Book Review: A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina

A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina. By Neil Kinghan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Paperback, 272 pp. $30.00.

Reviewed by Rich Condon

When considering the meaning of post-war Reconstruction in the 1930s, historian W.E.B. Du Bois provided a bittersweet summarization as when the “slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”[1] His words captured the experience of millions of African Americans from the final stages of the Civil War into the early years of the 20th century, including South Carolina educator and politician Francis Lewis Cardozo, the first African American elected to statewide office in the United States.

In his most recent work, A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina, Neil Kinghan focuses on the most transformative period in the life of Cardozo as it paralleled that of the Reconstruction-era South. Employing Cardozo’s story as a narrative tool, Kinghan explores the trajectory of Reconstruction from its successful implementation in the 1860s to its eventual defeat in the 1870s. As he argues, “The treatment of Francis Cardozo was the living embodiment of the dishonesty of the myth of the tragic era.”(6)

Though Francis Cardozo’s name does not often register with most Americans in concert with those of Robert Smalls, Hiram Revels, or John Mercer Langston, his story is nonetheless essential to the progression of Black political influence during the Reconstruction era. Born to a white Jewish father and freed African-American mother in antebellum Charleston, Cardozo was raised in slaveholding Charleston where he bore witness to the horrors of slavery and experienced the inequalities which faced the entirety of the state’s Black population. Even so, Cardozo sought opportunity abroad as he attended university in Scotland and England; an experience which set him on a transformative path toward the field of education and, eventually, a career in post-war politics in the United States.

Kinghan’s “cradle to the grave” study of Cardozo’s experience centers much of its focus not only on the man, but on the period which he helped shape and, perhaps, helped shape him. As Kinghan explains, this book is meant to recognize Cardozo for his influential work as South Carolina’s first Black secretary of state and treasury, in addition to that as a community leader and teacher of African American youth, all in the face of adversity and threats of white supremacist violence. Ultimately, the publication is an astute effort by Kinghan to restore Cardozo’s name to the growing study of 19th century Black history.

As the recipient of the 2023 South Carolina Historical Society’s George C. Rogers Jr. Book Award, A Brief Moment in the Sun engages with the historiography of Reconstruction while even providing a detailed exploration of the previous works that have, and have not, included studies of Cardozo’s Reconstruction-era exploits. Among these are works, like that of Columbia University’s William A Dunning, which influenced the memory of many Americans into a state of historical amnesia; often forgetting, neglecting, or ignoring the role Cardozo and his colleagues played in re-creating the post-war nation.

A great biography serves as a vessel through which readers can better understand a person’s lived experience while providing a greater perspective of the subject’s surroundings; both periodic and geographic. As one of the nation’s continuously misunderstood periods, the study of the Reconstruction era has benefitted from recent and updated scholarship, of which A Brief Moment in the Sun now finds itself included.

[1]  W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880, (The Free Press, 1998), 30.

Rich Condon is a public historian from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of West Virginia’s Shepherd University. For over a decade he has worked with a multitude of sites and organizations including The Battle of Franklin Trust, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum, and the National Park Service, including work at Beaufort, South Carolina’s Reconstruction Era National Historical Park and Catoctin Mountain Park. He has written for Civil War Times Magazine, The American Battlefield Trust, as well as Emerging Civil War, and operates the Civil War Pittsburgh blog, which focuses on sharing stories related to western Pennsylvania’s role in the Civil War. Rich currently lives in Gettysburg.