1856
Mr. Brown at age 19 or 20, Yale College Graduation Picture.
1856
Mr. Brown at age 19 or 20, Yale College Graduation Picture.
Henry Brown.
Henry Billings Brown.
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1876
Mr. Brown was born on March 2, 1836, in the village of South Lee, Massachusetts, United States, to Billings Brown and Mary Tyler Brown. His father ran flour and lumber mills in South Lee before selling the mills and moving the family to Stockbridge in 1845 and later to Ellington, Connecticut, in 1849.
Henry Brown attended private academies before entering Yale at the age of 16. One of his classmates at Yale was a future colleague on the Supreme Court, David Brewer. Mr. Brown graduated in 1856 with Bachelor of Arts after four years, having attained no particular scholarly prominence, though his father rewarded him for his graduation with a trip to Europe for a year.
When Mr. Brown returned from Europe, he embarked on a course of study for the legal career his father had planned for him. Dissent from this paternal control did not occur to him. "I felt that my fate was settled," he later wrote, "and had no more idea of questioning it than I should have had in impeaching a decree of Divine Providence." In any event, Mr. Brown worked for a time as a law clerk in Ellington, Connecticut, until his refusal to participate in a local religious revival made life there unpleasant. He left Ellington to pursue legal studies, first at his alma mater and then at Harvard. He then migrated west to Detroit, Michigan, where he served a further legal apprenticeship.
Mr. Brown received an appointment as deputy U.S. marshal for Detroit in the summer of 1860. His position placed him in close contact with the thriving shipping industry located around Detroit harbor, and he began to acquire an expertise in admiralty law. In 1863 he was appointed an assistant U.S. attorney, a position he was to hold for five years. When his wife's father died, she inherited a sizable estate that gave the young couple a measure of financial independence. Like other men of some means, Henry Brown was able to avoid military service during the Civil War by hiring a substitute to serve in his place for the sum of $850. Mr. Brown’s newfound financial independence also allowed him to pursue a judicial career rather than a more lucrative legal practice. But he was not immediately able to obtain a settled position as a judge.
He was appointed by the Republican governor of Michigan to the Wayne County Circuit Court in 1868, but later that year, when he stood for election to this position, he lost to a Democratic opponent. This loss sent him back to the practice of law. He became a partner specializing in admiralty law in the firm of Newberry, Pond & Brown, and practiced there for seven years. During this period Mr. Brown made another bid to win a political office in 1872, but he failed in Iris attempt to win the Republican nomination for a congressional seat. Finally, in 1875, he obtained an appointment to the federal bench when President Ulysses S. Grant picked him to serve as U.S. district judge for the Eastern District of Michigan.
Life as a judge suited Henry Brown well. He preferred to "take refuge in the comparative repose of the bench" and "to exchange a position where one’s main ambition is to win for one where one’s sole ambition is to do justice." He served 14 years as a federal district judge, enjoying an excellent reputation, especially in the area of admiralty law, his specialty. He taught regularly at the University of Michigan Law School and was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Michigan and Yale University. Mr. Brown also consciously sought a more prestigious judicial appointment, ultimately casting his aspirations toward a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court itself. According to an early biographer, Henry Brown "did not hesitate to use all honorable means to attain the object of his ambition." The exact means pursued by Brown in this ambition remain unclear, but they seem to have included his willingness to ride circuit, helping to decide cases in other districts in need of temporary judicial assistance and making important political contacts along the way.
When Justice Stanley Matthews died in the spring of 1889, Judge Brown was one of the two most promising candidates to fill the vacancy left on the Supreme Court. The other was one of Mr. Brown’s classmates from Yale, David Brewer. President Benjamin Harrison eventually appointed Brewer to fill the seat left vacant by Matthews’s death. The following year, though, Justice Samuel F. Miller also died, and the president promptly nominated Henry Brown to assume the vacant seat on the Court. The Senate confirmed Brown’s appointment in December 1890, and he took his seat on the Court at the beginning of the New Year. Justice Brown credited his appointment to the support of his friend Judge Howell Edmunds Jackson, a Tennessee judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Mr. Brown reciprocated the favor by urging President Harrison to appoint Jackson to the Court two years later, after Justice Lamar died, and the president obliged by appointing Jackson in February 1893. Because of his eye problems, he resigned in 1906.
Henry Brown made a brilliant career of a lawyer. He was best known for writing the majority opinion in the landmark civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson, a decision that upheld the legality of racial segregation in public transportation.
Mr. Brown edited a collection of rulings and orders in important admiralty cases from inland waters, which is still used as a reference in Black's Law Dictionary. He also compiled a casebook on admiralty law for his lectures at Georgetown University.
Mr. Brown was a follower of Congregationalism.
Henry Brown was a member of the Republican Party of the United States, who stood against government intervention in business and back the federal income tax. He was known to be a strong supporter of the Union and Abraham Lincoln.
Justice Brown was moderately conservative in his judicial views, but on a Court with such arch-conservatives as Stephen Field, David Brewer, and Rufus Peckham, Mr. Brown often found himself in the center of the Court’s political spectrum, anxious to secure compromise and to avoid dissent.
Brown was a social Darwinist, and his views of women and minorities were at best, crabbed and at worst, racist.
Mr. Brown's was personally likeable (but ambitious), depressed and often full of doubt about himself.
Physical Characteristics: From his childhood, Henry Brown had suffered eye problems. By the time he joined the Court, he was blind in one eye, and his work as a justice gradually ruined his other eye.
In 1864, Mr. Brown married Caroline Pitts, the daughter of a wealthy Michigan lumber merchant. They had no children. His first wife had died while on a trip abroad in 1901, and two years before leaving the Court Brown had married again to Josephine E. Tyler, the widow of his cousin.
