Prominent among Alabamians who have aided in building into greatness our commonwealth is the Honorable Willis Brewer, of Lowndes County. Along different channels he has wrought for many years. Planter, journalist, lawyer, author, and statesman, Colonel Brewer has been no inconspicuous contributor to the growth of the state. A native of Sumter County, Alabama, with his education restricted to academic training, he has turned to most valuable account his gifts and acquirements, and by the self-cultivation of the one, and by means of close and studious application of the other, he has been an active participant in the affairs of the state for many years.

When a mere lad of sixteen he, in connection with the late Judge William R. DeLoach, of Sumter County, began the publication of a paper at Milton, Florida, where they were, when the war began, in 1861. Both enlisted in the Confederate army, but the health of Mr. Brewer became broken, and he was assigned to post duty during much of the war, but served for a period on the staff of General Wirt Adams in the Mississippi campaign.

His fondness for journalism led him to resume the editorial pen just after the close of the war, when he published at Camden, Alabama, the Wilcox Times. It was at this time, when Mr. Brewer was only twenty-two years old, that Governor Patton appointed him on his staff with the rank of colonel, by which title he has since been known.In 1868 Colonel Brewer removed to Hayneville, and founded the Hayneville Examiner. The times and the environments served to evoke from the young editor the best that was in him, and his paper became one of the most powerful engines in the state in the exposure of the corruption of reconstruction. The slogan resounding from the Hayneville Examiner, “the people against the fools and thieves in power,” caught, in its aptness, the ear of the state, and became a popular legend throughout the reconstruction era.

In 1876 to 1880 Colonel Brewer served the state as auditor. During 1880 he was chosen for the legislature and served during the remarkable period of eighteen years, twelve of which as senator and six as representative. At the end of that period he was chosen for congress, where he served for four years. Twenty-six years of public service, years of diligent activity, entitles him to the gratitude of the people of a great state.

Valuable as his service was in every position occupied by Colonel Brewer, his most useful service was rendered while he was state auditor. His career in that capacity began with the administration of Governor Houston, which was one of retrenchment and reform. The pivot on which the economic administration of Governor Houston turned was the office of the auditor, over which presided Colonel Brewer. Here he discovered the leakage of the resources of the state, and it was Colonel Brewer who not only discovered this vent but sealed it, and gave backbone to the economy of the administration. To illustrate, Colonel Brewer found that the tax collector of Mobile County was allowed a credit of sixty-two thousand dollars for the lands bought by the state in 1874-75, and yet it was shown that Mobile was sold every year, while in the County of Dallas, not including the town lots, ninety-five thousand acres were sold in 1875.

Conditions like these had prostrated the state financially, and the eight per cent “horse shoe” money of the state was being hawked in the market at fifty and sixty cents on the dollar. Within two years after Colonel Brewer became state auditor, the eight per cent bonds of the state were funded at six per cent. He never suffered a tax collector to settle with a subordinate, but always with himself.

Another illustration of his share in the financial rehabilitation of the state is afforded by the fact that Colonel Brewer originated the state law of sale of property for taxes, which law he worked through the legislature during the session of 1878-9. He is the author of the law relative to descent and distribution by means of which parents inherit from their children when they die intestate, without wife or children. For seventy years the state had made no provision for parents, and no matter how old or infirm, they could not inherit, and the property fell to the brothers and sisters of the intestate.

From the dry, dull details of rigid business and the exacting irksomeness of burdensome labor, Colonel Brewer could turn with his facile pen to the production of the rarest English and the highest expression of thought. His passion for literature, for he is a most versatile student, has resulted in a style peculiarly his own—crisp, terse, luminous, condensed, cast in a classic mold. His History of Alabama, published in 1872, is an invaluable contribution to the literature of the state. As a stylist he is rigid in exactness, while preserving a singular flavor which is most agreeable to the learned reader. His “Children of Issachar,” a novel, deals with Ku Klux times. “The Secret of Mankind” is a metaphysical production which has won such praise as to cause it to be compared to the works of Tacitus and Swedenborg. Though published as far back as 1895, this work is securing a revived popularity, and is now being translated into the German. The last literary production of Colonel Brewer, “Egypt and Israel,” is a scholarly production of philology, and shows a remarkable knowledge of the language of the ancient Egyptians and Hebrews.

At this writing Colonel Brewer is still among us. His poise is still as erect as when a lad, and his speech as clear, though he has passed his sixty-seventh milestone. In commenting on an allusion made to him in the Mobile Register in September, 1907, which journal spoke of him as “the last of the southern colonels,” the Montgomery Journal said of Colonel Brewer: “No man in the state has a more distinguished personality, a personality more distinctly southern, and none whose brain and intellect, culture and learning so forcibly remind of the Old South, as does the Register’s Hayneville friend.”

In quiet leisure Colonel Brewer is spending his closing days at “The Cedars,” his country mansion, a few miles distant from Montgomery.