Alfred Moore

Alfred Moore, a Revolutionary War officer from the Cape Fear country who rose to the Supreme Court of the United States, died in Bladen County, North Carolina, on October 15, 1810. He was fifty-five. He was born on May 21, 1755, in New Hanover County, into one of the oldest families of colonial Carolina. His great-grandfather James Moore had governed Carolina at the opening of the eighteenth century, and his father, Maurice Moore, was a colonial judge who published an essay condemning the Stamp Act. After his mother died and his father remarried, the boy was sent to Boston for schooling. He came home to read law under his father and was admitted to the bar in April 1775, just as the colonies moved toward war. That September he took a captain's commission in the 1st North Carolina Regiment of the Continental Army, commanded by his uncle. He fought at Moore's Creek Bridge and in the defense of Charleston. The deaths of his father, brother and uncle in 1777 called him home to run the family plantation, but he kept fighting as a militia colonel, and British troops later burned his property. After independence the General Assembly made him attorney general, a post he held from 1782 to 1791. In 1787 he argued the state's side in Bayard v. Singleton, an early and important test of judicial review. A committed Federalist, he worked to bring North Carolina into the Union under the new Constitution after the state first held back, and he helped choose the site of the University of North Carolina, serving as a trustee from 1789 to 1807. President John Adams nominated him to the Supreme Court in December 1799 to succeed James Iredell, and he took his seat in April 1800. Illness kept him from much of the Court's work, and he wrote a single opinion, Bas v. Tingy, which held that France was an enemy in the undeclared Quasi-War. He resigned in January 1804. Moore County and Moore Square in Raleigh carry his name. His summer house, Moorefields, near Hillsborough, still stands on the National Register of Historic Places. He is buried at St. Philip's Church in Brunswick County.