Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag During Radical Reconstruction (review)

Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg contends that Jews in the South before the Civil War served as “court Jews” for the plantation aristocracy. In a region with low levels of educational and business acumen, Jews advocated agricultural technology, provided intellectual leadership, performed as spokespeople for planter interests, and acted as merchants, educators, and attorneys. They were rewarded with financial success and political preferment. Nonetheless, because of religious and what were perceived as racial differences, they were never truly accepted into the upper class. Although the plantation elite shielded them against the latent prejudice of the lower classes, when the old order broke down after the Civil War, so, too, did the tacit acceptance. Whereas Jews were elected to various offices before the Civil War, from 1865 to 2008 only five Jews won election to the House and none to the Senate or as governor (outside of Florida) of a former Confederate state. Following Hannah Arendt, Ginsberg argues that, because they were socially marginalized and thus viewed society from an outsider’s perspective, Jews offered creative options for the region’s future. Ginsberg’s biography of Franklin Moses Jr. of South Carolina is, to some extent, a case study of this thesis.

Moses, scion of an old Charleston Jewish family, has been vilified as the “Robber Governor.” Although Ginsberg admits that the Radical Republican was not above graft, he places Moses’s crimes in the perspective of the widespread corruption of the Reconstruction era. He credits the governor as a true reformer who practiced what he preached in terms of black equality and as a person who participated in perhaps the first black-Jewish coalition.

Before Reconstruction, Moses followed a path limned by his father, a successful lawyer, plantation owner, jurist, and politician. After two years at South Carolina College, he read law with his father and entered the legal profession. He and his father were Unionists like other planter elites until Abraham Lincoln received the Republican Party nomination for the presidency in 1859. Thereafter they advocated secession, with the younger man serving Governor F. W. Pickens as secretary and aide de camp. The war did not bode well for either the Moses family or for South Carolina. After a stint as a Confederate officer, Moses sought and obtained a noncombatant position. Ginsberg maintains that increasing antisemitism coupled with the devastation wrought by the war placed Moses in a precarious position. Nonetheless, his father helped lead the state constitutional convention of 1865, father and son quickly rebuilt their legal practice, and the son won appointment as justice of the Sumter military tribunal while the father was elected to the state senate, serving there as president pro tempore, and then as a circuit court judge. As editor of the Sumter News, the younger man promoted industrialization, supported black codes, and opposed carpetbaggers, the Union League, and Radical Republicans. These and other policies pleased his white, upper-class readers, and he became an officer in the Masonic order and assistant tax assessor.

When federal troops reoccupied the state during Congressional Reconstruction, Moses participated in the constitutional convention of 1868, in his mind to help provide white leadership to African Americans now granted the franchise. Although other white South Carolinians also chose this route, he continued after most others withdrew from politics and resorted to violence. He ultimately took what the author considers a unique, principled position by socializing with African Americans, thinking of them as equals, and treating them as such. A pariah from white society, Moses became a “star” in the black community (67). He became adjutant and inspector general of the militia, a regent of the state university and first speaker of the new state house of representatives. In these positions and as governor from 1872 to 1874, he promoted integrated education, land reform, economic development, black rights, and sound credit. Conflict within the state Republican Party and the end of Reconstruction effectively ended Moses’s career. He...