A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina by Neil Kinghan (review)

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• A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina by Neil Kinghan
• Robert Colby

A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina. By Neil Kinghan. Southern Biography Series. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. xvi, 255. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-8378-6; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7899-7.)

A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina aims, in author Neil Kinghan’s words, to “rewrite the history of Reconstruction from the perspective of a highly able and honorable African American political leader whose voice should be heard” (p. 6). Unquestionably, Francis L. Cardozo (the leader in question) merits the study that Kinghan has provided us. As an educator and political leader, Cardozo made remarkable strides to remake the South Carolina slave society into which he had been born and, in doing so, personally embodied the possibilities inherent in the postbellum order. In his political and personal lives, however, those changes proved all too fleeting. As such, he stands as an effective avatar of the promises fulfilled and unfulfilled in the Second American Revolution.

Cardozo was born in Charleston in 1837 to a Jewish father and a mother neither fully enslaved nor fully free. She, Francis, and his siblings lived as if they possessed their liberty, though the legal codes governing people of color continuously menaced them. After being educated in the United Kingdom, Cardozo served briefly as a minister in Connecticut. After the Union victory in the Civil War, he returned to South Carolina to teach people emerging from slavery there. His educational work—perhaps by design—offered a springboard into public life, and Cardozo became a prominent Republican at the advent of Radical Reconstruction. In a variety of positions within South Carolina’s government, he advocated for educational and land reforms, and he effectively expanded African Americans’ access to both in the years between 1868 and 1876. He also earned plaudits, meanwhile, for his probity in overseeing the state’s finances.

Cardozo’s work as a financial administrator proved pivotal in his career. His push for integrity and accountability sparked conflicts with his fellow Republicans (and made him a useful cudgel for their Democratic critics). It also spurred one of the more controversial political efforts of his career: his work, alongside gubernatorial candidate Daniel H. Chamberlain, to build a broader coalition by appealing to moderate white Democrats in South Carolina. Historians have widely criticized this action for undermining the Republican Party ahead of the critical election of 1876. Kinghan argues instead that it represented a logical extension of Cardozo’s underlying belief in the power of [End Page 627] argument and persuasion—that by demonstrating in word and deed that Black and white South Carolinians could live harmoniously, the project of Reconstruction would advance. This project, and with it Cardozo’s political career, fell prey to the violent revanchism of Wade Hampton’s Red Shirts. After a politically motivated prosecution and brief prison stint (ironically for the same financial management for which he had previously received bipartisan praise), Cardozo moved to Washington, D.C., where he resumed his work as an educator, a role in which he functioned almost until his death in 1903.

A Brief Moment in the Sun largely adheres to its subtitle by emphasizing Cardozo’s political life. This focus was, one suspects, largely dictated by the sources available to Kinghan (for all his prominence, Cardozo left very few private papers behind). As a result, Cardozo’s private life, interior world, and family remain largely opaque; they appear only to the degree that they factored into or suffered from the fallout from his political travails. Similarly, the biography relies heavily on Cardozo’s public comments and the discussion of him in the partisan press of the day, and thus Kinghan is forced largely to infer Cardozo’s perspectives and aims from contemporary newspaper coverage—a challenging task given the pugnacity and lack of veracity in political publications. A Brief Moment in the Sun nevertheless provides a useful addition to the growing literature on understudied Reconstruction figures, studies that add needed texture to...