Alexander Brown (author)

Alexander "Sandy" Brown (September 5, 1843 – August 19, 1906) was an American historical writer, the author of several books on the early history of Virginia.[1]

Portrait of Alexander Brown by Walter Libbey

He was born at Glenmore, Nelson County, Virginia to Robert Lawrence Brown and Sarah Cabell Callaway Brown, the eldest of three children but only one to survive childhood. His paternal grandfather, also named Alexander Brown, was born near Perth, Scotland and came to Virginia in 1811,[2] where he married Virginian Lucy Shandes Rives. On his mother's side, he came from one of Virginia's oldest families, the Cabells, who hailed from Buckinghamshire. He was descended from American Revolution officer Col. William Cabell.[3] Two of his great-uncles, Alexander Rives and William Cabell Rives, were Virginian lawyers and politicians.

His mother died in 1849, and he was raised by his grandmother until his father remarried in 1853. He was educated by private tutors from 1851–56 and then at a school in Charlottesville, Virginia from 1856–60. He studied for a short time at Lynchburg College until the American Civil War broke out. He joined the Confederate army, serving for four years until he was rendered "stone deaf" by the famous explosion at Fort Fisher in January 1865.[1]

Despite being deaf, after the war he engaged in mercantile pursuits and farming. In 1873, he married his distant cousin, Caroline Augusta Cabell, who died in 1876. He remarried to Caroline Cabell's sister, Sarah Randolph Cabell, in 1886.[1]

Brown studied the early history of Virginia from the standpoint of the Virginia Company and became convinced that the early history of the commonwealth had not been truly written. To correct what he considered misconceptions and misjudgments was the aim of his various works, which included magazine articles and papers read before historical societies. His publications include New Views on Early Virginia History (1886), a pamphlet; The Genesis of the United States (two volumes, 1890), a valuable collection of previously unprinted historical manuscripts and of rare tracts; The Cabells and their Kin (1895); The First Republic in America (1898), an account of the early history of Virginia; The History of our Earliest History (1898); and English Politics in Early Virginia History (1901).[1][2]

He died in Norwood, Nelson County, Virginia, in 1906.[1]

References
  1. Memoirs. Proceedings of the New England Historic Genealogical Society at the Annual Meeting. 1908. p. LVIII. Retrieved August 13, 2017.
  2. Tyler, Lyon Gardiner (1909). Men of Mark in Virginia: Ideals of American Life; a Collection of Biographies of the Leading Men in the State. Men of Mark Publishing Company. p. 45. Retrieved 13 August 2017.
  3. Lineage Book - National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Daughters of the American Revolution. 1908. Retrieved 13 August 2017.
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