This Thursday, May 5th, 2005 was the 140th anniversary of an historic but largely forgotten event in Georgia -- the last meeting held, and the last order given, by the Confederate government before it passed into history.
That last order was issued to my maternal ancestor, Maj. Raphael Jacob Moses, of Columbus, who coincidentally is known as the father of Georgia's peach industry.
Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox about three weeks earlier, on April 9, 1865, and the Civil War had basically ended. On the run from Union troops who wanted to arrest them, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and a few members of his cabinet met for the last time in Washington, Ga. (Wilkes County).
In their final official act, they ordered the major to take possession of the last measure of the Confederacy's wealth -- $40,000 in silver and/or gold bullion, worth perhaps $750,000 today -- and deliver most of it to Augusta to help the thousands of defeated rebel soldiers straggling home, many of them shoeless, hungry and sick.
Moses wrote later that Washington, Georgia, was "full of stragglers, cavalry men who had just been paid $20 each. They had arms but no consciences, and the little taste they had of specie [coins] provoked their appetites".
[This amazing story is recounted in Moses' memoirs, as well as in Mel Young's "Last Order of the Lost Cause," I.W. Avery's "The History of the State of Georgia, from 1850 to 1881,", and Robert Rosen's "The Jewish Confederates."]
Moses hired 10 men he knew and armed them with rifles. His memoir continues: "I agreed to pay them $10 each in gold to guard it that night and go with me to Augusta [the next morning.] I then took a squad of them and destroyed all the liquor I could find in the shops." Moses placed the boxes of bullion and a keg of powder in an unoccupied building and let it be known that he would blow the powder and the treasure if anyone tried to take the bullion.
The next morning, his men loaded the riches onto a train and took off for Augusta. Near the town of Barnett, Moses reports, the train's conductor warned that he'd heard the passengers talking about making a run for the bullion. He told his 10-man guard of the plot, all the while worrying that the guard would join forces with the mob. But they pledged to back Moses.
At Barnett, Moses was to meet another train that would take his car and the bullion the rest of the way to Augusta.
The major went out among the men, who were "as thick as blackbirds," and told them that "every dollar of the bullion would be devoted to feeding their fellow soldiers, and caring for the wounded in the hospitals at Augusta. . . . [I told them] they might kill me and my guard, but they would be killing men in the discharge of a duty in behalf of their comrades! That if they killed us, it would be murder, while if we killed any of them in defending the bullion, which we certainly should endeavor to do, we would be justified, because the killing would be in self defense and in a discharge of a sacred duty."
The crowd dispersed, and Moses wrote that he was able to talk his way out of yet another threat before he and his men finally caught the train to Augusta and safely delivered the goods.
The Atlanta Journal of Feb. 6, 1927, reproduced Moses' receipt for the delivery of the bullion, calling it the "last official writing ever issued by the Confederate administration," and adding solemnly that it was "as historic a curiosity as the world affords, this last flicker of a mammoth revolution."
Peach mogul
Moses was a fifth-generation South Carolinian who in 1849 moved to Columbus, Ga., where he was a lawyer, planter and owner of a plantation he named Esquiline.
Before the War, he pioneered the commercial growing of peaches and plums in Georgia, so it could be said that Georgia is the Peach State largely because of R.J. Moses.
He is reputed to have been the first planter successfully to ship peaches outside of the South, in 1851, before there was any through connection by railroad. James C. Bonner's "A History of Georgia Agriculture, 1732-1860," credits Moses with being the first to succeed in preserving the flavor of shipped peaches, by packing them in wicker "champagne baskets" instead of pulverized charcoal.
Best commissary officer
Moses knew well and wrote in his memoirs about major Confederate figures, including General Lee (with whom he served at Gettysburg, and who wrote to Moses after the war, urging his support in reuniting the nation). The renowned historian Douglas Southall Freeman, in "Lee's Lieutenants," called Moses "the best commissary officer of like rank in the Confederate service."
As Gen. James Longstreet's chief commissary officer, Moses was responsible for keeping an army of 54,000 [including non-combatants] fed and provisioned. He took part in most of the major battles in the East.
Moses' three sons also fought for the South; one, Lt. Albert Moses Luria, 19, became the first Jewish Confederate killed in action when he died at Seven Pines, Va., in May 1862. (The last Confederate Jew to be killed was Moses' nephew, Joshua Lazarus Moses, of Sumter, S.C., the brother of my great grandfather. He was killed in the battle of Fort Blakeley, Ala., a few hours after Lee surrendered, firing the last guns in defense of Mobile. In this battle, Josh's brothers Perry and Horace were respectively wounded and captured.)
Moses wrote in his memoirs that "I have never turned my back on an enemy that was attacking me or failed to forgive one as soon as he cried for quarter. I can also say that I never deserted a friend..."
And The Atlanta Journal ... , in 1928, summed up Moses' career thus: "At the beginning of the war, although over age, he hastened to the defense of his beloved Southland, offering his fortune, his services, his sons everything save honor---a willing sacrifice on the altar of his country."
