Franklin J. Moses Jr.: Reconstruction-Era South Carolina’s Corrupt Jewish Governor
Few Reconstruction figures have faded from public memory as completely as Franklin J. Moses Jr. Moses entered South Carolina history under a cloud of scandal and left it in disgrace. As governor, he accepted bribes, traded favors, and misused public funds. His obscurity, however, conceals a more consequential story. Moses ranked among the most outspoken politicians of Jewish extraction to champion the political empowerment of Black South Carolinians during the Reconstruction era.
Moses came from a notable South Carolina family. Born in Sumter District on January 1, 1838, he was the son of Franklin Israel Moses Sr., who was born Israel Franklin Moses in 1804 into a prominent Charleston Jewish family of Iberian (Sephardic) and German descent. The elder Moses rose to Chief Justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court in 1868. Moses’s mother was Jane McLellan, a Scots-Irish Methodist, who raised him as an Episcopalian.
Like many other Jewish political operators, Moses showed a willingness to change his colors whenever political expediency demanded it. Moses showed a willingness to change his colors whenever expediency dictated. Before Reconstruction he stood firmly with the Confederate cause, serving as private secretary to Governor Francis Pickens in 1860 and claiming to have personally lowered the United States flag from Fort Sumter in 1861. He subsequently worked as a Confederate enrollment officer. After the war he edited the Sumter News and backed President Andrew Johnson’s approach to Reconstruction. He initially attacked Radical Republicans for their insistence that the South face even harsher punishment for seceding from the Union.
However, Moses eventually changed his political stripes toward the end of the 1860s. His political conversion came in 1868, when he joined the Republican Party, served in the constitutional convention, and won election to the state legislature. Despite an African American majority in the South Carolina House, members selected Moses as Speaker over Black leader Robert Brown Elliott. As adjutant and inspector general of the state militia, Moses organized a military force tasked with defending the Republican regime against the Ku Klux Klan and other White paramilitary groups that had formed to resist the oppressive policies of Reconstruction.
Moses’ strongest base of support came from Black Republicans and the Union League. In 1872, Black delegates dominated the state Republican convention, and their backing secured his gubernatorial nomination. His administration included prominent Black leaders such as Lieutenant Governor Richard Howell Gleaves, Secretary of State Henry E. Hayne, and Treasurer Francis L. Cardozo. Curiously, Cardozo’s father, Isaac Nunez Cardozo, was a Sephardic Jew from a prominent Portuguese Jewish family in Charleston, the same city that anchored the Moses family’s Jewish roots. Jewish historian Benjamin Ginsberg, in his book Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag During Radical Reconstruction, contends that Moses arguably helped create a proto-Black Jewish alliance—a political venture that would be revived and accelerated throughout the 20th century, particularly during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.
As Speaker and later governor, Moses supported some of Reconstruction South Carolina’s most consequential reforms. At the time, the Republican legislature enacted civil rights protections, established a statewide public school system, promoted land ownership for recently freed Black Southerners, and opened the University of South Carolina to Black students.
On October 7, 1873, Henry E. Hayne—then serving simultaneously as Secretary of State—became the university’s first Black student when he enrolled in its medical school. Unsurprisingly, White students and faculty resigned in protest of this integrationist act. Richard T. Greener, Harvard’s first Black graduate, simultaneously became the university’s first Black faculty member, teaching metaphysics, Latin, Greek, and constitutional history from 1873 to 1877.
Moses also crossed racial boundaries in ways that shocked White South Carolinians. He entertained Black lawmakers at his home, attended Black churches, welcomed Black guests socially, and appeared publicly with the Rollin sisters—Frances, Charlotte, Katherine, Louisa, and Florence—five daughters of Charleston’s free Black elite who operated a political salon in Columbia that served as one of Reconstruction’s most consequential organizing spaces.
While Moses positioned himself as a reformer, his administration was rife with corruption. The South Carolina Encyclopedia records that Moses “regularly accepted bribes to expedite the passage of legislation,” secured a personal payment of $10,000 from a militia arms transaction, sold hundreds of pardons, and repeatedly diverted public funds to finance a lifestyle that would have been impossible on his official income. He spent $40,000 to purchase the Hampton-Preston mansion as his official residence and ran up $50,000 in personal living expenses during 2 years in office on a salary of just $3,500 per year.
Historians have called him arguably the most corrupt governor in South Carolina history. In 1874 Moses was indicted for misappropriation of state funds and responded by summoning 3 companies of the Black militia to block a sheriff from serving the indictment. The State Supreme Court ultimately ruled he could not be prosecuted while in office, only impeached.
That legal protection expired with his term. By 1874 Republican reformers led by his successor Daniel H. Chamberlain, along with Cardozo, ensured Moses was not renominated. The legislature then elected him to a circuit judgeship, a move Chamberlain instantly nullified by refusing to issue his commission given the corruption record Moses carried out of office.
His later years brought humiliation and poverty. Moses filed for bankruptcy in 1875, was divorced in 1878, and drifted through New York, Chicago, and other northern cities while struggling with morphine addiction and stacking up convictions for fraud and theft. He was arrested in New York City in September 1878 for forging a promissory note, extradited to South Carolina, and allowed to escape. His family disowned him entirely. He died in a Winthrop, Massachusetts rooming house on December 11, 1906, after years of declining health and financial ruin.
In the end, Franklin Moses Jr. epitomized the readiness of opportunists of Jewish origin to undermine the historic White majority by steering the apparatus of state power against them. His tenure illustrated the pervasive graft of Reconstruction regimes, which systematically looted public resources while working to dismantle traditional Southern authority.
Although the Compromise of 1877 brought a nominal close to military occupation and allowed Southern Whites to re-assert local control, the political landscape had been altered permanently. Moses’ personal trajectory collapsed into disgrace and addiction, yet his crude proto-alliance with Black leaders mapped out a distinct strategy that would later be activated by his Hebraic kin in subsequent decades. In doing so, his flawed career inadvertently laid the operational groundwork for later generations of Jewish activists who would mobilize similar coalitions during the 20th century.
José Niño is a freelance writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can contact him via Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to his “Substack” newsletter by visiting “José Niño Unfiltered” on Substack.com.
Cool! Now do Judah Benjamin please!
Don’t forget Good Ol’ Judah Benjamin.
Not only Benjamin but the 2000 Jews in Confederate uniform.
I think this is a good example of deep Jewish hatred of Whites goes back. I hear a lot of people say it’s mostly a reaction to national socialism but as tanstaafl points out it’s been going on for at least 2,000 years.
I think the another point is that people who hate our government have good instincts, even if they are egalitarian. I talk to people of every race and they all hate our government for various reasons.
As much as I admire the white police in my town doing their best I have no doubt they would do what their masters tell the and arrest us when the Jews get their hate speech laws passed.
I actually talked to a police officer and asked him if he thought it was odd that our law enforcement agencies go to Israel to train. I asked him if he would be comfortable if they were going to china or India to train. He said he’d never really thought about it and asked me what I thought. I said I think a lot of Jews believe in ethno religious supremacy and they want to control every institution in our government. It’s why I don’t support ice because it’s clearly not going to be used to deport illegal aliens. It will be used against people who oppose Jew rule.
You’re doing good work there. You’d get nowhere with that cop ranting about the Jews’ tentacles in everything, but asking why US cops are training in Israel is very legit. And not being all outrageous about it, but gently turn the guy toward looking at the Jews’ actions in Gaza and Lebanon. The people they’re trying to wipe off the face of the Earth have many Christians among their number, and many are descendants of people who walked with Jesus. They’re the native people of the region and 1000, 20000, years are nothing to them. During the time the Jews were self-evolving into the specialized parasites they are now, these people were quietly living and farming etc.
Thanks, I never try to explain to the Whites around me that we’re being genocided by a group of psychopaths. I always tell Whites that we are being ethnically cleansed by our government, and we’re being forced to pay for it.
Unfortunately it only appeals to older people where I live. The younger people are completely race blind. There is a sickening amount of race mixing.
There is a town in my state where it’s still mostly white and I tell them what happened to my town and they should consider defending their town by any means necessary.
As people have said, we have the moral high ground. We are entitled to enjoy the country our ancestors built. The radical position is letting people from the other side of the globe take our country while they steal and physically harm us.
I always blame our government, never the Jews, because people naturally hate the government.
I don’t know. Uncle Mel made quite an impact even though jews tried to destroy him for it.
Every single time, eh?
Now do Albert Pike. Betcha he’s related to Christa Pike.
a great colorful political character who happened to be half jew by his father
Jews HAVE to be working from some superior authority’s script. -no other way their aims are realized by ‘revolutionary spirit’ alone.
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Based cong candidate got into it with some israeli, (((who))), for some reason was in ‘sconie. (fb comments = Gold)
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