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BY JOHN SEAWRIGHT
THE SORROWS OF THE
ALSTONS* Part 12.
After his father’s lynching Robert A.
Alston moved to Milledgeville with his
mother and sister. From the time he was 8
years old till he was 14 he attended Ramsay’s
Academy in nearby Midway, Ga. His old
schoolmates later remembered him as an ac
tive, outgoing boy who avoided verbal and
physical violence. Robert’s formal schooling
ended when he was 14. In 1847 he went to
Charleston, S.C., to clerk for E.W. Bancroft,
a wholesale merchant. It is not at all clear
why a very bright young man from a family
which was by no means impoverished should
be sent far away to learn the dry goods trade
rather than attend Oglethorpe or Emory or
Franklin College.
Robert’s education was not the most puz
zling mystery of the Alston household during
the 1840s. Before Willis Alston’s death in
April 1841, he and Elizabeth Sarah Howard
Alston had had four children, the two older
sons dying in infancy. Robert was bom in
1832 and Susan in 1834. In Joseph A.
Groves’s genealogy of the Alston family, pub
lished in 1901, two younger children are
listed, Augustus H. and Thomas H. Alston,
but their birthdates are not given. Going to
the 1860 U.S. Census we find Elizabeth
Alston, a widow, living
in Atlanta’s First Ward
with her mother, Susan
P. Howard, and two boys,
Augustus H. Alston, 13,
and Thomas H. Alston,
10. Their surroundings
were not what ,u fam
ily had been ....Listomed
to: their immediate
neighbors were a stone
cutter and a laborer, and
several prostitutes are
We have no
clue to the
identity of
their father
or fathers.
enumerated on the same page of the census.
Elizabeth and Susan’s ages 3te given correctly
(47 and 68, respectively), but some quick
math with the boys’ ages raises questions: If
the census information is correct, Augustus
could have been bom no earlier than 1846
and Thomas no earlier than 1849, five and
eight years after Willis’s death. In 1893,
Augustus H. Alston, then a judge in Eufala,
Ala., submitted the following information to
the Memorial Record of Alabama, a sort of
Who’s Who compiled by the Brant and Fuller
publishing company:
Judge A. H. Alston is a native of Bibb
County, Ga., and was bom November 17,
1844 H is parents, Willis and Elizabeth Alston...
Willis... died m Texas in the year 1846.
Augustus just might have been bom as
early as 1844, but there is no getting around
the fact that by 1846 Willis Alston had been
dead for five years.
Wallace M. Alston, longtime president of
Agnes Scott College, contributed some fam
ily history to Caroline M. Clarke’s The Story
of Decatur (1973):
My grandfather, Thomas H. Alston, grew
up in the home of his older brother (who, after
his father's deadi when he was a very young child)
became a father to him. The older brother re
in 1842. Henrietta and Augustus Kenan’s mar
riage was an unhappy one, ending in divorce
in 1858, a drastic measure for die time, requir
ing a special act of the Georgia legislature. Fi
nally, it should be recalled that Augustus H.
Alston gave Bibb County as his birthplace.
Whatever the speculations that can be
spur, from these disconnected threads, there
is no question that the young Alstons and
their Kenan cousins grew up in homes lack
ing many elements of Southern gentility and
Victorian rectitude. By 1860, as we have
noted, Elizabeth was living in the worst part
of Atlanta with no personal wealth listed. Her
brother, Thomas Coke Howard, a wealthy
lawyer and newspaper publisher, lived in the
city’s affluent Fifth Ward and was certainly
in a position to take care of his sister and her
boys if he had cared to; only Elizabeth’s
mother stood by her.
Robert A. Alston left home about the
time his half-brother Augustus was bom;
despite the aristocratic airs of his ances
tors he was the son of a lynched murderer
and a disgraced woman, sent to a strange
city at the age of 14 to make his own way
in the world.
CONTINUED NEXT WEEK.
©1996 John Ryan Seawright
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/erred to was Col. Robert A. Alston. ...After
the War, in which my grandfather, a teenager
who tried to enroll but was declared too young
Thomas was indeed too young to have
served in the Civil War; the 1870 census gives
his age as 19, consistent with his reported age
in 1860. He was bom nearly a decade after
Willis Alston’s death.
It is impossible to speculate on this phase
of the Alstons’s story without risking injus
tice to the dead and embarrassment to the
living. In all honesty it must be said that there
is every indication that Augustus and Tho
mas were the sons of Elizabeth Sarah Howard
Alston, bom out of wedlock after the death
of her husband. We ha v no clue to the iden
tity of their father or fathers.
The 1850 census for Bibb County yields up
a tantalizing entry from which no conclusions
can be drawn: “Sarah A. Alston” was listed as
the head of a household in a respectable Ma
con neighborhood. She owned $700 worth of
real estate (moderately well-to-do), was37 years
old, and was a native of North Carolina. Eliza
beth Sarah Alston is not listed in the 1850
Georgia census, but she was a North Carolina
native who would have been 37 in that year.
“Sarah A. Alston” does not appear in the 1860
census for any southeast
ern state. The only other
person listed in Sarah A.
Alston’s 1850 Macon
household was 3-year-
old boy, A. J. Kennan,
born in Georgia.
Elizabeth’s sister-in-law,
Henrietta Alston, was
married to Augustus H.
Kenan, a prominent
Milledgeville lawyer.
Their last child was bom
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