Page:The Biographical Dictionary of America, vol. 01.djvu/474

BROWN.BROWN. year was made an A.M. by that institution. He was a menil>er of the Aineiic-an academy of arts aud sciences, a prominent Ma.son, and held the offices of representative to the general assembly and assistant to the governor in council. During the last year of his life he was professor of experimental philosophy of Brown university. He was one of the architects of the First Baptist church erected in Providence, in ITT-l-'To. He died in Providence, R. I., Dec. 3. ITS.-..

BROWN, Joseph Brownlee, author, was l)orn in Cliarleston, S. C, Oct. 4, 1834, where his fatlier was a missionary of the Seamen's aid society. He earned by his own labor the money which enabled him to attend Dartmouth college, where he was graduated in 1845, standing first in his class. He began the study of law, but aban- doned it for the work of teaching, in which he was very successful. He was a student of art, an admirer of Emerson, and one of the more promising of the young men who constituted a distinct group in the transcendental movement. During the early j-ears of the Atlantic Monthly he contributed frequent and able articles to its columns. In 1865 his health became undermined and he was obliged to spend several years in Eu- rope. Though never recovering his former strength, he was able to spend his time profitably in study and writing. He resumed the study of art. acquired a thorough knowledge of the modern languages, later became engrossed in the study of philosophy, and at the time of his death had nearly finished a four-volume philo- sophical work, in which he elaborated a .sy.stem to take the place of those of German idealists, with whom he was in general sympathy. He had arranged for one volume of statement and three of demonstration. His favorite relaxation from his work was the translating of Homer's Iliad into hexameter verse. He died in Brooklyn, N. Y., Oot. 21, 1888.

BROWN, Joseph Emerson, governor of Georgia, was born in Pickens district, S. C., April 15, 1821. His father removed to Georgia and settled in Union county, where he cultivated a farm. The lad was Ijrought up to the life of a common farm lalxjrer, and until nineteen years of age had little schooling. In November, 1840, he walked most of the way to Calhoun academy in South Carolina, where, without money to pay his tuition, he secured admission, and pursued his studies with characteristic jjersi-stence. Returning to Georgia, he paid the cost of his tui- tion by teaching school. He read law in his lei.sure hours, and was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1845. He then continued his legal studies at Yale college law schrx)l, and returning to Georgia in November, 1846, began his practice of

the Law in Canton. He was elected state senator in 1849; i)re,sidential elector in 1852; judge of the superior court of the Blue Ridge circuit in 1855; governor of Georgia in 1857; re-elected in 1859, 1861, and 1863 — the established usage of the commonwealth being set aside, which disallowed an executive over two consecutive terms. He took an active part in the civil war, first as a state rights Democrat, and then as a secessionist of the most pronounced type, his first acts being the seizure of Forts Pulaski and Jackson, before his state had seceded, and of the U. S. arsenal at Augusta immediately after. He equipped and put into the field for state service, during Sher- man's invasion, an army of ten thousand, mainly old men and youths usually exempt from military service. At the close of the war he was arrested by the U. S. authorities and imprisoned for a time. He advised the acceptance of the reconstruction measures of Congress, and, in consequence, incurred for a time popular dis- favor, the legislature of Georgia, in 1868, electing Joshua Hill U. S. senator over him. This was the only political defeat he ever sustained, as he was always successful in securing the majority vote of the people. He was appointed the same year chief justice of the supreme court of Georgia for twelve years, which judicial position he resigned in 1870, to become president of the Western and Atlantic railroad, holding this office for twenty years. In 1880 he was ap- pointed by Governor Colquitt U. S. senator, in place of Gen. John B. Gordon, resigned, and he was elected by the general assembly by over two-thirds majority for the remainder of the term, and re-elected in 1884. His term expired March 3, 1891, when he declined a re-election, and retired to private life and to the care of his largely increasing business interests, which extended to the development of the material wealth of Georgia in all sections of the state. He gave more than one hundred and fifty tliou- sand dollars to educational institutions, churches and benevolences. He opposed the policy of con- scription as adopted by the Confederate adminis- tration in a correspondence with President Davis, which is historical. He died at his home in Atlanta. Ga., Nov. 30, 1894.

BROWN, Joseph Willard, educator, was born in Abington, Mass., May 21, 1839; son of Jo.seph and Mary (Porter) Brown, a descendant in the fifth generation of Samuel Brown, who was grad- uated at Harvard in 1709 and was ordained as the first minister of the church in Abington in 1714. He was fitted for college in the high .school, Abington, and at Phillips academy, Andover, entering Amherst in 1858, and devoting the win- ters of 1859, '60 and '61 to teaching. He enlisted as a private in the 7th Mass. Vols, in 1861, and