Some of the men were from Saint-Domingue, brought to Spanish Louisiana several years earlier by white French refugees, as well as by refugee gens de couleur (free people of colour), who fled the violence and expropriations of the Haitian Revolution.

Brown was elected as a Democratic Republican to the United States Senate on December 1, 1812, to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Jean Noël Destréhan, whose slaves were also involved in the quashed uprising.

The Louisiana legislature refused to reelect him, but in 1819 he was elected again to the U.S. Senate as a Democratic-Republican aligned with Southern Jeffersonians.

During the Missouri Crisis, he favored the unrestricted expansion of slavery west of the Mississippi River.

He agreed to support a Quaker appeal for funds to aid an American free black settlement in Ontario, Canada, known as the Wilberforce Colony.

It had been started by free blacks from Cincinnati, Ohio, who emigrated to Canada in reaction to discriminatory laws and especially a highly destructive riot against them in 1829.

Brown is remembered as one of the drafters of the first Louisiana Civil Code of 1808, a work undertaken together with Louis Moreau-Lislet and Edward Livingston.

This article incorporates public domain material from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress