Lemuel James Alston

Lemuel James Alston (1760–1836) was a slave owner, lawyer, state legislator, and U.S. Representative from South Carolina in the early national period of the United States. He was born in 1760 in the eastern part of Granville County in the Province of North Carolina, in an area that later became part of Warren County. He came of age during the era of the American Revolution, and his early life was shaped by the political and social transformations occurring in the southern colonies, though specific details of his family background and youth are not well documented in surviving records.

After the Revolutionary War, Alston left North Carolina and moved southward to the backcountry of South Carolina. He settled near Greens Mill, a small settlement that would soon develop into the town of Greenville, South Carolina. In this emerging community on the frontier of the state, he pursued legal studies, reading law in the customary manner of the period. Having completed his legal training, he was admitted to the bar and commenced the practice of law in Greenville. His professional standing and local prominence led to his entry into public life, and he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives, serving as a member from 1789 to 1790 during the formative years of the new federal republic.

Alston’s legal and political career in South Carolina advanced as the Democratic-Republican Party became the dominant political force in the state. Identified with the Jeffersonian Republican tradition, he was elected as a Democratic-Republican to the Tenth and Eleventh Congresses. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from March 4, 1807, to March 3, 1811, representing South Carolina during the administration of President Thomas Jefferson and the early administration of President James Madison. His tenure in Congress coincided with a period marked by growing tensions over British and French interference with American shipping and the domestic debates that preceded the War of 1812, although the specific details of his committee assignments and legislative positions are not extensively recorded.

Following the conclusion of his congressional service in 1811, Alston returned to private life and his legal practice in South Carolina for several years. In 1816, amid the broader movement of planters, professionals, and settlers into the southwestern frontier, he relocated to Clarke County in what was then the Mississippi Territory and soon to become the state of Alabama. He settled near Grove Hill, Alabama, where he quickly assumed a role in the local judicial system. From November 1816 until May 1821, he presided over the orphans’ court and the county court of Clarke County, positions that placed him at the center of probate, guardianship, and local civil matters in a rapidly developing region.

Alston spent his later years in Clarke County, where he continued to be identified as a substantial landholder and slave owner, reflecting the entrenched system of slavery that underpinned the social and economic order of the Deep South in the early nineteenth century. He resided at his estate known as “Alston Place” in Clarke County, Alabama. It was there that he died in 1836, closing a public career that had spanned the early years of the United States from the post-Revolutionary era in the Carolinas to the frontier society of early Alabama.