1st Governor of the State of Florida. He served as a Democrat from 1845 to 1849 after the territory of Florida became a state in 1845. Born on his family's estate "Moseley Hall" to his parents, Matthew and Elizabeth Moseley, the Moseley line were early settlers in North Carolina, becoming wealthy and very political. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1821 with a master's degree. While at the university, his roommate was the future United States President James K. Polk. After law school, he began his law practice in Wilmington, was a schoolteacher and a farmer. Beginning in 1829 he served in the North Carolina State Senate, serving as speaker for four terms between 1832 and 1835, but then had an unsuccessful and very heated run for governor, leaving state politics. With not only a political letdown, he experienced financial disgraces. In 1836, Moseley moved his wife and his oldest five of six children to a plantation on Miccosoukie Lake in Jefferson County in the panhandle of northwest Florida and within ten years, purchased more acreage. The 1850 Slave Schedule shows Moseley owning 70 enslaved, who were used cultivated the crops on his plantation. He was elected to the territorial House of Representatives in 1840, followed by a seat in the Senate four years later. In 1842 his twenty-year marriage to his wife, Susan Hill, ended with her death and apparently she was buried on the plantation. After Florida became the 27th state in the Union on March 3, 1845, he was elected as the first governor of the state. He ran against the third and fifth Florida Territorial Governor, Richard Keith Call. Damping the celebration of Moseley's inauguration was the death on June 8, 1845 of former United States President Andrew Jackson, the commander of United States forces in the First Seminole War, which led to the annexation of Florida from Spain and serving briefly as Florida first territorial governor. Following being sworn in on June 25, 1845, he began the challenging task of developing the first state government. He oversaw the last days of the construction of the State Capitol building in Tallahassee, which was fully occupied in the first year of his administration. First, he encouraged agriculture especially the planting of citrus, tobacco, avocado and cotton. During his tenure as governor, over half of Florida's population was the enslaved, who worked the sugar or cotton plantations, or indigenous people, such as the Seminole tribe. Wanting peace, he managed the state's role in ongoing skirmishes between the settlers and the Seminole tribe between the end of the Second Seminole War in 1842 and before the third Seminole War in 1855. He sent troops to the Mexican War, and with his name mentioned in documents, there is proof that the support of the Mexican War was led by the need to make Texas a "slave state." He initiated the building of Fort Clinch on the north end of Amelia Island and Fort Jefferson on Garden Key, which is in the southernmost tip of Florida. He also supported public schools and was a strong proponent of states' rights. According to Florida's constitution, he could only serve one term, hence Moseley returned to his plantation in October of 1849. He later moved to Putnam County in 1851 where he owned a citrus grove. After his death, his daughters commissioned a portrait to be painted from an old "Daguerreotype," which is on exhibit in the Florida State portrait gallery at the Old Capital Building in Tallahassee. In his honor, the State of North Carolina erected a State Historical Marker near the post office in Lenoir County, which is about one mile from where his home was located. According to a Cultural Resource Survey conducted by Historic Property Associates in 1981, the structure being called the "William Dunn Moseley House" in Putnam County is not the actual home of Governor Moseley as the present abandoned structure was built in 1875, which was twelve years after his 1863 death.