Benjamin Gratz Brown - Political Career

Political Career

Brown became a member of the Missouri House of Representatives and served there between 1852 and 1858. An able lawyer in St. Louis, Brown made a speech in 1857 against a joint resolution opposing emancipation. The speech marked the beginning of the Free Soil movement in Missouri. He was a leader of the movement. After that, he edited the Missouri Democrat between 1854 and 1859. He was an unsuccessful candidate for Governor of Missouri in 1857.

On August 26, 1856 he fought a duel on Bloody Island (Mississippi River) with Thomas C. Reynolds (then the St. Louis District Attorney) over the slavery issue. Reynolds was not hurt but Brown was shot in the leg and limped for the rest of his life.

Brown became a founding member of the Republican Party in Missouri. Throughout the 1860s, he and Blair contested control of the state's Republican party. He tried to prevent Missouri from seceding from the Union in 1861. After that, he served as an officer in the Union Army during the first half of the Civil War, raising a regiment (the 4th U.S. Reserves) and serving as its colonel. He recruited over 1,100 soldiers for his regiment, many of which were St. Louis-area German-Americans, a key constituency that Brown courted for his political advantage.

Brown resigned from the Army after he was elected in late 1863 as an Unconditional Unionist to the U.S. Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the expulsion of Waldo P. Johnson. Brown opposed Abraham Lincoln's moderation and objected to the Emancipation Proclamation because it did not free slaves in Missouri and other loyal border states. He was a key figure in the move to replace Lincoln with John C. Frémont in the presidential election of 1864. In the Senate, Brown was chairman of the Public Buildings and Grounds committee and of the Committee to Audit and Control the Contingent Expense. Following Lincoln's assassination, Brown was vehemently opposed to new President Andrew Johnson's moderate plan of Reconstruction. He also supported the Radical-sponsored Civil Rights Bill and Freedmen's Bureau Bill. Brown left the Senate in 1867 because of ill health.

In 1870, dissatisfied with the Missouri Republicans, he joined the new Liberal Republican Party. The party nominated Brown for governor, and he defeated Republican incumbent Joseph W. McClurg. Brown served as the Governor between 1871 and 1873.