During the Civil War, Brown worked to keep Missouri in the Union. In 1863, he was elected to the Senate as a member of the Radical Union Party. In the Senate, he aligned with the Radical Republicans and opposed many of President Abraham Lincoln's policies. He was part of a movement that unsuccessfully sought to replace Lincoln as the 1864 Republican nominee. After the war, Brown strongly opposed President Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction policies and supported the Freedmen's Bureau bills.
Brown resigned from the Senate in 1867 but helped found the Liberal Republican Party in 1870. The party chose Brown as its nominee for governor, and he defeated incumbent Republican Governor Joseph W. McClurg. Brown sought the new party's 1872 presidential nomination but was defeated by Horace Greeley. After the nomination of Greeley, the 1872 Liberal Republican convention chose Brown as the party's vice presidential nominee. Seeking to avoid splitting the vote of opponents to President Ulysses S. Grant's re-election, the 1872 Democratic National Convention subsequently nominated the Liberal Republican ticket. The Republican ticket nonetheless triumphed in the election, as Grant won 55.6% of the popular vote and a majority of the electoral vote. Greeley died after the election but before the electors officially cast their votes, and Brown received some of Greeley's electoral votes. After the election, Gratz returned to his law practice and affiliated with the Democratic Party.
He studied law, and later settled in St. Louis, Missouri. There he joined his cousin, Francis P. Blair Jr., and Senator Thomas Hart Benton in a struggle against the pro-slavery faction for control of Missouri's Democratic Party. He was a correspondent for the Missouri Republican at the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851) and served as the secretary at the treaty negotiations.[1][2] He married Mary Gunn (1842–1888) in 1858, and together they had six children.
Political career
Speech of the Hon. B. Gratz Brown, of St. Louis, on the subject of gradual emancipation in Missouri - delivered in the House of Representatives (Missouri) Feb 12, 1857
Brown became a member of the Missouri House of Representatives and served there between 1852 and 1858. An able lawyer in St. Louis, Brown made a speech in 1857 against a joint resolution opposing emancipation. The speech marked the beginning of the Free Soil movement in Missouri. He was a leader of the movement. After that, he edited the Missouri Democrat between 1854 and 1859. He was an unsuccessful candidate for Governor of Missouri in 1857.
On August 26, 1856, he fought a duel on Bloody Island (Mississippi River) with Thomas C. Reynolds (then the St. Louis District Attorney) over the slavery issue. Reynolds was not hurt but Brown was shot in the leg and limped for the rest of his life.[3]
Brown became a founding member of the Republican Party in Missouri. Throughout the 1860s, he and Blair contested control of the state's Republican party. He worked to prevent Missouri from seceding from the Union in 1861. After that, he served as an officer in the Union Army during the first half of the Civil War, raising a regiment (the 4th U.S. Reserves) and serving as its colonel. He recruited over 1,100 soldiers for his regiment, many of whom were St. Louis-area German-Americans, a key constituency that Brown courted for his political advantage.
In 1870, dissatisfied with the Missouri Republicans, he joined the new Liberal Republican Party. The party nominated Brown for governor, and he defeated Republican incumbent Joseph W. McClurg. Brown served as the Governor between 1871 and 1873.
Presidential election of 1872
Greeley/Brown campaign poster
Brown was one of the contenders for the Liberal Republican presidential nomination, but lost to newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Brown was the vice presidential candidate under Greeley in the presidential election of 1872 for the Liberal Republican and Democratic parties. Greeley died on November 29 of illness, before the electoral college could vote, and the electoral votes (63 of 66) that were to have been for Greeley were split among four others, including Brown, who received eighteen of those electoral votes. The Republicans, incumbent presidentUlysses S. Grant and the vice presidential candidate, U.S. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, won the election anyway.
Brown returned to his law practice, quit the Republican Party and resumed his ties to the Democrats. He died in Kirkwood, Missouri and is interred there at Oak Hill Cemetery.
