William A. Browning

William A. Browning, also known as Colonel Browning (May 2, 1835 – March 2, 1866), was a 19th-century American political staffer. He served as a private secretary to U.S. Senator, then military governor of Tennessee, then Vice President and U.S. president, Andrew Johnson. Browning is mostly remembered today for being the recipient of a note from Abraham Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth.

Biography

Browning, born May 2, 1835 to a tailor named Peregrine Browning and his wife Margaret A. (Wood) Browning, was a native of the District of Columbia. William A. Browning was one of 12 children born to the couple, and the eldest son.

He had been admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. Browning eventually left his position "at one of the Departments" to go work for Johnson. On the Fourth of July 1864, Browning read the Declaration of Independence as part of a Union celebration at Nashville, following a parade that included "a procession over a mile long, consisting of the 31st Wisconsin, 13th regulars, 10th Tennessee, 5th Iowa cavalry, several batteries of artillery, the Fire Department, [and] citizens on foot and on horseback." President Johnson and Col. Browning met with defeated Confederates, after which Johnson told Browning to inform the Attorney General he will be granting no further pardons for the time being; "Mr Keitt retired evidently satisfied that Mr Johnson was President and 'that treason was a stain not removed by the mere asking for a signature' " (Charleston Daily Courier, September 2, 1865) During the fall 1864, he was apparently working for Johnson but was unable to do much work writing letters and private dispatches "due to illness." Browning was commissioned November 14, 1865 and/or nominated December 9, 1865 to be secretary of legation to Mexico under Gen. John A. Logan of Illinois as Minister to Mexico. However, Browning died in Washington, D.C., in March 1866 "after several weeks' sickness." He never left the United States or took up the position. The cause of death was said to be, variously, an "inflammation of the bowels" President Johnson, Martha Patterson, David T. Patterson, Mary Stover, and several members of Congress all attended the funeral. Browning was buried at the Congressional Cemetery, in Washington, D.C. After Andrew Johnson's son Robert Johnson died of an overdose in 1869, an anonymous columnist wrote a widely reprinted recollection of some of the figures of the Johnson era, including Browning:

Browning was one of the handsomest men in the world, tall, muscular, finely formed with an open pleasing countenance and a complexion as clear and a skin as fine as Ireland or Nantucket gives to the fairest of women. He had graduated at Yale College and was a fine belles lettres scholar and a man of many accomplishments. He had been with Mr. Johnson in Tennessee for several years and went with him to the White House. But his stay was of short duration. He received the appointment of Secretary of Legation to Mexico. He never left the country however. The same habit [alcohol abuse] which has now carried off young Johnson did its fatal work with him more speedily...Mr. Browning was married when quite young to a beautiful girl who lived but a short time after her marriage. He never seemed to recover in any degree from the shock of her death. On the contrary the pain of the separation seemed constantly to deepen and grow more poignant in his heart. The last time we met him was in Washington only a short time before his death. In the course of a brief conversation he said...'my heart is buried in my wife's grave and I want to die.' Soon afterwards he shut himself up in a room and deliberately drank whisky until it killed him. — Unknown