Isaiah T. Montgomery
1847–1924

Politician, entrepreneur

Called a black accommodationist and entrepreneur, Isaiah T. Montgomery walked a dangerous tightrope to become a wealthy and influential leader in Mississippi. He helped to found the all-black town of Mound Bayou, making it possible for blacks to own homes and businesses and to become educated in the private schools that were established in the colony. At the same time, his endorsement of legislation to disfranchise many blacks and some whites, though ill conceived, may have been the only way he knew to try to bridge a racial divide.

Born on the Hurricane plantation of Joseph Davis at Davis Bend, Mississippi, situated on the Mississippi River below Vicksburg on May 21, 1847, Isaiah Thornton Montgomery was the son of Mary Lewis, the daughter of Virginia slaves. His father, Benjamin Thornton Montgomery, the plantation's business manager, was born in 1819 in Loudon County, Virginia. Benjamin Montgomery was sold in 1837 to Joseph Davis, the older brother of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. His new owner was a benevolent man who encouraged his slaves to learn to read and write. Benjamin Montgomery learned well and later opened a store on the plantation, worked as an engineer repairing broken levees and cotton gins, and became a planter as well. In addition to managing Hurricane plantation, where some 350 blacks were enslaved, when Joseph Davis was absent Montgomery managed his plantation known as Brierfield.

The Montgomerys lived above their retail store where the mother cared for the four children. The Montgomerys gave their children far more parental guidance and attention that most slave parents at Hurricane. They also had generous amounts of food and clothing and lived in comfortable quarters. Benjamin was prominent among the slaves and therefore his son, Isaiah, at the age of nine or ten, became personal secretary and office attendant to his owner Joseph Davis. He also lived in Joseph Davis' home where he filed letters and papers. In his new role, Isaiah had full access to the Davis' fine library, and was able to study and to strengthen his education. His father and another slave had already given him some training.

In 1863, when he was just sixteen years old, Montgomery met Admiral David D. Porter, who commanded a Union naval operation that ran past Vicksburg. Porter enlisted Montgomery as his cabin boy, giving him the opportunity to serve on ships and to help General Ulysses Grant seize Vicksburg and remove Mississippi from Confederate control. Six months later, Montgomery became ill from dysentery and Porter sent him to Cincinnati to join his family who lived there temporarily. Montgomery spent most of 1863 in military service. When the Civil War ended, he and his family returned to Hurricane and father and sons reopened the store they owned, but now called it Montgomery & Sons. Benjamin Montgomery returned to his management post at the Davis plantation.

Chronology

1847

Born on Hurricane plantation in Davis Bend, Mississippi on May 21

1865

Becomes cabin boy in Union naval operation

1866

Purchases Hurricane and Brierfield plantations with father and brother

1871

Marries Martha Robb

1877

With cousin Benjamin Green, founds all-black town, Mound Bayou, Mississippi

1881

Hurricane and Brierfield plantations sold

1888

Elected founding mayor of Mound Bayou

1890

Elected the sole African American delegate to the Mississippi constitutional convention; supports amendment to disfranchise blacks and some whites

1900

Co-founds National Negro Business League

1902

Resigns as mayor; appointed federal post as receiver of public monies in Jackson, Mississippi

1903

Resigns from federal post

1904

Elected candidate to the Republican National Convention

1909

Co-founds Farmer's Cooperative Mercantile Company

1911–13

Helps develop Mound Bayou Oil Mill & Manufacturing Company

1924

Dies in Mound Bayou on March 6

Benjamin Montgomery and his sons William and Isaiah bought the two plantations in 1866 for $300,000 and apparently owned another as well. According to Janet Sharp Hermann in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, the Montgomerys planned to establish "a cooperative community of freed people." Isaiah, then only twenty-five years old, was already a respected and important leader at Hurricane. It was the largest of the three plantations that Montgomery & Sons now owned. Although their crops brought the Montgomery family prizes and high ratings during the next fifteen years, toward the end of that period they struggled to make the investment profitable. They were also unable to predict the difficulties that would arise by 1876. As the cost of cotton declined, crops failed, and tenants neglected to pay their debts to them, the Montgomerys were unable to meet their own financial obligations and approached bankruptcy. The strain led to Benjamin Montgomery's death on May 12, 1877; he had died intestate. Mortgage holders foreclosed on the mercantile business of Montgomery & Sons in 1879, and in 1881 the two plantations were auctioned; the Jefferson Davis family and the grandchildren of Joseph Davis became owners.

Founds All-Black Town

Isaiah Montgomery was a resident of Vicksburg by 1887. Around that time a representative of the Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railroad (LNOT) approached him with the idea of establishing a black settlement in the Delta Country located in the Yazoo delta. The company owned massive portions of the delta, over one million acres. Although the area was subject to malaria, had become a forest of great timber thickened with cane and briers, and was scorched by the delta's hot sun, it was supposedly appropriate for a black development but unsuitable for whites. As well, the LNOT Railroad sought black farmers to settle the land around the new tracks that now existed between New Orleans and Memphis. The company hired Montgomery as land agent and authorized him to select the site of his choice. Friends and family, including those from Davis Bend, joined in the search, resulting in the founding of Mound Bayou in 1877. Following its incorporation, Isaac Montgomery was elected the town's first mayor in 1898. He and his cousin Benjamin Green, were, in fact, the co-founders. The town was named after a nearby Indian mound, where American Indians held ceremonies and escaped rising waters. Among those who had an important role in founding and/or developing the town were men such as John W. Francis, founder in 1894 and president of Mount Bayou Bank; and Charles Banks, cashier at the bank and later an officer in the state and National Negro Business League.

Montgomery knew that any early black settlers in the Mississippi delta were freedmen who had begun to own their own land after the Civil War. As an agent for the railroad, he sold plots to the colonists. Obviously this was a profitable venture for him, as were the large retail store, cotton gin, lumber yard, and post office that he established in Mound Bayou. Thus, he was well secured financially. Janet Sharp Hermann wrote in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century that Montgomery spent "his later years comfortably established as the patriarch in a twenty-one-room red brick mansion which dominated the village scene." The railroad was good to him and his family as well, providing them access to state rooms and enabling them to avoid segregated railroad passenger cars.

Montgomery followed his father and former master in their belief that education is important for any group of people. Soon after the town was founded, he donated a track of land to be used to establish Mound Bayou Normal and Industrial Institute. He knew that the American Missionary Association (AMA) was active in the South and that it supported the founding and development of many schools. He persuaded the AMA to provide the new normal school with teachers and to fund it. Then the Colored Baptist Church of Bolivar County opened a school in the village and drew students from surrounding colonies. The state of Mississippi barely supported public education for blacks and gave only enough money to keep schools open four months a year. Private schools for blacks became the town's only options.

Montgomery realized the importance of black business development in Mound Bayou and did all that he could to encourage his people to establish businesses and employ sound business practices. In 1900 he joined Tuskegee Institute founder and president Booker T. Washington in founding the National Negro Business League (NNBL) and attended its initial meeting in Boston in August that year. When the NNBL held its second meeting in Boston the next year, Montgomery spoke on "The Founding of a Negro City." He had also served as one of the black commissioners at the Atlanta Exposition held in 1895. It was at that event that Washington delivered his accommodationist speech that brought the ire of blacks who had a different view of black/white interactions.

The founders had achieved well and in time had a town that, according to Hermann, was "self-contained, black-owned and black operated" and "white interference seemed negligible." The lynching of blacks and racial uprisings seen throughout the state and elsewhere were not a part of that community. In fact, violence barely existed. The leaders and the townspeople themselves supported temperance. To provide for the religious life of the townspeople, six churches were established. Mound Bayou had become a thriving agricultural center by 1905, with a total black population of 4,000. In 1909, Montgomery joined his son-in-law, E. P. Booze, in founding the Farmers' Cooperative Mercantile Company in Mound Bayou. Between 1911 and 1913, he helped to develop the Mound Bayou Oil Mill & Manufacturing Company. Concerned with educational opportunities for his people, Montgomery was a key figure in establishing, developing, and improving the town's educational institutions. By 1940, however, the town had become dilapidated and depopulated.

Endorses the Disenfranchisement of Blacks

Montgomery was active in local and state politics. A Republican, he was the only black delegate elected to the Mississippi constitutional convention in 1890. Montgomery and his family had for a long time become skilled in pleasing whites and in receiving their patronage. He believed, however, that blacks needed a segregated colony where they could promote their own interest. It was at that convention that efforts to disenfranchise blacks were put in motion. While Montgomery had the confidence of many whites, clearly he was acquainted with the racial climate in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Mississippi. Since he was a man with accommodationist sympathies and beliefs, he saw nothing wrong in delivering an hour-long speech in which he conceded that it would be in the best interests of both races to reduce black vote to a total far less than that of whites. He saw nothing wrong with disenfranchising 123,000 blacks and some 12,000 whites. This would help race relations, he thought, and blacks would have to increase their education and acquire property, then reenter politics themselves. The amendment also imposed a poll tax as a requirement to vote and exclude those who were illiterate or who were convicted of certain crimes. Montgomery's action brought mixed reaction from black leaders: Abolitionist Frederick Douglass thought that he had been tricked into taking such a stance; New York lawyer T. McCants Stewart called his advocacy a move to enfranchise illiterate whites and disfranchise illiterate blacks; and Mississippi Republican John R. Lynch called his action more dishonest than the practice of stuffing ballot boxes, which Mississippi knew well.

The state adopted the amendment, and by 1915 other former Confederate states followed. Within a twenty-year period after the convention, Montgomery admitted that all was not well in his state. Hermann quotes his prediction that "the dominant spirit of the south will be satisfied with nothing less than a retrogression of the Negro back towards serfdom and slavery." And clearly, by 1904, he admitted to the work of whites who terrorized and intimidate black Mississippians.

Montgomery resigned as mayor of Mound Bayou in 1902 when, on endorsement from Booker T. Washington, President Theodore Roosevelt, who forgave him for his political transgression, appointed him as receiver of public funds in Jackson, Mississippi. Sometime in 1903, he was accused of placing $5,000 of government money into his own account. He met secretly with Washington's secretary in New Orleans in 1903, who told him that he must resign his post. Montgomery stayed in office a few months longer, then resigned and returned to Mound Bayou. He had been reluctant to accept the post in the first place, but deferred to the wishes of his friend Washington. His primary concern had been for the development of his colony, Mound Bayou, and he had considered Washington his connection to northern white philanthropy to fund more ambitious projects and businesses there. He also faced hostility from his white staff in Jackson. Continuing in politics, however, in 1904 he was Mississippi delegate to the Republican National Convention.

Isaiah and Martha Robb Montgomery, who married in 1871, had twelve children, eight of whom reached adulthood. One daughter, Mary Booze, became a committee-woman for the national Republican Party. Martha Montgomery, who had become an important business partner, died in 1923, seven months before Montgomery's death in Mound Bayou on March 6, 1924. The Montgomerys' residence is listed on the National Register of Historic Places; it is one of the nation's most historic black culture sites.

To his credit, Montgomery had been involved in nearly every project of interest to the Mound Bayou area; he also worked diligently to promote black self-sufficiency and to enhance the quality of life, especially for those blacks who lived in Mound Bayou. But, as Hermann wrote, Montgomery finally admitted that he could not forgive himself for standing by, "consenting and assisting in striking down the rights and liberties of 123,000 freedmen."

REFERENCES

Books

Hermann, Janet Sharp. "Isaiah T. Montgomery's Balancing Act." In Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Leon Litwack and August Meier. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Logan, Rayford W. "Isaiah Thornton Montgomery." In Dictionary of American Negro Biography. Eds. Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston. New York: Norton, 1982.

"Mound Bayou, Miss.: A Town Owned and Controlled Exclusively by Negroes." In An Era of Progress and Promise, 1863–1910. Ed., W. N. Hartshorn. Boston: Priscilla Publishing Co., 1910.

Nichols, J. L., and William Crogman. Progress of a Race, or the Remarkable Advancement of the American Negro. Naperville, Ill.: J. L. Nichols & Co., 1925.

Silver, David Mark. "Isaiah Thornton Montgomery." In American National Biography. Vol. 15. Eds. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Online

"Mound Bayou." Cleveland: Crossroads of Culture in the Mississippi Delta. http://www.visitclevelandms.com/Templates/moundbayou.htm (Accessed 16 January 2006).

Collections

Papers of Isaiah Montgomery are in various collections. Those in the Benjamin Montgomery Family Papers and the Booker T. Washington Papers are in the Library of Congress. Papers relating to the town of Mound Bayou are in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History located in Jackson.

                                    Jessie Carney Smith