Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/528216
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 6 8 S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 6 8 wrote. Things seemed about perfect until this Cuban freebooter showed up at his door. He was Ambrosio Jose Lopez Gonzales, the son of a newspaper publisher, a revolutionary on the run and a salesman for the famed LeMatt Grapeshot revolver. Nine shots and then a final blast of buckshot, ten good men with LeMatts could break a cavalry change by one hundred, compelling advertising in those days. Gonzales was the first man to stop a bullet in the cause of Cuban liberty and he proudly bore the scar. He had impeccable manners, was fluent in five languages and was a school chum of the dashing soon-to- be-Confederate-general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, a widower and native of New Orleans, dubbed by the ladies as "Pretty Good Time Beauregard." Pretty good times, indeed. Ambrosio Gonzales had his eye on Harriet Rutledge Elliott, William Elliott's daughter. Polite society from Savannah to Charleston was shocked when daddy consented to the nuptials. Gonzales was 38; she was 16. Hattie bore him six children. With writer grandpas on both sides, it's small wonder three of the children took up the profession. But meanwhile, the Civil War got in the way. Beauregard fired on Ft. Sumter, won the First Battle of Manassas. He lost the Battle of Shiloh, then successfully defended Charleston from an 18-month Federal siege. At his side during the Charleston campaign was Col. Ambrosio Gonzales, chief of all Confederate artillery from North Carolina to Florida. After the surrender, Gonzales took a Spanish pardon and moved Hattie and the children to Cuba. Hattie died there of Yellow Fever in 1869, and Gonzales, struggling financially, sent the children back to South Carolina to live with their aunts on the family's ruined plantation where they hunted, fished, and grew vegetables for the Charleston market. Two boys, Narciso and Ambrose, learned Morse Code and became "lightning slingers," or telegraph operators. They moved from transmitting the news to writing it, and in 1891 founded The State, soon the most widely read newspaper in South Carolina. They were joined by younger brother William Elliott Gonzales. The Gonzales brothers took issue with Governor "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, a vicious Jim Crow racist. In 1903 unarmed Narciso was gunned down by James Tillman, the lieutenant governor and Pitchfork Ben's nephew. After Tillman's acquittal, the jury foreman remarked, "Who ever heard of any jury anywhere convicting anybody for killing a newspaper man?" Outraged citizens erected a monument to Narciso Gonzales, not on the spot where he was killed, but along the route James