Alexander Brown (author)



Alexander "Sandy" Brown (1843 – 1906) was an American historical writer, the author of several books on the early history of Virginia. He was born in Glenmore, Virginia, studied for a short time at Lynchburg College, served in the Confederate army throughout the American Civil War, and afterward engaged in mercantile pursuits and farming.

In 1873, he married his distant cousin, Caroline Augusta Cabell who died in 1876. He remarried to Caroline Cabell's sister, Sarah Randolph Cabell, in 1886. Two great-uncles Alexander Rives and William Cabell Rives were Virginian lawyers and politicians.

Brown studied the early history of Virginia from the standpoint of the Virginia Company and became convinced that the early history of the commonwealth had not been truly written. To correct what he considered misconceptions and misjudgments was the aim of his various works, which included magazine articles and papers read before historical societies. His publications include New Views on Early Virginia History (1886), a pamphlet; The Genesis of the United States (two volumes, 1890), a valuable collection of previously unprinted historical manuscripts and of rare tracts; The Cabells and their Kin (1895); The First Republic in America (1898), an account of the early history of Virginia; The History of our Earliest History (1898); and  English Politics in Early Virginia History (1901).