James Montgomery (22 December 1814 – 6 December 1871) was a Colonel of the US Army during the American Civil War.
Biography[]
James Montgomery was born in Austinburg, Ohio on 22 December 1814, and he moved to Kentucky in 1837 and to Missouri in 1852, working as a teacher. Montgomery became a fervent abolitionist, and he led Jayhawkers into Kansas to fight against the Border Ruffians during the Bleeding Kansas violence of the 1850s. He fought alongside John Brown, and only a snowstorm in Pennsylvania prevented Montgomery from launching a raid to free Brown from prison in Virginia. On 24 July 1861, he became a colonel of the 3rd Kansas Infantry of the US Army, and he became known as an anti-slavery zealot, sacking Osceola in Missouri and carrying out raids in South Carolina and Georgia at the head of a regiment of South Carolina African-Americans in 1863. In September 1864, months after a defeat at Olustee, Montgomery resigned his commission and returned to his Linn County, Kansas farm, where he died in 1871.