James Brown, the son of John (1736-1803) and Sarah (Smith) Brown (1738-1825), was born on September 22, 1761. Educated at Harvard University he graduated in 1780. In 1789 he was elected a member of the Board of Fellows of Brown University, and regularly attended meetings until his death.
Son of the highly successful businessman, John Brown of Providence, James did not have his father’s drive for business pursuits. He “[had] no relish for active pursuits [and] never engaged in any business” as a handwritten draft for an obituary put it. It continues “his ample patrimony he did not care to expose to the hazards of trade, and to his credit be it added he squandered no part of it upon expensive or corrupting pleasures.”
James Brown was interested in books and travel, and lived the life of a gentleman of leisure, despite efforts of his father to involve him in the family business. He kept records of expenses and diaries of his travels and social activities, often in the empty pages of pocket Almanacs. He never married, and was devoted to his family, writing frequently to his sister and brother-in-law John Francis. He died on December 12, 1834.
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Papers of James Brown (1761-1834), MSS 310, Rhode Island Historical Society.
This collection contains the personal correspondence, both sent and received of James Brown. The papers date from 1773 to 1834 with the bulk of the material falling between 1773 - 1806. The correspondence is mainly with family and friends, recording travel descriptions and family concerns. The collection also contains dairies and personal accounting records.
The accounts document his personal expenses, but also include some invoices from merchants, an inventory of his personal library, eyewitness accounts of important events such as the Providence Fire of 1801, meteorological records, and a ciphering book of mathematical lessons.
The collection has been arranged in chronological order and described in three series under, Correspondence, Diaries and Accounting Records.
See Also: Rhode Island Historical Society Manuscript Collection MSS 312 Papers of John Brown
The collection was originally processed by Nathaniel Shipton in 1976. The John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization at Brown University, in partnership with the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and the Rhode Island Historical Society, conducted a two year collaborative project starting in 1995 to arrange, describe and catalog records relating to the Brown family of Providence, Rhode Island. The Brown Family Papers Project was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The diaries from this collection are available on microfilm as a part of: Schipper, Martin P, comp., A guide to the microfilm edition of Papers of the American Slave Trade. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 2001.
Contains letters sent and received by James Brown from family and friends. There are descriptions of places James Brown visited, people he dined with, clothes people wore, and family gossip with his sisters. There is an interesting letter from his brother-in-law, John Francis, describing Congress, which was in session in Philadelphia in 1790. Several letters in 1791 describe the death of his uncle, Nicholas Brown, and family responses to the death. There is a letter written by James while on business for his father where he describes the City of Baltimore in good detail. There is also a business letter concerning the rebuilding of the Washington Bridge written in 1807. The following list is an index of all the correspondents.
Consists of James Brown’s diaries which often describe his travels while on business for his father, John. Of note in his diary of 1801 is a detailed description of the fire which burned much of Providence that year.
The account records in this Series document James Brown’s personal expenditures. The Cash Account Book from 1823-1830 has an additional ten pages of genealogical information (mainly birth and death dates) for the ancestors of Chad Brown. There are also several books recording thermometer readings and other meteorological information.