Montgomery's Brigade

Colonel James Montgomery (1814-1871)

Seymour's final infantry brigade was commanded by Colonel James Montgomery, certainly one of the most colorful and controversial figures of the Civil War. Montgomery had been intimately involved in the Kansas border disputes before the war, acting as one of the chief lieutenants of James Lane. He remained in Kansas until December 1862, when, after continued conflicts between himself, Lane, and Charles Jennison over the command of a newly-organized black regiment, he left the state for Washington. After meetings with abolitionist George Stearns, Kansas Senator Samuel Pomeroy, and President Lincoln in January 1863, Montgomery was authorized by the War Department to recruit and organize a black regiment in the Department of the South. The Kansan's unit would eventually become known as the Second South Carolina Colored Volunteers.

Despite the slowness of his initial recruiting efforts, Montgomery and his unit participated in the early 1863 occupation of Jacksonville, an operation marred by the subsequent burning of much of the town. In June 1863 Montgomery gained further notoriety with his destruction of the Georgia coastal town of Darien. He informed his aristocratic subordinate, Robert Gould Shaw that he burned the town because "'we [black units] are outlawed, and therefore not bound by the rules of regular warfare."' In his classic, The Sable Arm, Dudley Taylor Cornish writes that Montgomery was a "primitive patriarch uninhibited by any effete Eastern notions of the rules of civilized warfare."

In the Florida Campaign, Montgomery was placed in command of a brigade, containing the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts and First North Carolina Colored Volunteers (later known as the Thirty-fifth United States Colored Troops). One of his regiments was as yet untried in combat, while the other was the most famous black unit of the entire war. In the battle his brigade helped protect the withdrawal of the defeated Union army, allowing it to escape back into the Jacksonville defenses. Montgomery's career declined rapidly after Olustee, and he resigned his commission in September 1864.

Colonel Montgomery's official report of the battle

Union Order of Battle
Battle of Olustee Home Page
http://battleofolustee.org/