Early Life
Brown was born in Giles County, Tennessee, the son of Duncan and Margaret Smith Brown. He was the younger brother of Neill S. Brown, who served as governor of Tennessee in the late 1840s. John graduated from Jackson College in Columbia, Tennessee, in 1846. He studied law with his uncle, Hugh Brown, in Spring Hill, and was admitted to the bar in 1848. He began practicing law in Pulaski that same year.
Like his brother, Brown was a Whig prior to the Civil War, and following the Whig Party's collapse in the mid-1850s, he continued to support former Whig candidates. During the presidential election of 1860, he served as an elector for the Constitution Union Party candidate John Bell, who opposed secession, and took a neutral stance on the issue of slavery. In the weeks following the Battle of Fort Sumter in April 1861, however, secessionist sentiment swept across Middle Tennessee, and Brown, along with his brother and, eventually, John Bell, switched sides and supported the burgeoning Confederacy.
Read more about this topic: John C. Brown
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