Franklin Israel Moses Jr. (1838-11 December 1906) was the Republican Governor of South Carolina from 7 December 1872 to 1 December 1874, succeeding Robert Kingston Scott and preceding Daniel Henry Chamberlain.
Biography[]
Franklin Israel Moses Jr. was born in Sumter, South Carolina in 1838, the son of lawyer Franklin J. Moses Sr.; his middle initial was later confused for the letter "J", and the name stuck. While he was of paternal Jewish ancestry, he was raised an Episcopalian, and he became a lawyer in 1855. He served as a colonel in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War and personally lowered the US flag from Fort Sumter in 1861, but he became the Republican Adjutant and Inspector General of South Carolina during Reconstruction. He organized a white-led Black militia of 14,000 soldiers to suppress Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist violence, and he served as Governor from 1872 to 1874. He supported publicly-funded old age pensions, integrated the University of South Carolina, and hosted African-Americans socially, both as governor and as a private citizen. He was nicknamed the "Robber Governor" due to his political corruption, which led to his successor, fellow Republican governor Daniel Henry Chamberlain, disowning him. With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, he became a fraudster and morphine addict in New York City, Chicago, and Winthrop, Massachusetts, resulting in multiple imprisonments. He killed himself through asphyxiation from a gas stove in 1906.