Brownson, Nathan
physician, statesman. He was a member of the provincial congress in 1775; was for some time a surgeon in the army; and speaker of the legislature of 1781, by which body he was chosen governor of Georgia. He was a delegate to the continental congress from 1776 to 1778; speaker of the Georgia house of representatives in 1788; president of the senate from 1789 to 1791; and in 1789 was a member of the convention that framed the state constitution. He died Nov. 6, 1796, in Liberty county, Ga. a a BROWNSON, ORESTES AUGUSTUS, clergyman, author, was born Sept. 16, 1803, in Stockbridge, Vt. He was a prominent philosophical thinker who in early life was successively presbyterian, universalist clergyman, socialist leader associated with Robert Owen, and a unitarian clergyman, as well as an able political speaker at all times. In 1844 he became Roman Catholic, and a a in Brownson's Review, from that date until 1864, he ably defended the Roman Catholic faith from the standpoint of a liberal. His philosophy is more or less influenced by the thought of Cousin. He is the author of New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church; Charles Elwood, or the Infidel Converted (1840), a more or less autobiographic novel; Leaves from My Experience; Essays and Reviews; The Spirit-Rapper, an autobiography; The American Republic, a work on political ethics; and Conversations on Liberalism. He died April 17, 1876, in Detroit, Mich.