BROWN, JOHN (1715-1766), British divine and author, was born at Rothbury, Northumberland, on the 5th of November 1715. His father, a descendant of the Browns of Coalston, near Haddington, became vicar of Wigton in that year. Young Brown was educated at St John's College, Cambridge; and after graduating at the head of the list of wranglers in 1735, he took holy orders, and was appointed minor canon and lecturer at Carlisle. In 1745 he distinguished himself in the defence of Carlisle as a volunteer, and in 1747 was appointed chaplain to Dr Osbaldiston, on his admission to the bishopric of Carlisle. His poem, entitled "Honour" (1743), was followed by the "Essay on Satire." This gained for him the friendship of William Warburton, who introduced him to Ralph Allen, of Prior Park, near Bath. In 1751 Brown dedicated to Allen his Essay on the Characteristics of Lord Shaftesbury, containing an able defence of the utilitarian philosophy, praised later by John Stuart Mill (Westminster Review, vol. xxix. p. 477). In 1756 he was promoted by the earl of Hardwicke to the living of Great Horkesley in Essex, and in the following year he took the degree of D.D. at Cambridge. He was the author of two plays, Barbarossa (1754) and Athelstane (1756); Garrick played in both, and the first was a success. The most popular of his works was the Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (2 vols., 1757-1758), a bitter satire which pleased a public depressed by the ill-success in the conduct of the war, and ready to welcome an attack on luxury and kindred evils. Other works are the Additional Dialogue of the Dead between Pericles and Cosmo ... (1760), in vindication of Chatham's policy; and the Dissertation on the Rise, Union and Power, &c., of Poetry and Music (1763). He was consulted in connexion with a scheme of education which Catherine II. of Russia desired to introduce into her dominions. A memorandum on the subject by Dr Brown led to an offer on her part to entertain him at St Petersburg as her adviser on the subject. He had bought a postchaise and various other things for the journey, when he was persuaded to relinquish the design on account of his gout. He had been subject to fits of melancholy, and, influenced perhaps by disappointment, he committed suicide on the 23rd of September 1766.
There is a detailed account of John Brown by Andrew Kippis in Biographia Britannica (1780), containing the text of the negotiations for his journey to Russia, and of a long letter in which he outlines the principles of the scheme he would have proposed. See also T. Davies, Memoirs of ... David Garrick (1780), chap. xix.
BROWN, JOHN (1722-1787), Scottish divine, was born at Carpow, in Perthshire. He was almost entirely self-educated, having acquired a knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew while employed as a shepherd. His early career was varied, and he was in succession a packman, a soldier in the Edinburgh garrison in 1745, and a school-master. He was, from 1750 till his death, minister of the Burgher branch of the Secession church (see United Presbyterian Church) in Haddington. From 1786 he was professor of divinity for his denomination, and was mainly responsible for the training of its ministry. He gained a just reputation for learning and piety. The best of his many works are his Self-Interpreting Bible and Dictionary of the Bible, works that were long very popular. The former was translated into Welsh. He also wrote an Explication of the Westminster Confession, and a number of biographical and historical sketches.
BROWN, JOHN (1735-1788), Scottish physician, was born in 1735 at Lintlaws or at Preston, Berwickshire. After attending the parish school at Duns, he went to Edinburgh and entered
the divinity classes at the university, supporting himself by private tuition. In 1759 he seems to have discontinued his theological studies, and to have begun the study of medicine. He soon attracted the notice of William Cullen, who engaged him as private tutor to his family, and treated him in some respects as an assistant professor. In time, however, he quarrelled with Cullen, as with the professors of the university in general, and from about 1778 his public lectures contained vigorous attacks on all preceding systems of medicine and Cullen's in particular. In 1780 he published his Elementa Medicinae, expounding his own, or as it was then called the Brunonian, theory of medicine, which for a time had a great vogue. In 1786 he set out for London in the vain hope of bettering his fortunes, and died there of apoplexy on the 17th of October 1788.
An edition of his works, with notice of his life by his son, William Cullen Brown, appeared in 1804.
BROWN, JOHN (1784-1858), Scottish divine, grandson of the last-named, was born at Whitburn, Linlithgowshire, on the 12th of July 1784. He studied at Glasgow university, and afterwards at the divinity hall of the "Burgher" branch of the "Secession" church at Selkirk, under the celebrated George Lawson. In 1806 he was ordained minister of the Burgher congregation at Biggar, Lanarkshire, where he laboured for sixteen years. While there he had an interesting controversy with Robert Owen the socialist. Transferred in 1822 to the charge of Rose Street church, Edinburgh, he at once took a high rank as a preacher. In 1829 he succeeded James Hall at Broughton Place church, Edinburgh. In 1835 he was appointed one of the professors in the theological hall of the Secession church, and, great as was his ability as a preacher and pastor, it was probably in this sphere that he rendered his most valuable service. He had been the first in Scotland to use in the pulpit the exegetical method of exposition of Scripture, and as a professor he illustrated the method and extended its use. To him chiefly is due the abandonment of the principle of interpretation according to the "analogy of faith," which practically subordinated the Bible to the creed. Brown's exegesis was marked by rare critical sagacity, exact and extensive scholarship, unswerving honesty, and a clear, logical style; and his expository works have thus a permanent value. He had a considerable share in the Apocrypha controversy, and he was throughout life a vigorous and consistent upholder of anti-state-church or "voluntary" views. His two sermons on The Law of Christ respecting civil obedience, especially in the payment of tribute, called forth by a local grievance from which he had personally suffered, were afterwards published with extensive additions and notes, and are still regarded as an admirable statement and defence of the voluntary principle. The part he took in the discussion on the Atonement, which agitated all the Scottish churches, led to a formal charge of heresy against him by those who held the doctrine of a limited atonement. In 1845, after a protracted trial, he was acquitted by the synod. From that time he enjoyed the thorough confidence of his denomination (after 1847 merged in "the United Presbyterian church"), of which in his later years he was generally regarded as the leading representative. He died on the 13th of October 1858. His chief works were: Expository Discourses on First Peter (1848); Exposition of the Discourses and Sayings of our Lord (1850); Exposition of our Lord's Intercessory Prayer (1850); The Resurrection of Life (1851); Expository Discourses on Galatians (1853); and Analytical Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans (1857).
See Memoir of John Brown, D.D., by John Cairns (1860).
BROWN, JOHN (1800-1859), American abolitionist, leader of the famous attack upon Harper's Ferry, in 1859, was born on the 9th of May 1800, at Torrington, Connecticut. He is said to have been descended from Peter Brown, who went to America in the Mayflower, and he was the grandson of Captain John Brown, who served in the War of Independence. He was taken by his father, Owen Brown, to Hudson, Ohio, in 1805. At the age of eighteen he began to prepare himself for the Congregational ministry, but soon changed his mind and turned his attention to land surveying. He engaged successively in the tanning business, in sheep-raising, and in the wool trade, but met with little success and in 1842, at Akron, Ohio, became bankrupt. In 1849, after having lived in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, he removed to North Elba, N.Y., where he engaged in farming on part of the land which was being given in small tracts, by its owner Gerrit Smith, to negro settlers. Long before this he had conceived a strong hatred for the institution of slavery, and had determined to do what he could to bring about its destruction. In 1854 five of his sons removed to Kansas, where the violent conflict was beginning between the "free-state" and the pro-slavery settlers, and in the following year Brown, leaving the rest of his family at North Elba, joined them, settling near Osawatomie and immediately becoming a conspicuous figure in the border warfare. His name became particularly well known in connexion with the so-called "Pottawatomie massacre," the killing in cold blood, on the 25th of May 1856, by men under his orders, of five pro-slavery settlers in retaliation for the murder a short time previously of five "free-state" settlers. He also on the 2nd of June, at the head of about thirty men, captured Captain H. C. Pate and twenty-two pro-slavery men at Black Jack, and on the 30th of August 1856, with a small body of supporters, vigorously resisted an attack of a superior pro-slavery force upon Osawatomie. Brown then visited the Eastern states for the purpose of raising money to be used in the Kansas struggle and of arousing the people against slavery. After spending a short time in Kansas, in 1858-1859 he proceeded to carry out a long-cherished scheme for facilitating the escape of fugitive slaves by establishing in the mountains of Virginia a stronghold in which such fugitives could take refuge and defend themselves against their pursuers. At Chatham, Canada, with eleven white and thirty-five negro associates, he adopted a "Provisional Constitution and Ordinance for the People of the United States." Brown was elected commander-in-chief, and from among this group a secretary of state, a secretary of war, a secretary of the treasury, and members of Congress were chosen. Later, with only twenty-two men supplied with arms furnished by the Massachusetts-Kansas committee, and with funds contributed (in ignorance of Brown's plans) by his intimate associates, Theodore Parker, George L. Stearns, T. W. Higginson, and F. B. Sanborn, all of Boston, and Gerrit Smith, of Peterboro, New York, he removed to a farm near Harper's Ferry, the site of a Federal arsenal, which he intended to capture as a preliminary to the carrying out of the main part of his plan. On the night of the 16th of October 1859, with only eighteen men, five of whom were negroes, he made the attack, easily capturing the arsenal and taking about sixty of the leading citizens prisoners to be used as hostages. On the following morning Brown and his followers were vigorously attacked, and on the 18th—a small force of United States marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee having arrived—were overpowered, Brown being seriously wounded after he had surrendered. Of the twenty-two men who had participated in the raid, ten were killed, seven were taken prisoners, and five escaped. On the other side five were killed and nine wounded. Brown was committed to the Charlestown, Virginia (now West Virginia), gaol on the 19th of October; on the 27th his trial began; on the 31st he was convicted of "treason, and conspiring and advising with slaves and other rebels, and murder in the first degree"; and on the 2nd of December he was hanged at Charlestown. His fellow-prisoners were likewise hanged soon afterwards. Brown was buried at North Elba, New York. The attack upon Harper's Ferry created widespread excitement, particularly in the Southern states; and among the abolitionists in the North Brown was looked upon as a martyr to their cause. Shortly after his death a famous popular song became widely current in the North, beginning:—
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,