The Strange Career of William Ellis

American historian Karl Jacoby’s biography, The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire (2016), reconstructs the life of its titular character, William Ellis, who was born into slavery on the Texas-Mexico border in 1864. Ellis lived his life striving to overcome (and in many ways succeeded) the racist assumptions about the kind of subject he could become. Jacoby argues that Ellis accomplished this mainly by learning to traverse the ambiguities built into America’s prevailing racial categories. By the end of his life, Ellis had become a rich New York businessman, who enjoyed many of the privileges of the white racial class. Much of Ellis’s past is elusive due to his secrecy, and Jacoby’s work is one of the first to patch together a convincing picture of it. He does so using a mosaic of narrative and photographic fragments from the early twentieth century.

Jacoby begins by stating that little is definitively known about Ellis’s life. Few records exist about freedmen of the time, let alone slaves, who were the most likely demographic to be illiterate and disenfranchised their entire lives. What is known is that, while Ellis was not fully “white,” he had many white ancestors. His parents, neither of whom passed as white, were lucky to have settled in Victoria, a town in southeast Texas. Close to the border and far from fertile fields, they evaded possible fates as cotton pickers. Ellis was fortunate to have received a primary education; further, his engagement with people from nearby Mexico helped him develop fluency in Spanish. His exposure to people from a different nation also helped him conceive of a future outside the normative boundaries of the United States.

Since Ellis was competent in Spanish, he was able to pick up a job with a local trader. He worked in cross-border transactions with Mexico, quickly becoming proficient in business. By the late 1880s, he had become a well-known trader in cotton, wool, hides, and other animal commodities, primarily based out of San Antonio, Texas. Around this time, he also adopted an alias, Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, which later became a quasi-official name. His ability to pass as brown, rather than black, allowed him to gradually adopt the behaviors, and make convincing claims, of being of Mexican descent. His public declaration of identity became that he was born in Mexico, having translated his birth name into the name William Ellis for business purposes. Though his initial foray into passing was turbulent and probably frightening, Ellis eventually became an expert at it, blending it with his natural charisma and linguistic proficiency. The extent of his ability to pass was perhaps signified in his successful run for office in Texas, though he occupied it only briefly before moving back into business.



Many of Ellis’s political and business choices were attempts to undermine racism in the United States. Though he managed to escape many conditions that determined other black lives, the ominous feeling of imminent oppression never left him. In 1889, one of his most notable exertions of power to this end occurred when he helped approve a contract with Mexico that allowed 20,000 African-American people to expatriate there. Though it was formally approved, he failed to raise enough money to implement the plan.

Ellis’s setback, nonetheless, intensified his belief that the sole way to improve the quality of life for African-Americans was to help them emigrate from the United States. He tried again, this time helping eight hundred move to Mexico, but they were eventually forced to return to the United States after the Mexican government nullified the agreement.

After Ellis’s second failure, he decided to move to New York to escalate his business involvements. Many of his plans failed, but he succeeded on several important fronts, including the development of a Panama railroad and the purchase of a booming Mexican furniture company. Eventually, a French company that manufactured weapons asked him to be their representative to Mexico. Meanwhile, Ellis’s identity went through several more revisions. He claimed at different times to be from Hawaii and Cuba; once, he even stated that he had been engaged in Cuba’s revolution. At the turn of the century, at the age of thirty-five, he had already become president of a multi-million dollar corporation. Ellis went on to marry a white woman, fabricating a story that she was descended from the English monarchy. The plans he hatched only grew more elaborate: he succeeded, for a time, in becoming a personal advisor to President Roosevelt, and made forays into the Ethiopian economy.



Ellis’s exploits in Ethiopia proved his swan song. The negotiations eventually fell through, and Ellis became mired in business problems. He returned to his Mexican business roots but found his old connections broken due to the country’s ongoing revolution. His health began to worsen, and he died in the fall of 1923 in Mexico City. His will left very little to his kids and wife, proving how dire his situation had become.

Jacoby’s biography of one of the most successful black men of the South during the hugely oppressive Gilded Age shows how ambiguous racial categories were even as they were cruelly enforced. The Strange Career of William Ellis richly chronicles how passing became one way out of racist oppression, but also demonstrates its shortfalls, as the people who leveraged it necessarily forgot parts of their identities, and floundered existentially in the lack of systemic improvement.