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.