The review below is from the spring/summer edition of The Journal of America's Military Past.
The two prior reviews were by Civil War Books and Authors and ARGunners Magazine.
James Montgomery: Abolitionist Warrior, by Robert C. Conner.
Havertown, Pa.: Casemate, 2022. 210 pp., $34.95.
When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, there was one region
of the country where bitter fighting had been going on since 1855.
That region, nicknamed “Bleeding Kansas,” straddled the lower
two-thirds of the Missouri-Kansas border, where anti-slavery
“Jayhawkers” from the Kansas Territory and pro-slavery Missouri
“Border Ruffians” had been skirmishing for about six years to
determine popular sovereignty. Jayhawkers, who wanted Kansas to
enter the Union as a free state – not accomplished until January 1861
— rode into Missouri, murdering slave owners, burning their farms,
and liberating their slaves, while Border Ruffians rode into Kansas
Territory to retrieve slaves and otherwise exact revenge. One of the
most important leaders in that deadly struggle was Kansas’s James
Montgomery, whose active life is covered in this biography by Robert
Conner, a former journalist.
Born in Ohio in 1814, Montgomery moved to the Kansas Territory
in 1854, after having lived in the slave states of Kentucky and
Missouri. He bought a farm in Linn County, which bordered
Missouri, and when not farming, he served as a Campbellite
(Christian) preacher. Montgomery was a staunch abolitionist, and he
soon became a leader in southeastern Kansas’s anti-slavery community.
He became associated with the notorious John Brown and
“came to share Brown’s view that a civil war to free the slaves was
both inevitable and justified.” (p. 4)
After the Civil War finally broke out, Montgomery was commissioned
as the colonel commanding the Third Kansas Infantry
regiment, which was assigned to James H. Lane’s Kansas Brigade
(Lane was also a U.S. senator). In 1863, Montgomery took command
of the Second South Carolina Infantry (later designated as the 34th
U.S. Colored Infantry), a regiment that was formed from liberated
slaves. With that unit, he fought in the Department of the South,
including participating in the 1863 Combahee River Raid in South
Carolina, where he worked with the famous African American
abolitionist Harriet Tubman to liberate almost 800 slaves. In February
1864, Montgomery commanded a brigade at the Battle of Olustee,
in northern Florida. That fight resulted in a Union defeat, but
his brigade fought well and prevented the battle from becoming a
complete rout.
Illness caused Montgomery to resign his commission, but shortly
after returning to Linn County in September 1864, Montgomery
returned to uniform for one final campaign. Confederate Maj. Gen.
Sterling Price was leading a 12,000-man force westward across the
state of Missouri and threatening federal strongpoints on the border
with Kansas — Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Kansas City,
Missouri. In early October, Governor Thomas Carney of Kansas
called up the Kansas State Militia (KSM), and Montgomery took
command of the KSM’s 6th Regiment, which rushed north to the
Kansas City area to help prevent “Old Pap” Price from invading the
Sunflower State. Montgomery’s citizen-soldiers fought well in the
actions that ended with the Battle of Westport. In defeat, General
Price’s ragtag column then quickly retreated south along the border,
passing within a few miles of Montgomery’s farm. Thus ended the
Price Raid, and the decade of fighting in that part of the country
effectively came to an end. Montgomery returned to civilian life at his
farm, and he died there in 1871.
The author shows James Montgomery to have been a brave leader,
who labored in the fringe areas of the war to defeat the Confederacy
and to end the scourge of slavery. The book would have benefitted
from at least two maps, one depicting the actions of Montgomery and
his units in the Department of the South and one showing the closing
days of the Price Raid, but Civil War buffs will still find a lot to enjoy
in reading about this abolitionist warrior.
Roger D. Cunningham
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