19. A Murderer in the Family

How long ago does a murder have to have taken place for the murderer to be described as “colorful?”  It appears that my great great great great grandfather Philip Alston lived long enough ago to qualify.  Alston, born in 1745, was a piece of work.  I knew that even before I started excavating The Pile.  My father was usually not one to make much of his ancestors, yet when we were stationed at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, he took us on a family outing to visit the nearby Alston homestead, called The House in the Horseshoe.   Attendance mandatory.  I was home from college and had better things to do with my time, but in the end I was glad I went.    

Philip Alston, as I had grown sick of hearing, was a Colonel in a Revolutionary War militia, and the forbear who would qualify me to join the Daughters of the American Revolution.  This was an outcome devoutly wished by my Aunt May and fervently resisted by me.  

It was a beautiful spring morning.  The Alston homestead was on a bend in the Deep River, and I can still picture the two-story white frame house on a hillside, surrounded by lush green fields.  But what I most vividly recall from our visit that day is the incriminating evidence I learned against its owner: Philip Alston was a murderer. 

I turned to The Pile recently to see if it contained any confirmation of Alston’s crime.  I found there a yellowing photocopy of a 1963 article from The Pilot, a paper published in Southern Pines, North Carolina.  I already knew the outlines of the story, having traced Phillip Alston through many a North Carolina history website.  

My Patriot ancestor has become tourist fodder.  Every August for nearly 40 years, in the reenactment of the Revolutionary War battle of The House in the Horseshoe, he has again surrendered to his Tory nemesis David Fanning.  Every August Fanning’s men threaten to burn down his house, and “Alston” sends his wife Temperance out waving a white flag.  

Although the battle was more grudge match than significant military engagement, the annual period-dress performance is extremely popular, a Trip Advisor favorite.  As one of the guides told a reporter, “We’re one of the few sites where you can re-enact the actual battle in the place where it happened. We’ve still got the bullet holes.”

In addition to the skirmish itself, there are musket and cannon firing drills, tomahawk and skillet throwing demonstrations, and a wreath-laying ceremony by the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution.  

Philip Alston’s surrender to Col. Fanning, negotiated by his wife, may have been a low point, but Alston was to have many more in his life. Search on the Internet and it’s not hard to find condemnations of his character  by contemporaneous sources as well as current ones.  A writer on a website called North Carolina Historic Sites tries to put Alston’s deeds into an historical context:  “These were reckless times in the North Carolina backcountry and it can certainly be said that he was a bold and aggressive man.”  

This didn’t persuade me;  I was more convinced by the considerable testimony I found against Alston.  The first governor of North Carolina, Richard Caswell, called him hectoring and domineering, and claimed that “a greater tyrant is not upon the face of the earth.”

Alston was politically ambitious and his rivals were many, including and especially Dr. George Glascock, a Revolutionary War surgeon and a first cousin by marriage of George Washington. Glascock led many successful schemes against Alston, including getting him booted from his position as county clerk and Justice of the Peace and pushing for an investigation to get him recalled from being a state senator.  Part of the evidence of Alston’s unfitness, according to Glascock, was that the man did not believe in God, and had declared that the scriptures merely served as a scarecrow for children.  

Three months after this testimony, in October of 1787, Glascock was shot dead by one of Alston’s slaves, a man named Dave.  Here’s the “colorful” part of the story: the night of the murder, Alston invited the countryside to his plantation house for a dance, making sure to remain visible the entire evening.  

Dave was quickly caught and imprisoned -- and subsequently bailed out by Alston, who forfeited the 250 pounds bail money when Dave fled to Georgia.  

Alston’s dance-floor alibi didn’t fool anyone for long and he was eventually held as an accessory to Glascock’s murder – until he escaped from jail and fled to Georgia himself.  The end of the story is summed up in the headline from the Pilot newspaper clipping I found in the Pile: “Old Records Show Col. Aston shot Dead in Bed in Georgia.”  

The story quotes from a letter that an Alston descendant had discovered in the Georgia State archives.  It is addressed to the then governor, Edward Telfair, and it informs him that “this morning about Brake of Day Col. Alston . . . was killed by a Gun that was fired through the house as he lay in bed though no person was discovered to Do It.”

The letter writer speculates that the guilty party was “sum white person that had ill against Alston.”  The story also quotes from a second document found in the archives proclaiming the governor’s offer of a fifty pound reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderer.  

The reward was never claimed; the Pilot story closes with what has since become the consensus  view of Alston’s murder: His own slave Dave did it.  

This would be poetic justice indeed.  Slaves were forbidden to own firearms, so Alston would have furnished Dave with one of his own guns to kill Glascock.  And later, quite possibly, to kill him.

A few months after Philip Alston was shot, in December 1791, Congress adopted the Second Amendment, partly in response to Southern fears of “servile insurrection,” as it was then called.  Slaves were not meant to control guns; guns were meant to control slaves.