Who was William Henry Browne? Some five years younger than his sister Augusta Browne, William Henry left a personal mark in U.S. history as a Union brigadier general in the Civil War, and as the preeminent American authority on trademark law during the nineteenth century. The lives and activities of Augusta and William Henry grew ever more interwoven through their adult years. During the 1870s, the brother and sister worked together on music performances and songwriting, culminating in a series of campaign songs for Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican presidential candidate in the 1876 election.

Except for a few months during her marriage, Augusta, William Henry, and their parents resided together wherever the family lived. They encouraged, read, and no doubt commented on each other’s writing, which included essays, short stories, and poems published in New York newspapers and household magazines. Augusta and William Henry would become the last remaining siblings from their nuclear family.1 During the final five years of Augusta’s life, they shared a house they built at 1645 K Street NW in Washington, DC, after their mother’s death in 1875.

William Henry Browne (1825–1900) was born in the Canadian seaport of St. John, New Brunswick. The Browne family relocated to Boston the following year, followed by moves to a half dozen other cities. As a youngster, the lad watched his father’s legal problems play out in one city after another—Boston, New York City, Baltimore—as David S. Browne struggled to establish a thriving music academy and store. The difficulties that his father faced may have engendered William Henry’s interest in the law. David Browne shared a keen interest in the legal process that was whetted by attacks from business competitors, who accused him of false statements and “foreign credentials.” Most of conflicts sprang from his advocacy of the Logierian System of Music Instruction, which he had learned in Dublin from its inventor, John Bernard Logier.

The Back Story

Browne had studied and received accreditation in the system from Logier in 1816. Such a business franchise system was unfamiliar in the U.S. Furthermore, businessmen typically ignored British legal distinctions, such as copyright protection for print publications from Great Britain. American music teachers simply acquired Logier’s instruction books and called themselves “Professors of the Logierian System.” Browne’s assertion that he was one of few who genuinely held a license to teach the patented method fell on unfriendly ears in Boston, New York, and Baltimore.2

Barely a year after David Browne began teaching in Boston, a New York music teacher, Peter K. Moran, wrote to Boston newspapers with the claim he was the first Logierian professor in the United States and that Browne, whom he had met in Logier’s home, was an inferior pianist and colleague.3 Browne responded that, although Moran had spent time in Dublin in Logier’s academy and home, he never had completed the formal course of instruction nor paid the “license” fee of one hundred pounds. He had “promised” Logier that he would pay the fee if and when he had financial success teaching the new method in New York. Thus, Moran was not a fully qualified Logierian teacher.

Bostonians took sides with Browne or Moran. Browne continued to assert his qualification, including a self-published pamphlet of self-defense in June, 1828. The dispute took its toll among potential customers, and the Browne family left Boston the following summer, staying for a time in Utica, New York, before tentatively establishing business in New York City in 1830.

Trouble soon followed when two music teachers, the Cowan sisters, sued Browne in 1830 in New York when he challenged their assertion that they had been students of Logier. The case generated bad publicity, but Browne solicited a letter from Logier proving the sisters had never met him, nor had any instruction from him. The case was dropped, but Browne had lost the battle of public opinion. Logier’s patented system of music instruction and the title “Logierian professor” meant something different to many Americans than to the British. Right or wrong, David Browne had to learn to soft-pedal his claims in subsequent advertisements for his music academies in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

A Young Adult

William Henry was an impressionable youngster while his father faced these run-ins regarding the Logierian system. The youth was an apt student but delayed higher education when war with Mexico began in 1846. Swept up with patriotic enthusiasm, the twenty-one-year-old joined the volunteers. Augusta marked the event by republishing an earlier piano solo, “The Columbian Quick-Step,” as the “Mexican Volunteers Quickstep” in 1847. Her friend Mary Balmanno wrote words to make the dance into a jaunty song, published as “The Volunteers’ War Song.”

Young man wearing U.S. military uniform from mid-19th century seated at a table.

The youthful cadet pictured on the title page was probably William Henry himself, taken from a daguerreotype before he left for Mexico. After the end of the war, Augusta crafted a formal concert ballad, “The Warlike Dead in Mexico” (New York: C. Holt, Jr., 1848) that she dedicated to the venerable politician Henry Clay, whose son died in the conflict.

William Henry returned safely from the war. He had fought in several battles, even breaking out of confinement to join in the fray. The incident, in which William Henry allegedly showed disrespect to an officer, caused some repercussions in New York City when he attempted a run for local public office.4 Knowing all too well the damage caused by bad publicity, William Henry solicited testimonials from prominent army officers, including General Winfield Scott, to defend and clear his good name. Perhaps inspired by his sister’s example, he wrote a series of sixteen chapters of “My Campaign Reminiscences,” lighthearted accounts of his Mexican War experiences, published between 1854 and 1857 in the Knickerbocker monthly magazine. He remained active in reunions of Mexican War veterans in New York City.

In 1852, William Henry graduated from the University of the City of New York and began a modest legal practice in Manhattan. David Browne, now largely retired from teaching music, joined his son’s law office. Both men handled cases such as preparing pension applications for military widows and veterans, but William Henry was the only one of the pair to argue cases in court. He successfully kept his argumentative father occupied and out of trouble.

The rising lawyer held political sympathies with the burgeoning Republican party. William Henry organized a support group, the Fremont and Dayton Central Club, to campaign for John C. Frémont, when the explorer and senator from California ran for president in 1856. Frémont, the first presidential candidate to run as a Republican, was opposed to slavery despite his southern origins. The election went to James Buchanan, with the vote split by the so-called “Know Nothings.” William Henry remained a solid Republican, although he did not take any prominent role as a volunteer in the election campaigns for Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and ’64, nor for Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 and ’72.

The Civil War

As for many Americans, the Civil War divided William Henry’s personal and professional lives into before and after. War was declared on April 12, 1861, after firing began on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. Eleven southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. William Henry immediately initiated a volunteer militia, the Montezuma Regiment, that became part of the New York 31st Volunteer Infantry. By July, William Henry was stationed near Washington, D.C., as part of the Army of the Potomac. He fought in the Peninsular Campaign in 1862. Among the battles where he saw action with the Army of the Potomac were Bull Run (First Manassas), Antietam, and Fredericksburg.

William Henry rose from Lieutenant to Captain, then to Lieutenant Colonel with the 31st, and Colonel with the 36thRegiment.

Recruiting poster for New York 36th Regiment shows a man, Lady Liberty carrying an American flag, and a U.S. soldier
“A Great Rush. Cost what it may, the Nation must be Saved! 36th Regiment New York Volunteers” (lithograph poster), New-York Historical Society Civil War Collections

The recruiting poster for the regiment—some printed in black and white and others in brilliant inks—is a well-known image of Civil War appeals for citizens to step up as soldiers.5 As often happened, the surname of “Colonel W. H. Brown” was spelled without the final “e” on the poster.

He remained with the Army of the Potomac under General George McClellan during the Peninsula Campaign. Augusta sometimes offered extracts from his letters for publication in New York periodicals. Three of his poems were issued in 1863 in the New York Observer. Not surprisingly, the poems treat universal wartime topics of death, battlefield, prayer for safety, and homecoming. Perhaps the most personal of the poems is “The Missing Half,” published on April 23, 1863, in the New York Observer with the notation “Army of the Potomac, Falmouth, Va. April, 1863”:

When life’s fresh dawn with rosy hues,
Was blushing into perfect day,
I hoped my heart’s-delight would choose
To be companion for the way.

And, sooth, the breath of morn was sweet,
All odorous of the flowery field:
What joy! could I that angel meet,
To body forth what dreams revealed.

That willowy form! those heavenly eyes!
Beams not the sun on aught more fair,
Light-roved in vest of rainbox dyes,
To cheer my Castle-in-the-Air.

Why came she not, my lovely bride?
Why lingering stays she yet away,
Though long expected at my side,
Till morn is mellowed into day?

I sought her where earth’s fairest gems
In animated forms allured;
Yet did not one fulfill my dreams,
And close the void my soul endured.

In sorrow, then, I vowed my sword
Should be my sole unblemished bride;
And in stern furtherance of my word,
It clings in dalliance to my side.

Though faithfully it did my will,
How could one love a bride so sharp,
So stained and cold! Though graceful still,
I’ll hang it near my stringless harp.

Wake, REVEILLE! Now improvise
To Lucifer a matin-song; [Lucifer = the morning star]
Yet will thy notes to one arise
Less fair than Mine-expected-long.

Unless my peerless one can show
The Fountain of Perennial Youth,
’Twere vain to bide her pace so slow,
Bright phantom, so devoid of truth!

Mayhap a being by a shade
Less radiant than the ideal one,
May prove more feeling than the maid
Invoked in sighs since early dawn.

Perchance my errant moiety 
Will yet her waiting-half rejoice;
Warm flesh and blood, a WOMAN be,
Nepenthe in her sweet, low voice! [Nepenthe=a drug that relieves sorrow and pain]

Moral for Perfection-seekers.
The height of folly is to think
The Virtues, Beauties, Loves, combined,
Would deign, in Woman’s shape, to link
Their glories all to mortal mind.

William Henry had not yet married, but he yearned for a wife during months of reflection in Union army camps. Wartime circumstances dictated otherwise, and sadly he vowed “my sword should be my sole unblemished bride.”

Less than a month after “The Missing Half” was published, William Henry’s circumstances changed abruptly.

Colonel William Henry Browne continued to lead his regiment until he was hit by a minié ball through his left thigh on the battlefield at Salem Church (or Salem Heights), Virginia, on May 3, 1863. His fellow soldiers carried him off the battlefield on a blanket.6 William Henry would be “too crippled for hard field duty” for the remaining two years of the war.7

His story continues in Part 2 of this blog.

  1. Augusta Browne Garrett’s oldest brother, Louis Henri Browne, lived a quiet life as a piano builder in Boston (1823–1875). Two brothers died of tuberculosis (Alexander Hamilton Browne and Arthur St. John Browne), and two others perished in tragic accidents (Samuel? Browne and George Washington Browne). Two sisters also died early. ↩︎
  2. Such resistance would be less likely today. Music instructors must take training to be able to offer licensed methods such as Suzuki music lessons or Kindermusik classes. ↩︎
  3. Peter K. Moran, “To the Public,” New-England Galaxy (Aug. 1, 1828), p. 3, and Evening Gazette (Aug. 9, 1828). ↩︎
  4. he attack on Browne by an anonymous editor appeared in the Brooklyn Eagle, July 24, August 18, and Aug. 21, 1852. The kerfuffle arose when William Henry denounced the Democratic nominee for president, Franklin Pierce, at a whig rally. Pierce had lost consciousness from an injury to the knee during a battle in the Mexican War; thereafter, he was mocked as “Fainting Frank.” ↩︎
  5. “A Great Rush. Cost what it may, the Nation must be Saved! 36th Regiment New York Volunteers” (lithograph poster), New-York Historical Society Civil War Collections. The poster is used to illustrate the push to enlist wartime volunteers in Harold Holzer and the New-York Historical Society, The Civil War in 50 Objects (New York:  Viking, 2013), Plate 12-1, facing p. 73. https://digitalcollections.nyhistory.org/items/136585-great-rush-cost-what-it-may-nation-must-be-saved-join-36th-regiment-new-york ↩︎
  6. “Col. Browne of the N.Y. 36th,” New-York Observer (May 21, 1863), p. 8. ↩︎
  7. “William Henry Browne,” in Men of the Century: An historical work giving portraits and sketches of eminent citizens of the United States, ed. Charles Morris (Philadelphia: L. R. Hamersly, 1896), p. 210. ↩︎