James Montgomery (colonel) - Early Life and Bleeding Kansas

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:

    “The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
    —David Elkind (20th century)

    “... a business career for a woman and her need for a woman’s life as wife and mother, are not enemies at all, unless we make them so, but may be the closest and most co-operative friends and supporter of each other.”
    —Hortense Odlum (1892–?)

    “This city is neither a jungle nor the moon.... In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.”
    —Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    “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)