Karl Jacoby's Blog

The first reviews of The Strange Career of William Ellis have begun to appear.  One early review, which appeared in Kirkus, a journal for librarians, was enthusiastic, terming the book “a remarkable historical detective story.”  However, the anonymous reviewer also saw fit to conclude that “Ellis was surely a kind of confidence man.”

 

 

The question of whether Ellis was a “con man” is one that I am asked far more than I ever expected.  The term confidence man arose in mid-nineteenth century New York.  A grifter named Samuel Thompson used to ask new acquaintances if they had enough confidence in him to lend him their watch or some cash.  Those trusting souls who did have confidence in Thompson rarely saw their watches or money ever again, leading newspaper reporters to dub Thompson a “confidence man.”  The term stuck and has become a synonym for a cheat or swindler.

 

To be sure, Ellis was, like Thompson, an artist in gaining the confidence of those around him.  And the Wall Street milieu in which Ellis spent much of his days was never noted for its highly developed ethics.  As one official put it after an investigation of Ellis in the early 1900s, “I suppose he has the average morality or lack of morality in financial transactions on the street.”

 

But to reduce Ellis to a “con man” distorts his history in several respects.  Not only is there no evidence that Ellis ever engaged in any illegal undertakings, he used his charisma towards quite different ends than did Thompson.  Ellis sought to gain the confidence of his companions not to cheat them but to further his racial masquerades in a hostile white world.  Wall Street was a virtually all-white environment during the Gilded Age–indeed, Ellis was arguably the first African American on the street (his only possible rival for the title being Jeremiah Hamilton, who rose to prominence when Wall Street was still in its formative stages).  To survive in this climate, he had to learn how to manipulate the prejudices and stereotypes of those around him.  To call this a con, with all its associated implications of illegality, overlooks the far greater crime of white supremacy, which is what drove Ellis to reinvent himself in the first place.  Is it a con to try to trick those who would otherwise deny Ellis his full measure of humanity?

 

Henry Louis Gates just posted a fascinating article on his website “The Root” that attempts to answer the age old question of how widespread black-to-white passing has been in the United States.  Over the years, various observers before have attempted the challenge of counting the uncountable: coming up with a numerical total for what was a quintessentially veiled activity.  Sociologists working in the early twentieth century, comparing the actual count of African Americans in the census with the expected count, computed that some 25,000 blacks were passing every year.  Walter White of the NAACP, who often passed (temporarily) to investigate lynchings in the South, estimated in the 1940s that the total was closer to 12,000.  Other commentators admitted that “[n]o one, of course, can estimate the number of men and women with Negro blood who have thus ‘gone over to white,’” although they hastened to add that “the number must be large.”

Now, Gates et al. have injected science into the conversation and come up with some potentially startling answers.  By looking at genetic markers, a group of researchers at “23 and me” concluded that roughly 4% of U.S.-born “whites” had in fact acquired some African ancestry in the last two hundred years.  Gates doesn’t attempt a year by year breakdown, so for the mathematically challenged like myself, it is hard to compare his numbers to the earlier counts above.  But based on the 2010 census, this means that some 7,872,702 “whites” in the U.S. have recent African-American ancestry and thus by the relentless logic of the “one drop” rule, should be considered “black.”  By any measure, this number is staggeringly large and suggests how widespread the phenomenon truly was.  Moreover, many, if not most of these “black whites” (not sure what else to call them), presumably have no knowledge of their African heritage, which speaks to the ways in which those who passed often attempted to hide the fact from some of those closest to them: their children.

 

Gates doesn’t discuss the scientific methods used to determine the genetic markers of African ancestry, but you can read more about the findings here.

 

One of my favorite poems is “The Cure at Troy” by the late Seamus Heaney, which reads in part:

History says don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

on the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

and cures and healing wells.

I was reminded of Heaney’s insights because of a remarkable turn of events a few weeks ago.  After years of sleuthing, as detailed in my post “Crowdsourcing History,” I was finally able to locate William H. Ellis’s grandchildren (and great-grandchildren) in Mexico.  This happy discovery set in motion a reuniting of the larger Ellis family, which had been divided by not only the U.S.-Mexico border, but by other divisions of time and distance and forgetting.  From my outsider’s perspective, there was something magical about watching a family circle that had been broken for almost a century come back together, and I congratulate the family members on both sides for being so welcoming of one another.

I was supposed to go to this extraordinary family reunion, which took place in South Pasadena, but at the last minute got sick and could not attend.  But I am hoping that it is just the first of many such get-togethers and that I’ll have many more opportunities to better know both sides of the extended Ellis family.  I would add, too, that for a historian it is often hard to tell what effect our research has in the real world.  But in this case, at least, there was a very concrete knitting back together of a family, which in its own way felt like a very tangible achievement.

Image: To help convey their history, members of the LA branch of the Ellis family created an illustrated family tree, as seen in the bulletin board below.

 

 

One of my paramount goals in creating this website was to investigate how the internet might allow historians to change how they conduct research.  By this, I don’t mean just looking at documents on-line instead of traveling in person to distant archives (although I’ve certainly done my fair share of this for my current project and have found it very helpful).  Rather, I hoped to harness the power of the internet to see if one could discuss writing problems and generate research leads with a much larger and more diverse community than is usually available to scholars in the academy.

I had the idea to explore the internet’s potential to crowdsource history after completing the website for my last book, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History.  In this instance, I wrote the book first and then, while the manuscript was in its final production stages at the publisher, created a companion website.  Over time, a fair number of people who stumbled across the website contacted me to relate family stories related to the event at the heart of Shadows of Dawn and even to offer sources that I’d never encountered before, since they were in personal collections rather than public archives.  Although I could incorporate these individuals’ insights into my website (which has the virtue–and the vice–of being endlessly open to revision), it was, of course, too late to change my book manuscript.  But perhaps there was a lesson here.  Next time, I vowed, I would create the website first and write the book afterwards.

[image error]

 

Fastforward to 2013 and this website for my current project on William Henry Ellis/Guillermo Enrique Eliseo.  One of the great mysteries I’ve dealt with in tracing his life is figuring out what happened to his wife and children, who moved to Mexico City in the 1920s.  Then, just two weeks ago, I was contacted by a historian at the University of Puerto Rico who had noticed my website.  She is in the process of researching the history of cinema in Mexico, and brought my attention to the fact that a certain obscure Mexican actress named Victoria Ellis had donated some important early films to Mexico’s Cineteca Nacional in 1984.  This was the first clue I’d had to what happened to Ellis’s family since the 1920s–and it was better than I could ever have imagined.  Turns out that Victoria Ellis, W.H. Ellis’s only daughter, acted in at least one film, “A la orilla de un palmar” (“At the Edge of a Palm Grove”), a melodrama set in Veracruz in the 1930s.  There seem to be only two copies of the film in existence, and I was able to watch one yesterday and see what Victoria Ellis looks like as an adult.  In the screenshot above, she is second from the left.  She speaks flawless Spanish–in fact, if I did not know her backstory, I could not tell that she was born in Mount Vernon, New York.  And that is the point.  Indeed, in all the many press releases about her 1984 donation to the Cineteca Nacional, she is identified as an “actriz mexicana” never as an American, let alone an African American.  Ellis may have been passing as Mexican, but his daughter truly became Mexican.

Creating and maintaining a website costs a lot of time and money.  I probably could my book on Ellis/Eliseo finished by now if I hadn’t invested my energies in my website instead.  But would it be as good a book?  Already, it seems, my hope that the web would generate new leads that I could never have found myself has been realized. . . .

“Juneteenth” is a holiday that memorializes June 19, 1865, when Union forces finally arrived in Texas and declared the end of slavery in the Lone Star state.  It is also a telling reminder of how different slavery was in Texas.

These differences, as I discuss in my forthcoming book, were two fold.  The first was Texas’s proximity to the Mexican border.  For all the folklore about slaves following the north star and fleeing north to New England or Canada, most enslaved African Americans in the deep south did not head north but rather south into Mexico.  Exact numbers are illusive, but anyone who has glanced at a Texas newspaper from the 1850s will encounter scores of fugitive slave announcements, all of them asserting that the runaways are headed to Mexico.   (For an example, see below, from the Northern Standard from Clarksville, Texas, in 1851.)  Towns such as Piedras Negras on the Mexican side of the border became well known collection points for escaped African Americans.  That the south’s most dynamically growing slave state was located so close to a potential refuge for fugitive slaves generated great tensions in Texas, leading to both brutal treatment of slaves, to discourage them from running away, and frequent attacks against Tejanos, who were thought to be helping slaves to flee across the border.

 

The other difference was again geographic.  As the most distant state of the Confederacy, Texas witnessed almost no combat during the Civil War.  Indeed, in 1865 as the rest of the south was crumbling, slaves in Texas were planting yet another crop of cotton, and Jefferson Davis was hoping to flee to Texas to reconstitute the Confederate government and perhaps even link up with the French forces in Mexico.  Slavery’s sudden end in Texas, with no major battles being fought on the Lone Star state’s soil, caused many white Texans to question the legitimacy of the Confederate surrender and made for an especially violent emancipation, even by the bloody standards of Reconstruction elsewhere.

The moral?  Geography matters.  Proximity to Mexico matters in particular.  Slaves fled into Mexico seeking refuge; Confederates resupplied themselves from Mexico when all their other ports were blockaded by the Union navy; and, after the war, Confederates would again look south, hoping to rebuild slavery in Mexico.

What brought W.H. Ellis to suddenly switch his focus from Mexico to Ethiopia in the early 1900s?

On one level, the answer is obvious: Ethiopia (also known at the time as Abyssinia) leapt to prominence after its 1896 defeat of Italy at the Battle of Adwa.  This rare victory of African forces over European imperialists spoke volumes to Americans, white and black, alike.  If whites, who liked to imagine themselves as heirs to their own anti-colonialist rebellion of the American Revolution, saw a certain kinship between their history and recent events in Ethiopia, this impulse was all the stronger for blacks in the U.S.  There already was a prominent Ethiopianist strain to African-American thought, based in large part on Ethiopia’s import in the Bible.  But following 1896, the African-American identification with Ethiopia became all the more significant.  Even though W.H. Ellis attempted to conceal his African-American ancestry by claiming to be Cuban or Mexican, he does not seem to have been immune to the larger currents swirling through the black community of the late 1890s.  Rather than simply expressing an interest in affairs in Ethiopia, however, he decided to journey there instead.

On the other hand, though, Ellis’s enthusiasm Ethiopia–he would visit the kingdom twice in the early 1900s, becoming the first African American to set foot there–seems most peculiar.  He possessed a deep familiarity with the Spanish language and Mexican culture, having grown up along the Texas-Mexico border.  He had no similar fluency with Ethiopia’s language (Amharic) and, obviously, no prior exposure to the kingdom at all.  One hesitates to make hasty judgments as to character, but there seems to be a certain boldness (or should one say recklessness?) to Ellis’s decision to journey halfway across the globe to what was at the time one of the most remote corners of the world.

Ellis’s return journey in 1904 would be marked by an abiding mystery.  Ellis was traveling with Kent Loomis, the younger brother of the then-Assistant Secretary of State.  Kent was charged with delivering a treaty to King Menelik of Ethiopia.  Somehow, however, Kent fell overboard from the steam ship that was carrying him and Ellis to France on the first leg of their journey.  A later autopsy revealed a large wound behind one of Loomis’s ears.  Did he hit his head as he fell overboard?  Or was he struck from behind and then pushed overboard by someone?  Could that someone have been Ellis, who harbored hopes of his own of delivering the treaty to King Menelik? One more unanswerable mystery about a most mysterious figure. . . .

 

W.H. Ellis arrived in Mexico City for the first time sometime in the 1880s.  It is tantalizing to imagine what the experience must have been like for a young African American from Texas to stroll along the colonial alameda or the grand new boulevard of el Paseo de la Reforma of what was even then one of the largest and most cosmopolitan urban centers in North America.  What did he think of the Mexico City elite, with their European fashions and showy carriages?  Of the district’s urban poor?  Of Mexico City’s vast, bustling markets?  Its elegant opera houses?

If a big part of Ellis’s story starts in Mexico City, it also ends there.  Ellis died in the 1920s; his family vanishes from the historical record several years afterwards.  For many years, I had the frustrating experience of scouring the genealogical records without success, trying to find them.  Had they moved out of their home in Mt. Vernon, New York?  Had Ellis’s wife, Maud Sherwood Ellis, remarried and changed her name, thus explaining why I couldn’t locate her by searching on the Ellis surname?

I did not learn the truth until I was fortunate enough to get in touch with some of Ellis’s descendants.  It turns out that Ellis’s remaining family–Maud, son Sherwood, and daughter Victoria–moved to Mexico shortly after his death to look after some property there.  I have been able to locate their Mexican visas (which intriguingly record their race as white) but after this they vanish once again from the historical record.  Even though I now know where to look, it has proven hard to research Mexican genealogical data from the U.S.  There was a Mexican census in which they should appear, but Ancestry.com–a staggeringly useful resource for historians as well as genealogists–has not digitized the records for Mexico City, which is, alas, where Ellis’s family settled (first on Chihuahua 71 in Colonia Cuahtémoc and then on Luis Moya 93 in the same neighborhood).  Any Mexican genealogists out there with any bright ideas?  It is hard to shake the sensation that some of Ellis’s descendants may even today reside somewhere in the sprawling megalopolis of today’s “defectuoso.”

 

One of the greatest insights of the past years in historical scholarship is that evidence need not be only documents.  Many forms of material culture can also help illuminate the past, if only we know how to read them.  Living in New York, I am constantly reminded of this fact.  Manhattan is a city of neighborhoods, each with its own flavor and vantage point on the past.  The neighborhood where I currently live, for example, Morningside Heights, was built in the early 1900s.  It features many references, however, to events from half a century before: Grant’s tomb, memorials to Frederick Douglass, Carl Schurz, and the like.  The reason is not hard to discern: the members of the nineteenth century’s “greatest generation” were passing away at the turn of the century, and Americans sought to solidify their legacy of these figures in the very bricks and mortar of their city.

Other neighborhoods are ghosts that float just beyond our vision.  One such example would be “San Juan Hill,” the leading black neighborhood in the latter half of the nineteenth century (that is, prior to the rise of Harlem in the early 1900s).  San Juan Hill was located around 60th Street and 11th Avenue, and featured thousands of African Americans squeezed into one of the few areas where they were able to rent apartments.  Not only were its bars and nightclubs one of the birthplaces of jazz, it was something of an oasis in an often hostile world.  (The name “San Juan Hill” was derived from the frequent fights between blacks and whites that took place along its borders.)

I only learned about “San Juan Hill” when trying to make sense of where Ellis/Eliseo lived in New York in the 1890s and early 1900s.  That he dwelled outside of the neighborhood was not surprising.  More surprising was what happened to San Juan Hill; it is the land on which Robert Moses et al. constructed Lincoln Center in the 1950s and 60s.  Some of the African Americans living in the area were moved to the Amsterdam Housing Projects on the far West side; the rest were displaced completely.

Or perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that in the name of culture and “urban renewal,” one of the oldest African American neighborhoods in the city was erased from Manhattan.  Today, Lincoln Center features a broad plaza that welcomes in passersby from Broadway.  But the side that faces west towards the Amsterdam Housing Projects is a forbidding wall, which seems to say that its residents are less welcome.  Lincoln Center features a jazz program (run by Winton Marsalis, no less) but no acknowledgment of San Juan Hill’s pivotal role in the music’s development.

And where did Ellis/Eliseo live?  For most of his time in Manhattan, on Central Park West in the upper 80s and low 90s–the very area from where another African-American community, Seneca Village, was displaced in the 1850s to make way for Central Park.

 

It is, we all know, foolish to look to Hollywood for history lessons.  Part of the trouble is cinema itself.  Moviemaking, for all its undeniable power, is an art form that struggles to express the ambiguities and multiple possibilities inherent to interpreting primary sources.  Married to Hollywood’s love of drama, this tendency has encouraged the creation of strong, simple narratives, from which all complexity—the essence of good history—has been drained away.

Still, as problematic as they may be, movies remain the source from which most Americans imbibe their visions of the past—which is what makes the recent release of two movies dealing with slavery and emancipation, Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” so important.  I’ve yet to see “Lincoln” (much of which, for the record, was cribbed without attribution from the book of my friend and former colleague, Mike Vorenberg).  But last week I made the short walk up to the Magic Johnson Theater on 125th street to watch “Django Unchained.”

Tarantino is a gifted historian of cinema, and his movie quotes with great fluidity from many films—not only the Spaghetti Western and Blackploitation genres, but from classic westerns such as “The Searchers.”  (Indeed, like “The Searchers,” “Django Unchained” represents a captivity narrative.)  Tarantino as a historian of slavery is on less firm ground.  The plot of “Django Unchained” pivots on “Mandingo Fighting”—a sort of early UFC that has almost no basis in reality (healthy male slaves were too valuable to waste in fights to the death).  There are other odd mistakes as well: Tarantino gets the starting date of the Civil War wrong; suggests that enslaved African Americans seldom rode horses; and has his characters quote prices for slaves are far below the $1,000-$1,500 that a prime field hand commanded in Texas in the 1850s.

Setting the movie in Texas in the 1850s is a far better decision, but even here Tarantino doesn’t take full advantage of the opportunity that the Lone Star State presents.  Texas was arguably the most dynamic part of the antebellum slave south, site of a booming internal migration that witnessed ever more enslaved African Americans converting former Mexican grazing lands into cotton plantations.  Yet, as I discovered in researching Passing the Line, slavery in Texas also proved to be quite fragile.  The presence of ethnic Mexicans and proximity to Mexico created vectors for flight that did not exist elsewhere in the south.  Thousands of slaves from Texas escaped across the Rio Grande into Mexico.  For their part, Texas slave owners were consumed with fears that nearby Mexico was inspiring slave uprisings, leading to bloody reprisals against suspected Mexican and African American plotters.

There is no Mexican presence at all, however, in the Texas of “Django Unchained.”  In fact, when some Texan slaves do escape in the movie’s opening scene, Tarantino has them heading north.  But the U.S. north in the 1850s was no refuge for escaped slaves, given the Fugitive Slave Act.  Mexico was both closer and safer, and, as history demonstrates, slaves in Texas in the 1850s knew this.

There is a level, however, on which Tarantino’s merging of the Spaghetti Western and Blackploitation genres is more successful.  The extreme violence (some might even say sadism) of the Spaghetti Western evokes all too well the brutality of antebellum Southern slavery.  Indeed, I would argue that despite the criticisms he has received in the aftermath of Newtown, Tarantino is not violent enough—or, to be more accurate, his violence, by focusing on Western gunplay, overlooks the sexual exploitation, separation from children, and grueling long hours of labor that exemplified antebellum slavery.  In the vast majority of runaway slave ads from 1850s Texas that I’ve managed to locate, the slaves feature some sort of physical trace from their brutal lives in bondage, be it whip marks, broken limbs, cropped ears, or missing teeth.  This portrait of the daily cruelties of slavery has yet to make it into our Hollywood presentation of the past.

Who was Guillermo Eliseo?

Such was the question that any number of people asked themselves during the Gilded Age as this enigmatic figure flitted in and out of an astonishing array of the era’s most noteworthy events—scandalous trials, unexpected disappearances, diplomatic controversies. To many, the answer was obvious. The tall, exquisitely dressed figure with the carefully coifed mustache, was an upper-class Mexican—in fact “the wealthiest resident of the City of Mexico” and “a prominent Mexican politician.”

Eliseo at the turn of the century

For confirmation, one needed to look no farther than his elegant appearance and his frequent journeys south of the border. Indeed, based on his connections with Latin America, he was widely believed to be, if not a Mexican, than a “Spaniard” or “a Cuban gentleman of high degree.” At least a few observers, however, ventured a quite different answer: despite the widespread acceptance of Eliseo’s “Latin-American extraction,” he was not of Hispanic descent at all. Rather, he was just “an ordinary American mulatto” named William (or W.H.) Ellis, who had managed to play an elaborate game of racial passing.

The answers to such questions about Eliseo’s background mattered, especially at a time when the United States, in the aftermath of emancipation, was endeavoring to draw clear lines between the races through a flurry of segregation measures. Through the alchemy of race and class, the upper-class Mexican Guillermo Eliseo was able to travel in first-class train berths, stay in the finest hotels, and eat in leading restaurants—all venues closed to anyone with a known African-American background, like the “ordinary mulatto” William Ellis.

My current project explores the mysteries of what contemporaries termed Eliseo’s “fairytale” life as a way to discuss some of the largest challenges in the historical enterprise: How are we to address silences in the archives? What is the place of microhistory, biography, or geneology in understanding the past? How can we write a history that unites the Mexican and American pasts? Because of his prominent role in passing across a rich array of borders during the turn of the last century, Eliseo represents an ideal entry point into many of these issues, one that weaves together an unlikely tale spanning the small, isolated frontier town of Victoria along the Texas-Mexico border, the haciendas of northern Mexico, Chicago, New York, Mexico City, London, and eventually even Ethiopia.

Eventually, my research will result in the publication of a book (tentatively entitled Passing the Line: A Trickster’s Tale from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands and to be released by W.W. Norton). The goal of this website is to serve as a place to open up the usually solitary process of book-writing, previewing some of my findings while simultaneously modeling a new, more inclusive way of conducting historical research. The worldwide web possesses the flexibility to allow one to expand the discussions that normally take place between scholars in the preparatory phase of any project to include interested parties anywhere in the world, from academics to community members. In regular posts, I will share documents that I have uncovered, discuss challenges, float preliminary interpretations, and ask for suggestions or help.