Early Life and Bleeding Kansas
James Montgomery was born to James and Mary Baldwin Montgomery in Austinburg, Ashtabula County, Ohio, on December 22, 1814. He migrated to Kentucky in 1837 with his parents and eventually taught school there. He married, but his first wife died shortly after the wedding, so he married again to Clarinda Evans. They moved to Pike County, Missouri, in 1852, and then to Jackson County and finally Bates County while awaiting the organization of Kansas for settlement.
In 1854 Montgomery purchased land near present day Mound City, Kansas, where he became a leader of local Free-state men and was a fervent abolitionist. In 1857 he organized and commanded a "Self-Protective Company", using it to order pro-slavery settlers out of the region. Conflict with other pro-slavery elements led territorial governor James W. Denver to dispatch U.S. Army soldiers in to restore order. Montgomery at times cooperated with the abolitionist John Brown and considered a raid to rescue Brown after his capture in Virginia, but snow in Pennsylvania upset his plan.
Read more about this topic: James Montgomery (colonel)
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, bleeding and/or kansas:
“I got a little secretarial job after college, but I thought of it as a prelude. Education, work, whatever you did before marriage, was only a prelude to your real life, which was marriage.”
—Bonnie Carr (c. early 1930s)
“Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Since the Civil War its six states have produced fewer political ideas, as political ideas run in the Republic, than any average county in Kansas or Nebraska.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)