On the pleasant winter day of Jan. 17, 1872, Mary Virginia Montgomery, the precocious 21-year-old daughter of one of Mississippi’s largest cotton planters, used her diary to record the day’s activities on Brierfield, the family’s sprawling cotton plantation south of Vicksburg.
“Brierfield is so beautiful this morning,” she wrote in her careful penmanship. “… I spent fully two hours practicing [piano] after dinner. … After supper read Byron and some chemistry.”
Before the Civil War, Brierfield belonged to Jefferson Davis, who became president of the Confederacy, but it was now the Montgomery’s. The adjoining plantation, which her family also now owned, was named Hurricane and had belonged to Davis’ brother, Joseph. This was several thousand acres on a peninsula that formed a deep curve in the Mississippi River, called Davis Bend.
The remarkable thing about Mary Virginia’s musings, considering the Deep South’s brutal reality, is that she was Black, a former slave on Davis Bend, and that in less than a decade she and her family had moved from being the property of Joseph Davis to being owners of his plantation and that of his famous brother.
Further, Isaiah Montgomery, one of her brothers, would go on to create and help run Mound Bayou, the all-Black Delta community that was a nationally known model of Black self-sufficiency in the early 20th century. President Theodore Roosevelt toured the town and dubbed it the “jewel of the Delta.” Booker T. Washington was a staunch supporter.
The Montgomery family story is one of the most unique tales to arise from the ashes of the Confederacy and attempts during Reconstruction to create a democratic society in its wake. They tread a delicate balancing act born of their unique circumstances — freedoms, living standards and educational levels that were unimaginable to nearly all other formerly enslaved people. In 1870, five years after the Civil War, Benjamin Montgomery’s estate was valued at an astonishing $50,000.
Family records preserved at the Library (and many others at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History) show that Benjamin Montgomery, the family patriarch, was born into slavery in Virginia in 1819 and was sold at auction in 1836 to Joseph Davis, then a wealthy lawyer who had branched out into being one of the state’s largest cotton farmers. Davis was a firm believer in slavery — at one point he owned more than 200 slaves — but he had been influenced by British social reformer Robert Owen and educated and trained many of his enslaved workers.