Background
Mr. Moore was born on May 21, 1755, in New Hanover County, North Carolina, United States. He was born into an influential political family.
Alfred Moore, Library of Congress.
Alfred Moore.
Mr. Moore was born on May 21, 1755, in New Hanover County, North Carolina, United States. He was born into an influential political family.
Alfred Moore received his early education in Boston, and then returned to North Carolina, where he studied law with his father and was admitted to the bar in 1775.
In 1775 Moore joined the fight against the British by accepting a commission as captain with the First North Carolina Continental Regiment, commanded by his uncle, Colonel James Moore. Mr. Moore continued some measure of military activity by serving in the militia, where he helped harass the British lines; perhaps in retaliation, the British plundered the Moore family plantation on Eagles Island, near Wilmington. After the British finally retreated from the area, Alfred Moore spent the rest of the war serving as judge advocate of the North Carolina military forces.
He served at the General Assembly with distinction. Large numbers of North Carolinians had been Tories during the Revolution, and post-independence legislative assemblies considered the punishment of significant political dissent important to the internal security of the new state. Much of Mr. Moore’s work as attorney general thus involved the prosecution of "disloyalty" offenses. Alfred Moore was realistic about the prospect of jury nullification in these largely political prosecutions; he accordingly often pursued lesser charges and by doing so acquired a higher conviction rate than Mr. Iredell’s.
When the war was over, North Carolina rewarded his service by electing him to the state legislature. Soon after, beginning in May 1782, he replaced James Iredell as attorney general of North Carolina. Over the following years Mr. Moore earned a reputation as one of the state’s top triumvirate of lawyers, joined by James Iredell and William R. Davie. Toward the end of this period, the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia and proposed a constitution for ratification by the states; North Carolina did not include Alfred Moore as one of its delegates to the Convention.
In 1791 the North Carolina legislature passed a law creating the post of solicitor general. Alfred Moore viewed this act as an unconstitutional intrusion on his powers, and he resigned from his position as attorney general in protest. But unable to abandon political life for good, he successfully ran for a seat in the North Carolina legislature in 1792.
A few years later he narrowly lost his election bid for the U.S. Senate. By the end of the decade, however, he had gained the attention of President John Adams, who appointed him in 1798 as one of the commissioners delegated to negotiate a treaty with the Cherokee Nation. Mr. Moore did not complete his service in this position, owing to his election to a seat on the North Carolina Superior Court in 1799. He served on this court for a year; then the death of James Iredell in the fall of 1799 created a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court that President John Adams sought to fill with an appointment from North Carolina. William R. Davie had perhaps the better credentials for the post, but Mr. Adams had only recently appointed him as a plenipotentiary to France (with Oliver Ellsworth, who was chief justice of the Supreme Court at the time). Thus, on December 4, 1799, Alfred Moore won the nomination instead. He was confirmed by the Senate shortly thereafter and took the oath of office on April 21, 1800, inaugurating a most inauspicious career as a justice of the Supreme Court. Mr. Moore’s Supreme Court tenure was undistinguished. He wrote only one published opinion, Bas v. Tingy (1800), which recognized that the U.S. participated in what historians call a "quasi-war" with France in 1798-1799.
Alfred Moore joined the Court on the eve of its transformation from a little-regarded institution in American life into a co-equal branch of government. Within a year after Mr. Moore had been sworn in as a justice, President Adams appointed a new chief justice: John Marshall. Mr. Marshall secured the Court’s authority as a final arbiter of the Constitution’s meaning and would thus give it a powerful voice within the structure of American law. Time and circumstance, though, deprived Moore of any real part in this transformation.
Circuit riding, the bane of many early Supreme Court justices, took its toll on Mr. Moore’s health. All the justices were responsible not only for attending and participating in sessions of the Supreme Court but also for presiding over sessions of the Circuit Courts of Appeals. This latter responsibility required significant travel that strained the health of many justices. On January 26, 1804, Alfred Moore resigned his seat on the Supreme Court and returned home to North Carolina.
As a Federalist, Alfred Moore supported ratification of the Constitution, but he failed to win a delegate’s slot in the first North Carolina ratifying convention, which met in July 1788 and declined to ratify it. The following year, after he won a seat as a delegate to a second ratifying convention, he joined James Iredell and William R. Davie in persuading the convention to ratify the U.S. Constitution in November 1789.
Mr. Moore and the supporters of the Federalist Party believed that France was an enemy nation. This position of the Federalists was bitterly attacked by the Jeffersonian press on the grounds that only Congress could declare a state of war.
Though successful as a lawyer and politician, Alfred Moore was not able to create a name for himself on the Supreme Court.
Physical Characteristics: He was physically a small man, described as standing a mere 4'5" tall, easily dwarfed by taller men; and - at least on the Supreme Court - his diminutive physical stature mirrored his influence.
Alfred Moore married Susanna Eagles on September 1, 1775.