Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,462

This is the grave of Joseph E. Brown.

Born in 1821 in Pickens County, South Carolina, Brown grew up not that well off. This was not someone who was born in the slaveowning class, at least not heavily. He lived on a family farm. Not sure if there were any slaves or not, but in 1840, when he decided he didn’t like this life anymore and wanted an education, he had to drive a herd of oxen to town himself to trade for room and board, so this gives you a sense of the social class.

Of course none of this meant that Brown wasn’t interested in owning slaves. The entire construction of “The Civil War wasn’t about slavery; my ancestor didn’t own slaves and he fought” is a total canard. Even if one didn’t own slaves doesn’t mean one didn’t want to own slaves.

This was Joseph Brown. He attended an academy in Anderson, South Carolina for a few years, then moved to Canton, Georgia to run a town academy there. He earned money, became friends with rich guys, got a loan to pursue the law at Yale, did so, got his degree, passed the bar, and moved back to Georgia. Now he wanted to be in politics, which again was an extremely common move for lawyers in these days. He was elected to the state legislature in 1849, married a rich woman, was elected state circuit court judge in 1855, and was an elector for the Democrats in 1856. Of course by now he owned his share of slaves and he wanted more of them.

In 1857, Brown won a race to become governor of Georgia. By this time, anyone who wanted to be a politician in the South had to be a member of the Democrats and rabidly pro-slavery. Such it was for Brown. But he was a Whig before slavery came to dominate American politics. He was a believer in using the power of the government for development. Like anyone else who wanted to survive in southern politics after 1848, he became a Democrat. One of this top priorities was to create a system of free public schooling for white children. He paid for it by taxing a state-owned railroad. This was politically difficult. The planter class flat out didn’t care about poor whites. This would be a huge issue in the Civil War–the utter indifference of the elites for the poor whites fighting the war, not to mention the unwillingness of planters to plant food crops instead of cotton in the war would really hurt the Confederate war effort. So they didn’t want to build up public schools. What did they care? They hired private tutors for their kids. Even when Brown got this through, the railroad was not well run and so he had to bring in his own guy to run it. But they made it work and the road both brought in money for the state coffers and paid for the schools.

Brown won reelection in 1859. By this time, he owned 19 humans, up from 5 in 1850. He was a huge supporter of secession and gladly committed treason in defense of slavery after Lincoln’s election in 1860.

But here’s where things get weird. The South used state’s rights rhetoric up to 1860. But then it needed a strong central government in 1861. Almost everyone understood that the only real issue that was about a state’s rights was slavery. But not Brown. When Jefferson Davis started running the Confederate government and demanded that the states actually do what was necessary to fight the war, Brown basically refused to help. He thought Davis was a huge hypocrite and thought that the government in Richmond had no business telling a governor what to do in his state. So he not only publicly denounced Davis, but he routinely gave exemptions to Georgia soldiers from service in the Confederate Army. He believed that the federal army had no right to tell men to leave their own states. So as far as he was concerned, Georgia soldiers were there to defend Georgia, period. Of course he also opposed any kind of central taxation. While Brown was the most extreme of southern governors on these points, he provided inspiration to other southern governors to resist Richmond as well. This is also just a weird place for a Whig to end up–he was both pro-development and pro-slavery, but he somehow did not make these connections after he had led his own state into treason!

In short, much of the Confederate elite were so high on their own supply that they wouldn’t do what they needed to do in order to actually win the damn war to defend slavery and thus materially contributed to the end of their beloved peculiar institution. None of this made Brown unpopular in Georgia either. He won a third term in 1861 and then a fourth in 1863. He was the governor of Georgia through the rebellion. After Sherman took Atlanta, Brown did all he could to pull all Georgia troops from the Confederate Army and have them grow crops for the state’s population, He also publicly called for an end to the war long before Richmond was willing to hear it.

For an Atlanta minute, Brown joined the Republican Party after the war. There were two reasons for this, I think. First, Brown was a practical man who also agreed with Republican developmentalism. Second, he was forced out of the governor position at the end of the war when he was briefly imprisoned and he wanted to show his loyalty. In fact, he was close to Andrew Johnson. So he got the position of Georgia Chief Justice shortly after his release and stayed in that position until 1870.

But Brown was nothing if not an opportunist. So he rejoined the Democrats when Reconstruction ended in 1877. You’d think all this party hopping would hurt him, but I think he understood how to play in a one-party state when you needed to win internal factions more than the support of all the party. So the legislature sent him to the Senate in 1880. Yep, by that time, it was totally cool with the North that Georgia was sending its leading traitors of twenty years ago back to Washington.

Can we take a minute and discuss Brown’s beard?

Did Brown just tie an entire mink to this face?

In any case, while Brown lost much of his money during the war, having invested in human property and then whatever he had in worthless Confederate money, his business connections with the railroad really paid off after the war. See, the states had no money either. So they got rid of prisoners they couldn’t afford to feed by renting them out as free labor to the railroads. If the railroads worked them to death, no one really cared. Plus with the ridiculous caveat in the 13th Amendment for prisoners, it took southerners approximately 5 seconds to realize the nation had just re-legalized slavery under a very specific circumstance. Law enforcement made sure to round up lots of freed slaves on often nonexistent evidence and convict them of spurious or fabricated charges. So Brown became a contractor selling these prisoners to the railroads and also buying them for his own works. He went into railroads, coal mines, iron, all sorts of industries. He continued this for the rest of his life. Forced Black labor had hardly changed from 1860 to 1890.

Brown served nearly two terms in the Senate, a defender of both white supremacy and the railroads. He left shortly before his second term ended, in 1891, due to his declining health. He died in 1894, at the age of 73. His son Joseph M. Brown later became governor himself and was a disgusting racist in his own right.

Joseph E. Brown is buried in Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other senators elected in 1880-81, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Eugene Hale is in Ellsworth, Maine and Samuel J.R. McMillan is in St. Paul, Minnesota. I again extremely very much appreciate the recent uptick in donations to cover my upcoming extension of a professional trip to Los Angeles in order to continue this series. The graves will flow there! Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.