Brown, Benjamin Gratz

Related Category: U.S. History: Biographies

1826–85, U.S. Senator (1863–67) and governor of Missouri (1871–73), b. Lexington, Ky. An able lawyer in St. Louis, Brown was a leader in the Free-Soil movement in Missouri and later helped form the Republican party there. In the memorable Missouri election of 1870, Brown and his supporters defeated the radical Republicans, and he thus became prominent in the rise of the national Liberal Republican party. He was the party's candidate for Vice President on the unsuccessful ticket headed by Horace Greeley in 1872. He later became a Democrat.

See biography by N. L. Peterson (1965).