Portrait and Biography of Parson Brownlow, The Tennessee Patriot

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DC Brownlow. Portrait and Biography of Parson Brownlow, The Tennessee Patriot

INTRODUCTION

BIOGRAPHY

THE LAST EDITORIAL OF THE KNOXVILLE WHIG

BROWNLOW IN NASHVILLE

BROWNLOW IN CINCINNATI

PARSON BROWNLOW AND THE CINCINNATI METHODIST PREACHERS

BROWNLOW IN INDIANAPOLIS

BROWNLOW IN CHICAGO

Отрывок из книги

William G. Brownlow was born in Wythe County, Virginia, August 5, 1805. His parents were poor, and died when he was about ten years old. They were both Virginians, and his father was a school-mate of General Houston, in Rockbridge County. After the death of his parents he lived with his mother's relations, and was raised to hard labor until he was some eighteen years old, when he served a regular apprenticeship to the trade of a house-carpenter.

His education was imperfect and irregular, even in those branches taught in the common schools of the country. He entered the Traveling Ministry, in 1826, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and traveled ten years without intermission, and was a member of the General Conference held in Philadelphia. He was untiring in his energy, and availed himself of the advantages of the Methodist Itinerancy to study and improve his education, which he did in all the English branches.

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He is quite a politician, though he has never been an office-seeker or an office-holder. He commenced his political career in Tennessee in 1828, by espousing the cause of John Quincy Adams as against Andrew Jackson. He has been all his life an ardent Whig, and Clay and Webster were his standards of political orthodoxy. His paper, the Knoxville Whig, which he has edited for twenty-two years, had the largest circulation of any political paper in Tennessee, and exerted a controlling influence in the politics of the State.

I shall in no degree feel humbled by being cast into prison, whenever it is the will and pleasure of the august Government to put me there; but, on the contrary, I shall feel proud of my confinement. I shall go to jail as John Rogers went to the stake – for my principles. I shall go, because I have failed to recognize the hand of God in the work of breaking up the American Government, and the inauguration of the most wicked, cruel, unnatural and uncalled for war, ever recorded in history. I go, because I have refused to laud to the skies the acts of tyranny, usurpation, and oppression, inflicted upon the people of East Tennessee, because of their devotion to the Constitution and laws of the Government, handed down to them by their fathers, and the liberties secured to them by a war of seven long years of gloom, poverty and trial! I repeat, I am proud of my position, and of my principles, and shall leave them to my children as a legacy, far more valuable than a princely fortune, had I the latter to bestow!

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