Acadiensis/Volume 3/Number 3/Brown, Hon. James

by D. F. Maxwell

hon. James Brown

tHE poem entitled "The Deil's Reply to Robert Burns" has of late attracted much attention, not on its own merits alone, nor in connec­ tion with memorial celebrations of Burns; but chiefly on account of its authorship, many suggesting that Burns must have been the author himself. Therefore in the public interest it is as well to set the matter at rest.

The real author of the poem was, beyond peradventure, the late Hon. James Brown, a former Surveyor General of the Province of New Brunswick prior to Confederation.

Mr. Brown was born in Forfarshire, Scotland, in the year 1790, and when a mere lad, about the year 1808, emigrated to New Brunswick, landing at St. An­drews, Charlotte County, then one of the most important towns in the Province, making his way a little later on from there to Tower Hill, a few miles distant, where he settled down on the "rocky farm," as he was wont to term it on political occasions, and where he spent the remainder of his long and useful life, dying in the year 1870 at the advanced age of eighty years, and lies buried not far from his old home amid scenes he dearly loved and a people whose confidence and esteem he held throughout his whole life. Mr. Brown was a member of the New Brunswick Legislature, as a representative of the County of Char­lotte, for a period of thirty-four years, about ten years of which time he was a minister of the crown in the capacity of Surveyor General. He was also for a time a member of the Legislative Council. His earlier years in the Legislature were marked by stirring political events in the history of the province, of which perhaps the most momentous was the settlement of the Inter­national boundary line between New Brunswick and the State of Maine, a question that brought the two coun­tries to the very verge of war, and which was no doubt hastened at the time by the great land speculation that swept over this eastern country in 1835-37, as well as by the agitation that had begun in the scattered provinces for an intercolonial railway, a preliminary survey of which had been made between St. Andrews and Quebec in 1835 by Col. Yule, R. Engineer, the route of which lay through the disputed territory. The chief cause of the trouble arose over the direction the line should take from the source of the St. Croix River to the highlands dividing the waters which flow into the St. Lawrence from those that flow into the Atlantic as expressed in the Paris Treaty of 1783, and which involved a large area known as the Aroostook Country; and it may be remarked here that the diver­ gence between the two lines as claimed by the respec­ tive commissioners amounted to nearly a right angle.

The New Brunswick Legislature voted a large sum of money and called out the militia to hold the disputed frontier against the maurading lumbermen and land speculators, who had begun to attack the tall pines for which the Aroostook had become so famous. Mr. Brown, who had before this time risen in the militia to the rank of Major (and afterward to Lieutenant Colonel) was ordered with a force of militia into the field, but happily before armed hostilities began the case was settled by peaceful arbitration between the high contracting parties, Great Britain and the United States, and the line definitely defined in 1842. Mr. Brown was one of the chief actors in the great struggle for "Responsible Government," by which the province was raised from a Crown Colony to one of local self-government as it exists today, and his administration of the Crown Lands Department after the change as one of its first Surveyor Generals is, perhaps, his greatest political work. During his incum­bency of that office most of the highways of the province were opened up and built, and mail routes and post offices established generally. It is said that he personally selected and engineered the great roads surveys and actually in some cases spotted with his own hands the lines on the trees through the woods.

He was also the author of the Labor Act (so called) under which a large amount of Crown Lands were entered for settlement and by which means some of the most thriving agricultural districts were reclaimed from the virgin forests.

It is also said that during his term of office he visited every parish in the province, in many cases travelling on foot. It was his custom in the early days, in attending the sessions of the Legislature, which usually took place in winter, to travel on snowshoes to and from his home to the capital at Fredericton, a distance of nearly a hundred miles.

The cabinet, of which Mr. Brown was a conspicuous member, was one of the most progressive executives New Brunswick has ever had, and many reforms were brought about during its regime. Voting by open ballot was first introduced, and the same law with very little change in principle is in force today. A Provin­cial Board of Works was established and the highways divided into two classes, and distinguished as "great" and "bye" roads, the former built and maintained by the government and the latter maintained largely by statute labor, and is a striking testimony to the com­pleteness of these systems of railroading and mainten