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In August 1871, Robert Alston returned home to Decatur from the state Agricultural Society meeting In Rome to discover that he had been called for |ury duty. At the end of September, he was picked to try one of the most scandalous cases ever heard in a Georgia court: The State v. Myron D. Wood, for the seduction of Emma Isadore Chivers. Wood was the pastor of the Decatur Baptist Church. Emma Chivers. 20 at the time of the trial, was the youngest daughter of the eccen tric poet and friend of Edgar Allen Poe. Thomas Holley Chivers. who had died when Emma was 6 years old. Wood had been Emma’s pastor and schoolteacher for many years. When she was 15 he began making advances to her. proclaiming his love, and claiming that his wife could not live very long and on her death he would marry Emma The teenager succumbed to the passionate pleas of the man who had more than any other stood as her father, and began a three-year affair. When she became convinced that Wood’s wife was not going to die and that the pastor had no intention of mar rying her, she brought charges. The testimony in the case was shocking; the defense called on male classmates who testified that Emma was a lewd girl; a neighbor swore that Mrs. Chivers often entertained men late at night; Emma Chivers described her pastor's atten tions in great detail. The jury found Wood guilty of seduction of a minor and sentenced him to 20 years at hard labor. His conviction was later overturned and he was acquitted at his second trial: His path and Robert Alston's would cross again. Robert Alston's restless energy was never more evident than *n the early 1870s. In 1872 he served on a committee looking into ways of establishing direct trade between Atlanta and Europe. Later in the year he was again a delegate to the state Democratic convention where he was elected an alternate presiden tial elector. He remained active in the state Agricultural Society and the DeKalb County Democratic executive committee. Besides politics, there was money: Robert Alston never had enough money. He had a growing family to support, and he also maintained the aristocratic habits of lavish generosity and opulent living formed in the palmy days of slavery and ill-suited to the hard realities of postwar life. To supplement the income from his plantation. Alston signed on as a “special agent" of the newly organized Cotton States Life insurance Company, whose officers included his wife’s brother, William J. MagiU, a onearmed Confederate veteran on whose behalf Alston interceded in 1873 to prevent a duel that would have almost certainly ended in MagiU’s death. The insurance business was only the first, and most mundane, of Robert Alton's many schemes to avoid bankruptcy. One day in 1871 Robert Alston saw a small, powerfully-built man with long black hair man on horseback leading two horses past the Georgia Railroad watering station rioteft A. Ah ton (Courtny. QA Dept. at Arctwm and History) near his home. He asked the stranger if he knew anything about the man who was look ing to buy the Wells plantation near Alston's Meadow Nook. The stranger said that he was the man and introduced himself as Edward A. Cox of Morgan County. The two men soon discovered that they had much in common: both had lost their fathers at an early age and had been sent away to distant cities to be educated, had married in their new homes and returned to Georgia on the eve of the Civil War. Like Alston. Cox had joined a local military unit, but resigned to enlist in the Confederate cavalry in the West, Alston under Morgan. Cox under Joseph Wheeler, both had risen through the ranks to become officers, Cox ending his service as a captain. Cox and Alston were impulsive, demonstra tive men who made no effort at hiding their emotions; both had a quick, nervous, larger- than-life air about them. After their meeting Cox increased his offer for the Wells farm by $500 to insure that he would become Bob Alston’s neigh bor. The two men soon began a close friendship that was to last until the day eight years later when Cox put a bul let through Alston's brain. in October 1872 in the lobby of Atlanta's Kimball House hotel, Robert Alston ran into Henry Grady, the 21- year-old editor of the Rome Commercial. Just over a year before, Grady had written a harsh article criticizing Alston's uncle Thomas Howard, but Alston's rnger with him had passed as swiftly as it had appeared. Alston had been about to tele graph Grady in Rome to urge him to come to Atlanta and become his partner in buying a two-thirds interest in the Atlanta Herald Over a bowl of oysters In Thompson’s restau rant, Grady agreed. Grady and Alston returned to the Kimball House, took a room, and discussed the deal until the early hours of the morning and went to sleep. In a few hours Grady was awakened by Alston calling his name: "Grady, is there anv insanity in your fami ly?" "None at all! Why do you ask me?" "Well. I’ve been thinking over this Herald trade for a week. You've only known of ft a few hours. Now. I know that a man that's quicker on a trade than I am must be crazy, and I was afraid I'd gone into partnership wiuiaiunaUcT Alston had already haJf-jolcingly offered to invest Li the paper on the condition that its founder. Alexander St. Clalr-Abrams, "allow himself to be put in an iron cage." Within weeks. Atlantans would be won dering whether Alston, Grady and Abrams had not Indeed opened a journalistic branch office of the State Asylum: The state of Georgia had never seen, and would never see again, more brilliant, eccentric or impractical management of a daily newspaper. 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