His classmates included future civil war generals Robert Anderson, Daniel S. Donelson, Benjamin Huger, William R. Montgomery, and Charles F.

He passed the bar exam, began to practice law, and in 1846 was elected an associate judge of the court of Licking County, Ohio.

[2] He was made Paymaster of the Western Department under General David Hunter at Fort Leavenworth, Missouri in 1859 and served until the beginning of the Civil War.

[8] In 1863, the War Department finally began to check the suitability of deputy paymasters with a physical examination, and tests to evaluate mental and moral fitness.

[8] The overhead cost of paying the troops, including expenses, defalcations and losses of all kinds, was just three-fourths of one per cent of the amount disbursed.

[8] General Brice reflected on the massive endeavor of creating a modernized pay department from scratch in 1865: No similar work of like magnitude, regarding its immensity both as to men and money and the small limit of time in which it has been performed, has, if is believed, any parallel in the history of armies... No system can be devised which, equal to the present one, can be made to combine the advantages of prompt payment, the safety of the public money, and an accurate and prompt accountability, with the least possible liability to embezzlement or corrupt defalcation.

[10] While President Abraham Lincoln's created a cabinet of the brightest and most capable minds from a team of his political rivals, Ulysses S. Grant is recognized for reorganizing the staff departments under the finest officers in their fields, including Brice.

"[15] Brice also officially interceded on behalf of his friend James Magoffin, a Confederate Quartermaster assigned to the far West supplying the forces of Henry H. Sibley and John W.

[16] In the fall of 1865, Magoffin went to Washington to seek amnesty from President Andrew Johnson for his activities on behalf of the Confederacy, but was unsuccessful until Brice's intervention in 1866.