Alexander Little Page Green was born on June 26, 1806, in Sevier County, Tennesse. He was one of the sixteen children and youngest of the seven sons of George and Judith (Spillmon) Green.
His father, born in Maryland or Virginia soon after the arrival of his parents from England, fought on the side of the colonists in the Revolution.
Both he and his wife, whom he married in 1776 when she was fifteen, were austerely puritanical Methodists.
When Alexander was only a few years of age, his parents removed to North Alabama, and there he grew up, working on the farm and attending country schools. When he was nine years old he was converted and at sixteen became a class-leader.
In 1824, Green was admitted to the Tennessee Conference on trial and was ordained elder in 1827. Though harried by frontier conditions in general and by Baptists and schismatics, he was soon the means of bringing some 200 new members into his communion.
After serving on several circuits, his success was marked enough for him to be sent in 1829 to Nashville, which, for the most part, with such intermissions as were required by the itinerancy provision of his church, he always thereafter thought of as his home.
He was a delegate to the quadrennial General Conferences of his church from 1832 to 1844, with the exception of the one in 1840.
During the Civil War, he spent much of his time in Alabama. At the General Conference of 1866, where he was on such important committees as those to amend the Discipline and to supervise ecclesiastical books and periodicals, he proposed and partly carried through a series of reforms in church administration.
His major interest during the latter part of his life was the publication house he had brought to Nashville.
When in 1854, the Supreme Court of the United States ordered a pro rata division, Green was largely influential in having the Southern Methodist publishing houses located in Nashville. In spite of all his deviation from the established canons of literary taste, he, however, set great store by education and was an important figure in the inauguration of Vanderbilt University.
Green was in disfavor because of his belief that the Methodists of Canada, then about to form an organization of their own, should be compensated for the contributions which they had made to the agencies of the Methodist Church in America at large.
Four years later, the Southern Methodists followed the Canadians in separation. At that time, the fact of the former restitution, which he had prominently advocated, was a considerable element in the decision by the courts that the withdrawing brethren were entitled to a part of what had previously been held in common. Among the chief of these holdings were the publishing houses.
Green was a man who knew how to get along in this world as well as how to prepare for the next one - prosperous in business and an enthusiastic sportsman.
Emphasizing as a preacher the emotional at the expense of the philosophic, he was “not bookish, ” it is said, “in his science, mechanics, or grammar”.
He said that he had heard preachers of his acquaintance surpass Milton in describing “angels, devils, rivers, and serpents, ” and he thought none too well of Shakespeare.
On October 19, 1831, Green was married to Mary Ann Elliston, who at fourteen had recently been graduated from the Nashville Female Academy.
