William G. Brownlow was born in Wythe County, Virginia, August 5, 1805.
His parents were poor, and died when he was about ten years old. They
were both Virginians, and his father was a school-mate of General
Houston, in Rockbridge County. After the death of his parents he lived
with his mother's relations, and was raised to hard labor until he was
some eighteen years old, when he served a regular apprenticeship to the
trade of a house-carpenter.
His education was imperfect and irregular, even in those branches taught
in the common schools of the country. He entered the Traveling Ministry,
in 1826, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and traveled ten years
without intermission, and was a member of the General Conference held in
Philadelphia. He was untiring in his energy, and availed himself of the
advantages of the Methodist Itinerancy to study and improve his
education, which he did in all the English branches.
Mr. Brownlow is about six feet high, and weighs about 175 pounds; has
had as fine a constitution as any man ever had. He has no gray hairs in
his head, and will pass for a man of thirty-five years. He has had the
strongest voice of any man in East Tennessee, where he has resided for
the last thirty years, and raised an interesting family. He has been
speaking all that time, taking a part in all the controversies of the
day.
He is the author of several books; but the one which has had the largest
run is one of over four hundred pages, being a vindication of the
Methodist Church against the attacks of Rev. J. R. Graves, in Nashville.
Brownlow's work was published by the Southern Methodist Publishing
House, and something like 100,000 copies have been circulated in the
South and West. It is a work of great severity, but of marked ability.
In 1858 he was engaged in a debate upon the slavery question in
Philadelphia, with the Rev. Mr. Prym, of New York, in which he defended
the institution of slavery with marked ability, exhibiting a familiar
acquaintance with the vexed question in all its bearings. The debate, a
volume of some four hundred pages, is for sale by J. B. Lippincott & Co.
He is known throughout the length and breadth of this land as the
"Fighting Parson;" but no man is more peaceable, or more highly esteemed
by his neighbors. Few men are more charitable, and few, of his
means--for he is not rich--give away as much in the course of a year.
He is quite a politician, though he has never been an office-seeker or
an office-holder. He commenced his political career in Tennessee in
1828, by espousing the cause of John Quincy Adams as against Andrew
Jackson. He has been all his life an ardent Whig, and Clay and Webster
were his standards of political orthodoxy. His paper, the Knoxville
_Whig_, which he has edited for twenty-two years, had the largest
circulation of any political paper in Tennessee, and exerted a
controlling influence in the politics of the State.