By: Neely Tucker
Library of Congress
On the pleasant winter day of Jan. 17, 1872, Mary Virginia Montgomery, the precocious 21-year-old daughter of one of Mississippi’s largest cotton planters, used her diary to record the day’s activities on Brierfield, the family’s sprawling cotton plantation south of Vicksburg.
“Brierfield is so beautiful this morning,” she wrote in her careful penmanship. “… I spent fully two hours practicing [piano] after dinner. … After supper read Byron and some chemistry.”
Before the Civil War, Brierfield belonged to Jefferson Davis, who became president of the Confederacy, but it was now the Montgomery’s. The adjoining plantation, which her family also now owned, was named Hurricane and had belonged to Davis’ brother, Joseph. This was several thousand acres on a peninsula that formed a deep curve in the Mississippi River, called Davis Bend.
The remarkable thing about Mary Virginia’s musings, considering the Deep South’s brutal reality, is that she was Black, a former slave on Davis Bend, and that in less than a decade she and her family had moved from being the property of Joseph Davis to being owners of his plantation and that of his famous brother.
Further, Isaiah Montgomery, one of her brothers, would go on to create and help run Mound Bayou, the all-Black Delta community that was a nationally known model of Black self-sufficiency in the early 20th century. President Theodore Roosevelt toured the town and dubbed it the “jewel of the Delta.” Booker T. Washington was a staunch supporter.
The Montgomery family story is one of the most unique tales to arise from the ashes of the Confederacy and attempts during Reconstruction to create a democratic society in its wake. They tread a delicate balancing act born of their unique circumstances — freedoms, living standards and educational levels that were unimaginable to nearly all other formerly enslaved people. In 1870, five years after the Civil War, Benjamin Montgomery’s estate was valued at an astonishing $50,000.
Family records preserved at the Library (and many others at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History) show that Benjamin Montgomery, the family patriarch, was born into slavery in Virginia in 1819 and was sold at auction in 1836 to Joseph Davis, then a wealthy lawyer who had branched out into being one of the state’s largest cotton farmers. Davis was a firm believer in slavery — at one point he owned more than 200 slaves — but he had been influenced by British social reformer Robert Owen and educated and trained many of his enslaved workers.
Montgomery was his star protégé. He was an accomplished engineer and mechanic, he kept Davis’ books, ran the dry goods store on the plantation (keeping the profits) and often managed the place in Davis’ absence. He married Mary Lewis, another slave on the plantation, but effectively bought her out of slavery, for she worked only at their house and garden, taught her children and did not work for the Davis household.
When the Civil War broke out, Davis fled with most of his enslaved workers, leaving Montgomery to tend the place.
Gen. Ulysses Grant’s army swept in and confiscated the property en route to taking Vicksburg, and Montgomery took the advice of Union officials and moved his family north to Ohio for the remainder of the war. Isaiah stayed behind to join the Union Army until illness forced him out.
After the war, the family returned as free people to Davis Bend. Montgomery both impressed and annoyed Reconstruction officials, who considered him to be Joseph Davis’ de facto agent, bent on disrupting their work.
When the military left, Davis won the right to reclaim Davis Bend. He sold it to Montgomery in 1866, for $300,000 plus interest, to be repaid in nine years.
The Montgomerys went to work, planting their own cotton, renaming the dry goods store “Montgomery & Sons,” managing a cotton gin and leasing plots to other freedmen in a bid to create an independent, all-Black enclave.
But the river changed course and flooded often (so much so that the peninsula would eventually be cut off into an island), insects ravaged crops, the Depression of 1873 wrecked the national economy and most freedmen wanted to own their own land, not lease it from anyone.
In the 1870s, Joseph Davis and Montgomery died, Jefferson Davis (now freed from prison) sued to claim what he still regarded his plantation. Banks eventually foreclosed on the mortgage and the Montgomerys left the place in 1880s.
But while Benjamin Montgomery had worked hard for Black independence, he almost entirely avoided politics, wrote historian Thavolia Glymph in her 1994 doctoral dissertation on Davis Bend. Blacks were the majority in Mississippi, about 60 percent of the population, and Black male suffrage was the overwhelming topic of the day. In the Reconstruction years of the late 1860s and 1870s, Montgomery was the third–largest cotton planter in the state. He might have competed for high office.
Instead, father and son had maintained close ties to Joseph Davis and other “leading whites” as business connections and as protection from the Ku Klux Klan. By the time he was an adult, Isaiah Montgomery began to think that most Black men, often illiterate and just released from far harsher slavery than his family had endured, were not qualified to vote.
This stance made national news in 1890, when he was the lone Black delegate at a state constitutional convention openly dedicated to expelling Black men from politics. In a speech that was reprinted in many newspapers across the country, he told the crowd that most Black men should be kept from voting “because of their inferior development in the line of civilization.”
He offered an “olive branch” to whites, saying that most Blacks (and some whites) should be barred from voting until they could obtain more education. He asked that in exchange whites allow Blacks to live in peace separately.
Many whites hailed it as heroic; most Black leaders in the state and elsewhere were apoplectic. Frederick Douglass lambasted Montgomery as guilty of “treason, to the cause of colored people, not only to his own state but of the United States.”
Montgomery, undeterred, developed Mound Bayou with his cousins as a church-going, farming and entrepreneurial home of Blacks who built nice houses, quietly made decent money and were so law-abiding that the town of 4,000 or so had no jail or need for one. White politicians and the KKK left it alone, even while they viciously attacked Blacks elsewhere in the state.
Mound Bayou’s fortunes eventually faltered, but the family held onto a unusual version of history for decades.
In a 1937 celebration marking the town’s 50th anniversary, a brochure featured a full-page celebration of Jefferson Davis, claiming that was he was actually the “first white man” to help freed slaves “have a chance to become self-supporting and independent citizens” and had urged his brother to sell land to the Montgomerys. (Neither claim was true.)
It left a confounding legacy.
“To the end, (Isaiah) Montgomery seemed unable to recognize that whites had not lived up to the bargain he had struck with them in 1890,” wrote Glymph, now the Peabody family distinguished professor in history at Duke University. “In his public statements, he made no link between black disfranchisement and the powerlessness of blacks against white violence. He continued to believe that ‘leading whites’ would be able to separate the idlers of the race from the progressive, well-mannered ones at Mound Bayou.”
