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."