Robert Francis Withers Allston

RFW Allston

Robert Francis Withers Allston (born April 21, 1801 in All Saints Parrish , South Carolina , † April 7, 1864 in Georgetown , South Carolina) was an American rice planter and governor of South Carolina from 1856 to 1858 .

Life

Early years

Robert Allston graduated from West Point , New York Military Academy in June 1821 . Until 1822 he served as a lieutenant in the US Army. Then he had to end his military career early for personal reasons. In Plantersville, South Carolina, he settled as a planter . He quickly earned a place in the agricultural community of his homeland and held a number of honorary positions. So he was active in the Prince Frederick Church. From 1840 he was a curator of the South Carolina colleges and from 1856 to 1861 president of the Waccamaw Indigo Society. At the world exhibition in Paris in the mid-1850s, he won a prize for his cultivation of rice (Cultivation of Rice).

Governor of south carolina

Prior to his election as governor of South Carolina in 1856, Allston had held several government offices. From 1828 to 1832 he was a member of the House of Representatives and between 1850 and 1856 he was in the Senate of his country . He was also a Colonel in the National Guard. In 1856, Allston was elected the new governor of his country by the House of Representatives by secret ballot. His two-year term began in December 1856. During this time, he worked to improve school education in his country. To this end, taxes were raised. Otherwise, his term of office, like that of his predecessors, suffered from the national conflict between the northern and southern states. The radical advocates of South Carolina's immediate exit from the Union were once again dampened when the decision of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled in their favor and thus briefly undermined their arguments. But this situation shouldn't last long.

Another résumé

According to the constitution, Allston could not be directly re-elected after his term of office expired. Therefore, he had to resign from office in December 1858. In 1861 he was still one of the electors in the election of the President of the Confederate States. Allston saw the beginning of the civil war and the turn to the detriment of the south. He died in April 1864, a year before the end of the war and the fall of the old south. He was married to Adele Pettigru, with whom he had nine children.

Act as a rice planter

Documents and records of the Allston family, published in 1945 in The South Carolina rice plantation: as revealed in the papers of Robert FW Allston , provide important information about agricultural, political and social conditions in the southern United States before the Civil War. Allston created one of the last large rice plantations in the lowlands off the Atlantic coast by draining and reclaiming marshland in his state . He was also the author of two authoritative and influential papers on rice cultivation.

literature

• Robert Sobel and John Raimo (Eds.): Biographical Directory of the Governors of the United States, 1789–1978. Volume 4. Meckler Books, Westport, CT, 1978. 4 volumes.
• The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Vol. 12. James T. White & Company, New York

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Robert Allston . In: Encyclopædia Britannica .
2. ↑ Eric W. Plaag: Allston, Robert Francis Withers . In: South Carolina Encyclopedia .

Web links

• Robert Allston in the National Governor Association (English)
• South Carolina Information Highway (English)