Born Enslaved, This Black Millionaire Attempted to Colonize Mexico and Aspired to Be the Emperor of Ethiopia
William Henry Ellis masqueraded as a Mexican businessman, but he never shied away from his Black roots
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In 1904, two Americans boarded the steamship Kaiser Wilhelm II and set off for Africa. One was Kent J. Loomis, brother to the assistant secretary of state and a representative of President Theodore Roosevelt. The other was William Henry Ellis, a flashy businessman based along the United States’ border with Mexico. Loomis was authorized to present a treaty to Menelik II, the emperor of Ethiopia, then known as Abyssinia. Ellis was not. By the time the ship touched down on the other side of the Atlantic, however, Loomis was dead, presumed lost at sea. And Ellis had his eyes on Menelik’s throne.
Ellis’ dream of wresting power from the emperor was but one small moment in his boundary-breaking life. Eulogized as a “reckless soldier of fortune,” Ellis was born into slavery in Texas in 1864. Little is known about his early life in the small community of Victoria, where he first experienced the opportunities of Reconstruction and adjusted to the realities of freedom. It’s clear, however, that the young Ellis exhibited an early knack for commerce. He worked for one of Victoria’s leading cotton and hide dealers, Irish immigrant William McNamara, before setting out on his own.
Through his work with McNamara, Ellis first grasped the possibilities of crossing borders as a means of financial opportunity and identity formation. He refused to be constrained by his status as a Black man or his hardscrabble childhood in southern Texas. Before it was all said and done, Ellis would travel the world, make and lose millions, play at Texas politics, consult with emperors, and meet with the presidents of multiple countries, not to mention contrive and attempt to implement an incredible array of grand plans for himself, other Black Americans and the world at large.
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So, who exactly was Ellis? His life, according to a 1923 obituary, “reads like the composition of a sick fancy—cowboy, colonizer of Negroes, stalwart of old-time politics in Texas, aspirant opera singer, wealthy speculator in Wall Street, diplomatic emissary of the United States government, friend and adviser to King Menelik of Abyssinia, Duke of Harrar and Hawash, ‘the man who would be king,’ magnate of Latin American rubber concessions, and, finally, bold and powerful manipulator of troubled Mexican politics.” Above all, Ellis was a man who refused to live life halfway. Win or lose, success or failure, he would be someone. And he wouldn’t stop until he made this aspiration a reality.
How William Henry Ellis became Guillermo Enrique Eliseo
Sixteen years before Loomis’ disappearance, in 1888, an olive-complexioned man calling himself Guillermo Enrique Eliseo opened up shop on the west side of the grandiose Military Plaza in San Antonio. As a speaker of Spanish and English, he attracted patrons on both sides of the border, rapidly expanding his company and joining the ranks of San Antonio’s economic elites. To his clients, associates and the local press, he was a Mexican businessman who traded goods across the U.S.-Mexico border. Some knew him as William Henry Ellis. But he claimed that name was simply a translation used to ease his dealings with non-Spanish speakers in the U.S.
No matter his complexion or his real name, “Eliseo”—in truth Ellis—maintained that he was Cuban, Mexican or even Hawaiian, but definitely not Black. He was listed in the city registry without the damning letter “c” used to designate (and ostracize) African Americans as “colored,” wrote biographer Karl Jacoby in The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire.
For a supposedly non-Black Mexican living in Reconstruction-era Texas, Ellis demonstrated an odd affinity for the Republican Party and Black political advancement. His earliest mentors were Norris Wright Cuney and Henry McNeal Turner, two of the Deep South’s most prominent Black political leaders. As early as 1888, 24-year-old Ellis spoke publicly on behalf of Cuney, securing himself a spot on the state Republican Party’s Committee on Resolutions. By 1892, he was a major player in Cuney’s battle to excise the anti-Black “Lily White” faction from the district’s Republican Party. As the Galveston Daily News reported that April, Ellis had “been actively manipulating things here in the interests of Cuney for several days past.” In recognition of his efforts, Ellis was invited to attend his state’s Republican convention as an elector and nominated to represent Texas’ 83rd District in the state legislature. He lost.
After this brief, unsuccessful foray into electoral politics, Ellis turned his attention fully to emigrationism—a belief that Black Americans would only be able to secure their rights by leaving the U.S. and moving elsewhere—as a solution to America’s race problem. Enter Turner, a freeborn African Methodist Episcopal Church minister and Republican power broker in Georgia. While Cuney enjoyed at least moderate success as a political operator in Texas, Turner saw more clearly the limits of Reconstruction political reforms. He’d been expelled from the Georgia House of Representatives in 1868, just three years after the end of the Civil War. “You may expel us, gentlemen,” Turner told the white legislators, “but I firmly believe that you will someday repent it. … There is a just God in heaven … [who] never fails to vindicate the cause of justice, and the sanctity of his own handiwork.”
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In Turner’s view, the ascent of white Democratic “Redeemers” and the expansion of the Lily White faction left few choices for the formerly enslaved. They had to return to Africa. To that end, Turner established two newspapers to fund his International Migration Society. After visiting Africa himself in the early 1890s, Turner said he saw “vast possibilities in store for [the] wealth and greatness” of the “self-reliant American Negro.” Turner’s grand ambition for an African American community in Liberia ultimately failed, with many of the roughly 1,000 emigrants who undertook the voyage at his behest soon returning to the U.S.
Ellis’ efforts to establish Black colonies in Mexico
Ellis remained convinced that emigration would uplift Black Americans and improve the country’s racial crisis. But he wondered why emigrants would want to go all the way to Africa when sunny, balmy Mexico was so close at hand. Instead of casting his gaze across the vast expanse of the Atlantic, Ellis thought it best to make the jump across the Rio Grande. Armed with letters of introduction from the Mexican consul in San Antonio, Ellis and another Cuney lieutenant set off for Mexico City in 1889. They had big plans. With a contract from Mexican President Porfirio Díaz’s government, they would resettle at least 1,000 people in the croplands of northern Mexico in the first three years, followed by increasing numbers of settlers. While the contract made no stipulation of the settlers’ background, Ellis’ clear intention was that they would be Black Southerners. A small-time trader and local Republican politician no longer, he was now a colonizer with grand ambitions—for himself, for the Black South and for Mexico.
First, Ellis needed backers. After all, relocating hundreds of people was an expensive enterprise. He traveled at a feverish pace across the Southwest, into Mexico, up to New York City and Chicago, and back again in search of financial support. It was in defense of this colonization program that Ellis gave one of his rare public statements to the press. The Illinois-based Streator Free Press printed his assurance that “the Negro in Mexico, with his American training, could accomplish miracles.” But this first effort was a flop. Despite significant interest among Black Southerners, Ellis failed to raise the necessary funds. The Mexican government canceled the contract, and Ellis returned to Texas, bruised but not defeated.
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At least nobody died. The same could not be said of Ellis’ second colonization effort. In early 1895, 800 African Americans left Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and headed south. Robert A. Williams—a Confederate veteran who earned the nickname “Peg Leg” after losing his leg while fighting under the Ku Klux Klan’s first grand wizard, Nathan Bedford Forrest—had been holding meetings in the community for more than a month. The flyer distributed by Williams told Alabama’s Black population about a wonderful land that “extends to all of its citizens the same treatment—equal rights to all, special privileges to none.” That land was Mexico. And while Williams may have been the face of the operation, Ellis was the one really in charge.
In 1894, Ellis had encountered a vast expanse of northern Mexico in desperate need of affordable labor. He knew just what to do. Calling on Juan Llamedo of the Tlahualilo Corporation, Ellis offered his services. If Llamedo, whose financial interests were tied to the region, put up the money, Ellis said, he would deliver 5,000 Black laborers from the American South.
Initial reports from the settlement were positive. In a letter to the editor of the Indianapolis Freeman, preacher S.F. Todd recounted that the settlers felt like “free men under a free government.” On its face, the relocation of nearly 1,000 African Americans to a planned settlement in such a short period of time was extraordinary. This accomplishment was even more impressive, Jacoby tells Smithsonian magazine, when one considers that Ellis was able “to persuade people at the very top echelons of [Mexico’s] government” to invest in the program when the Díaz administration’s “general impulse [was] the perceived need to whiten Mexico.”
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Unfortunately, the good times didn’t last. The settlers found the food unfamiliar and the language strange. “For a people with fresh memories of bondage in the United States … Tlahualilo’s fortified housing, armed overseers and isolated position gave it an uneasy resemblance to a prison,” Jacoby wrote. Tariffs governing trade between the U.S. and Mexico also drastically decreased the settlers’ ability to purchase manufactured goods.
Less than two months after their arrival, many of the settlers were poised to make the long trek back to Alabama and Georgia—on foot if necessary. Railway passengers in U.S.-Mexico border cities encountered groups of “half-starved and scantily clad” settlers following the tracks back north, begging for supplies along the way, a journalist in Houston observed. American newspapers reported that “some of the colonists escaped from the farm [and were] pursued by W.H. Ellis … and that 32 were shot down.” President Grover Cleveland’s report to Congress on the failure of the venture recounted one colonist’s claim that Ellis “sent three miles for a Mexican to come there and lasso him … by throwing a lasso over him and dragging him through the colony to show the balance of the Negroes the power that Ellis has in Mexico, and especially over them.” (It’s worth noting that later investigations disproved the worst of these allegations.)
Then came the pathogen.
For an emigrant community to thrive, it must scale up in terms of population. But smallpox has a pesky tendency to problematize such growth, as it did for the colony’s remaining residents in July 1895. The white doctor brought in from San Antonio to care for the patients diagnosed them with a disease resembling malaria and prescribed mercury and quinine, which brought little to no relief. Instead of suffering through the rapidly spreading disease and Mexico’s 100-degree summer days, most of the colonists broke for the closest town, Torreón.
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Ellis was now at the center of an international incident. Fearful that the unknown malady would spread to the local population, Mexican officials detained every fleeing colonist they could find. Cleveland, for his part, had no desire to transport a diseased population back into the U.S. Eventually, however, the obstinate president could hold out no longer. The colonists—smallpox or not—would have to cross the border.
Transported by train to a quarantine zone in Eagle Pass, Texas (nicknamed Camp Jenner in honor of Edward Jenner, who revolutionized the smallpox vaccine), the returning colonists were strictly segregated based on symptoms and barred from any contact with the world outside the camp. Some were also injected with an experimental smallpox serum derived from the blood of calves infected with the variola virus.
“The colonists, detained and dependent on the [U.S. Marine Hospital Service] for food, shelter and medical care, were in no condition to give their full and free consent to their treatment,” wrote historian John Mckiernan-González in Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848-1942. “In all scenarios, the record shows that [medical providers] … did not live up to their contemporary code of ethics.”
In total, 53 deaths linked to smallpox occurred at Eagle Pass between August and October 1895. When survivors were finally permitted to return home, many were malnourished and pox-scarred.
Ellis, the man who would be king
After both of his colonization efforts collapsed, one before it got off the ground and the other as a transnational disaster, “Eliseo” was forced to disappear. During his time in San Antonio, detractors had regularly questioned the truth of his claimed Latin heritage. The Tlahualilo affair destroyed Ellis’ credibility and removed all doubt regarding his racial background. In 1896, Ellis appeared in the San Antonio registry with a “c” next to his name for the first time. He was—and always had been—a formerly enslaved Black man from Victoria.
In some ways, it’s unsurprising that Ellis’ racial facade eventually fell to public scrutiny. Unlike many African Americans who attempted to pass as a member of a different race, Ellis never shied away completely from his Black roots. As Jacoby tells Smithsonian, “One striking feature of Ellis’ remarkable life is that he always … maintained a link with African American politics, often to the detriment of the poses that he was trying to strike.” His affiliation with Cuney, his invocation of Turner and his efforts to colonize specifically Black Southerners all pointed to some affinity to African Americans.
Once his racial background was exposed, however, Ellis refused to adjust to life as a Black man in San Antonio. Instead, he left the South altogether, opting to move to the shining metropolis of New York City, where he opened a brokerage firm next door to the most powerful financial institution in the U.S.: the J.P. Morgan & Company. Because of the implicit romantic difficulties associated with racial passing, Ellis only decided to settle down after leaving San Antonio. He moved quickly. In 1903, he married Maude Sherwood, a working-class white woman from Jersey City. Soon thereafter, a son named Guillermo, who is listed as a 6-year-old in the 1910 census, joined their family.
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Even Wall Street and family life failed to constrain Ellis’ grand ambitions. When Ellis ran into Ethiopian general Ras Makonnen in London, at the 1902 coronation of Britain’s Edward VII, he couldn’t help himself. Africa was calling his name.
At the turn of the 20th century, Ethiopia was in flux. The African nation had successfully crushed Italian imperial forces at the Battle of Adwa six years prior, in 1896. Its emperor, Menelik II, was busy introducing “some of the amenities of modern civilization” to the country, including establishing lines of communication with potential allies outside of Africa, wrote historian Bahru Zewde in Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early 20th Century. In 1903, for example, American diplomat Robert Peet Skinner successfully negotiated a treaty of friendship and commerce between the U.S. and Ethiopia.
For Ellis, Ethiopia was a land of untapped potential. In 1903, he visited the country and cultivated a friendship with the aging Menelik. He ultimately hoped to relocate Black Southerners to the country, going so far as to claim that it was “just as safe for a foreigner as Broadway is.” Once again, Ellis cast his racial identity into question to promote an emigration plan for African Americans. “You’d think he wouldn’t want to reveal his interest in a country that was such a powerful symbol of Black empire while he was passing,” Nadia Nurhussein, author of Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America, tells Smithsonian. “But his whole life was shaped by boldness and recklessness.”
“Bold” and “reckless” are certainly the words that come to mind. Ellis didn’t stop with his nascent colonization plan. Instead, he offered to hand-deliver Skinner’s treaty to Menelik’s court at his own expense. When the State Department refused, he ingratiated himself with Kent Loomis, brother of Assistant Secretary of State Francis Loomis, and secured passage on the ship carrying the treaty anyway. After Loomis turned up dead in June 1904, Ellis was immediately suspected of foul play. No less than Francis, the brother of the deceased, came to his defense.
Seeking to defend Kent’s judgment in inviting Ellis onto the ship in the first place, Francis insisted that “Ellis was Kent’s friend. Their relationship was sincere.” For the time being, Ellis escaped additional scrutiny and was permitted to deliver the treaty to Menelik. Nonetheless, doubts regarding Ellis’ culpability in Loomis’ death have never been fully put to rest.
Delivering the treaty made Ellis exceptionally popular in Ethiopia—so popular, in fact, that he claimed the emperor named him the Duke of Harrar, a province governed by Makonnen. “As unlikely as this seems,” wrote Nurhussein in Black Land, “Ellis apparently did chaperone … a leader from Harrar when he visited the United States with presents for [President] Roosevelt in 1905, so it is possible that he had some official jurisdictional connection to Harrar.”
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Even Menelik’s death in 1913 didn’t dissuade Ellis from his plan “to end his days on his Abyssinian possessions,” as a Victoria newspaper reported. But a mere duchy wasn’t sufficient for Ellis. He was the one “who would be king,” Time magazine declared.
A Boston Globe obituary recounted Ellis’ “ambition to be king of Abyssinia … and make it a nation of Negroes equal to European powers.” His 1904 trip to Ethiopia was merely “the first step in a plan to oust Menelik,” the newspaper suggested. According to the writer Prosper Buranelli, Ellis “had Menelik under his spell. He would nominate Ellis his successor to the Abyssinian throne.” Unsurprisingly, this vision failed to come to fruition, and power instead passed to Menelik’s grandson Lij Iyasu.
It’s doubtful that Ellis actually believed he would be crowned emperor. But he certainly aimed high. He returned to the U.S. in 1904 without incident and resumed speculating in Mexico. Almost immediately, he purchased a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, reportedly paying $45,000 for it, over $1.5 million today. Over the last two decades of his life, he split his time between New York and Mexico City, always seeking the next big business opportunity.
Unsurprisingly, Ellis—the brash world traveler, Mexican colonizer, Ethiopian diplomat and Wall Street millionaire—hustled and worked until the very end. He died in Mexico City in 1923 at the age of 59. He was in crushing debt, and his wife was denied access to his claimed Ethiopian holdings.
