[1] He was born to Joseph and Elizabeth (Rice) Brown, a poor family of hog farmers, in the Chester District of South Carolina, at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in 1813.

The family were farmers originally from Charlotte County, Virginia, from where Brown's grandfather had moved to South Carolina in the 1770s.

[2] In 1824, just one year after settling in Mississippi, Joseph Brown was elected Justice of the Peace in Copiah County.

With many learnt spells, handsome countenance surrounded by a luxuriant, flowing beard and dark-curly hair, in every sense he looked distinguished.

During a lifetime, most of which was spent in an epoch of bitter controversy, his most intimate friends never heard him speak ill of others.

Rand wrote that "the political career of Albert Gallatin Brown provides one of the most amazing chapters in Mississippi history."

Overcome by a stroke of apoplexy, Brown fell face down in a shallow pond at his home near Terry in 1880.