Background
Bedford Brown was born on June 6, 1795 and was the son of Jethro B. and Lucy (Williamson) Brown of Caswell County, North Carolina. Both parents were of good English stock, the Williamsons being socially prominent.
Bedford Brown was born on June 6, 1795 and was the son of Jethro B. and Lucy (Williamson) Brown of Caswell County, North Carolina. Both parents were of good English stock, the Williamsons being socially prominent.
As the representative of the large and politically-minded planters who dominated Caswell, young Brown, after two years at the state university, was sent to the lower house for four years (1815 - 18, 1823) and then to the Senate (1828 - 29).
Having fought successfully for Jackson electors in 1824 and 1828, in 1829 Bedford Brown was chosen speaker by the Senate; and when President Jackson transferred United States Senator Branch to his cabinet, Brown essayed to back Thomas Ruffin for the unexpired term. "In the scrambling, " however, Brown was elected--by mistake, apparently, in the casting of one vote. In the federal Senate his importance consisted chiefly in his support, whole-hearted and vigorous, of the Jackson and Van Buren administrations, particularly as to nullification and fiscal policy.
Though never of the Jacksonian inner circle, he was trusted by its members; and it was as an administration candidate that he participated in the legislative elections of 1834 and secured a full term. His retirement from the Senate was melodramatic.
A Whig legislature having sent him resolutions condemning Jacksonian policies and referring to "party servility, " he announced in the Senate that he "desired his public course should be tested by the popular will of his State, " and so would resign after the coming legislative elections.
The legislature, however, being won by the Whigs, accepted his resignation (1840); and when two years later he sought reelection from a Democratic legislature, the Calhoun wing of his party blocked him despite his own presence in the Senate and the efforts of his powerful friends outside the state.
Disgusted, he moved to Missouri about 1844, but by 1852 had returned and begun anew the game of national politics. State rights within the Union was now his leading principle. In the Democratic national convention of 1856 he favored Buchanan and in that of 1860, Dickenson, on a platform guaranteeing the rights of the Southern States through constitutional amendment. Back again in the state Senate (1858 - 63), he led the fight against secession in 1860.
His speech of December 19, which was reprinted and circulated, berated alike abolitionists and advocates of a "Southern 'higher law, '" and urged a policy of terms within the Union. Failing in this, in the secession convention and at first in the Senate he advocated a "most vigorous prosecution of the war"; but by the summer of 1863 this mood had passed.
The war over, his old Unionist attitude caused Governors Vance and Worth to enlist him--unsuccessfully--as a mediator in Washington.
Brown was buried on the grounds at Rose Hill just outside Yanceyville, North Carolina.
In 1829, Brown was elected as a Jacksonian (the party that would become the Democratic Party) to succeed John Branch as a United States Senator from North Carolina.
Tall, spare, smooth-shaven, firm of carriage, Bedford Brown cultivated the arts of dress and deportment. His intellectual equipment was mediocre. A deep, husky voice and a slow, labored style made him an unusually poor speaker; but a protruding lower jaw and a habit of clinching his teeth gave him an appearance of resoluteness and, when he was angry, of dangerous fierceness. Some laughed at his pompousness, but none questioned his individual courage.
Bedford Brown was married to Mary L. Glenn, and their son, Bedford Brown (1825 - 1897), became a noted physician.