Early Years
John Davis Bradburn was born in 1787 in Virginia. His father was probably William C. Bradburn, and John likely had an elder brother, also named William. At some point after 1800, the family moved to Christian County, Kentucky. As a young adult, Bradburn became a merchant in nearby Springfield, Tennessee. He trafficked in slaves and was once jailed in Natchez, Mississippi over a disputed slave sale.
It is likely that Bradburn participated in the 1812 Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition, which intended to establish independent Mexican control of Spanish Texas. The rebels were initially successful, taking Nacogdoches, Goliad, and provincial capital San Antonio de Béxar. After the execution of Governor Manuel María de Salcedo, many Americans left the movement in disgust. The remaining members of the expedition were decisively defeated by royalist forces at the Battle of Medina in August 1813; a small number of Americans escaped to Louisiana.
By 1814, Bradburn resided in Louisiana. Rumors abounded that British troops were preparing to invade New Orleans. After the December call for volunteers to help defend the state, Bradburn enrolled in the Eighteenth Louisiana Regiment and was elected third lieutenant. His unit arrived in New Orleans on January 24, just after the Battle of New Orleans, and remained until martial law ended March 11.
Read more about this topic: Juan Davis Bradburn
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)