era, the US-Mexico border, and the abiding riddle of race in America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393354171
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/06/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	318,078
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Karl Jacoby is a professor of history at Columbia University. The author of two previous books, he has won the Albert J. Beveridge Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other honors. He lives in New York.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Through History's Cracks xv

Part I Victoria

1 Gone to Texas 3

2 Juneteenth 34

Part II San Antonio/Tlahualilo

3 Military Plaza 67

4 The Land of God and Liberty 91

Part III Manhattan/Mexico City

5 A Picturesque Figure 125

6 The City of Happy Homes 162

Epilogue: Trickster Makes This World 194

Afterword 203

Acknowledgments 205

Notes 211

Bibliography 257

Illustration Credits 289

Index 291

Editorial Reviews

An irresistible account of one of the great tricksters of his time, a fearless border and barrier-crosser, an artist of the great escape.

Alma Guillermoprieto

[Jacoby] presents Ellis’ intriguing story…Equally intriguing is the history of the post–Civil War Texas-Mexican borderland. Jacoby’s book may well have you searching his bibliography for books on that subject.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A work of admirable sleuthing…Jacoby has assembled a portrait of a man who deliberately sought to cover his own tracks.

The Nation

Fascinating…dramatic.

The New Yorker

[A] titillating historical detective story.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

[A] titillating historical detective story.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Fascinating…dramatic.

The New Yorker

04/25/2016
In vivid and lyrical prose, Jacoby (Crimes Against Nature), a professor of history at Columbia University, recounts the extraordinary life of 19th-century African-American entrepreneur William Henry Ellis, a man born into slavery who became a figure of great wealth and influence in both the U.S. and Mexico. Jacoby emphasizes Ellis’s individual achievements as well as his adroit manipulation of Gilded Age America’s confused and contradictory ideas about race. While many African-Americans hoped to escape American racial prejudices by passing as white, Ellis shrewdly took advantage of his countrymen’s racial ignorance beyond the black-white binary by presenting himself as a Mexican, a Cuban, and even an indigenous Hawaiian. These racial masquerades served him well on Wall Street, where he built his vast fortune, but should not be seen as a repudiation of his heritage, Jacoby argues. Throughout his life, Ellis maintained contact with his black-identified relatives and attempted to improve the options for Americans of color at the onset of the Jim Crow era by encouraging Southern black men and women to migrate to Mexico. Jacoby deftly analyzes the divergent ways in which racial identities developed on both sides of the Mexican-American border and reminds his readers that “we all inhabit a mestizo, mulatto America.” Illus. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Readers will gain fresh insight into life during Reconstruction as well as the riddle of racial identities." —Library Journal Starred Review

From the Publisher

How is it that a black man named William Ellis, living in Reconstruction-era Texas, could transform himself into a Mexican magnate and conquer Wall Street, then disappear into history without a trace? Fortunately, Karl Jacoby has done the detective work to bring this intriguing larger-than-life figure back to life, challenging America’s fixed concepts of race, ethnicity and national identity. This fascinating history book reads like a novel.

Margot Lee Shetterly

A masterpiece of border history. Jacoby has a biographer’s eye for detail and a detective’s talent for discovery, which he deftly uses to construct both the inner emotional life and larger social world of his subject. At once a history of the United States and of Mexico, Strange Career offers a truly transnational history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America. Today, as borders are simultaneously being dissolved and hardened, Jacoby’s study of Ellis’s exceptional career is as timely as it is compelling.

Greg Grandin

[E]legantly written.

Vladimir Alexandrov - San Francisco Chronicle

Like all of his remarkable scholarship, Karl Jacoby’s The Strange Career of William Ellis takes an unexpected or little-known subject and, with great insight and imagination, uses it to shed new light on our larger past. He has excavated a life that began in obscurity and was ever being reinvented, and, in so doing, offers a deep understanding of the shifting boundaries of place, race, and social standing. An extraordinary story told with extraordinary skill.

Steven Hahn

[A] welcome and nuanced perspective to the racial history of the U.S. as well as a textured examination of the legacy of distrust between the United States and Mexico. …Ellis’ life is also a cracking good story, illustrated with intriguing photos and helpful maps topped off by an emotionally satisfying epilogue.

Sara Martinez - Booklist

William Ellis was a chameleon, a trickster, and a man determined to shape his own identity. With enormous skill, Karl Jacoby uncovers this tremendous subject, revealing Ellis’s lies, and crafting a powerful new narrative about the porous borders of class, race, and national identity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American life. Deftly moving between the improbable details of Ellis’s biography and the larger political and cultural stories of the day, Jacoby demonstrates how one man’s life can help us understand the past in an entirely new way.

Martha A. Sandweiss

Fascinating… [an] important slice of American history.

Karen M. Thomas - Dallas News

Remarkable... [R]eads like an American 'Odyssey.'

Caitlin Fitz - Wall Street Journal

★ 03/15/2016
Jacoby (history, Columbia Univ.; Crimes Against Nature) relates the fascinating tale of William Ellis, who was born into slavery on a cotton plantation in rural Texas just before the end of America's Civil War, and his fascinating transition into Guillermo Eliseo, a wealthy broker, statesman, and politician from Mexico. How this strange account of reinvention came to be makes for an important book because of Jacoby's discussion of racial fluidity and Ellis's flouting of racial codes during Reconstruction and the years after. Ellis/Eliseo's crossing of the color line in an era of racial tension is deftly contrasted with Mexico's post-Independence acceptance of the mixing of ethnic groups. Ellis/Eliseo's business acumen and gift with languages comes into focus as the narrative traces his involvement in statesmanship, plans for colonizing African Americans in Mexico, and business dealings with powerful investors. VERDICT Jacoby's masterly writing places race and its meaning at the center of this essential work. Readers will gain fresh insight into life during Reconstruction as well as the riddle of racial identities.—Amy Lewontin, Northeastern Univ. Lib., Boston

Library Journal

2016-03-30
A remarkable historical detective story that unearths the life and times of a "trickster" African-American who was able to "pass," and strive spectacularly, as Latino. During a time of deep racial anxiety in the United States—just after the Civil War and through the 1920s—the "color bar" was deeply pronounced and enforced in all aspects of society, from travel to public establishments to housing to marriage. Jacoby (History/Columbia Univ.; Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History, 2008, etc.) delves minutely into this unsettling history of racial relations through the life of nimble businessman William Henry Ellis, aka Guillermo Enrique Eliseo—born in 1864 to biracial slaves in Victoria, Texas—whose olive skin and facility with Spanish allowed him to move freely between the porous U.S.-Mexico border and reinvent himself in an extraordinary manner. Ellis' ability to pass as Mexican or Cuban (or even Hawaiian) while on business above and below the border is only one facet of this fascinating story. He rode in first-class cars, stayed at length in the British-owned Hotel Gillow in Mexico City, built a trading firm on Wall Street, and married a white woman. Ellis was surely a kind of confidence man, but he was also a crusader for his race and became embroiled in Republican politics in the 1880s, cooking up a scheme to recolonize African-American tenant farmers from the cotton-picking South to a huge tract of land in northern Mexico during a time of profound labor shortages in Mexico, where racial relations were far less fraught than in America. Jacoby imparts important, unknown aspects of Mexican-American history and does a stellar feat of research in weaving together this fragmented life as just one incredible example of the American experience in all its complexity and ingenuity. An amazing tale that is indeed "almost too strange to be true."

Kirkus Reviews

Read More