The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-03-08
JEFFERSON DAVIS SLAVE.
LITE ON THE CONFEDERAIE RRES-
 DENTS PLANTATION.

!
 Ovorseers-JeR Dsvis' Departure to
 Become President of the Coufe"erROy | Mrs. Davis Continued interest In
 Those Who Were Her Slaves.
 There recently visited Boston man who once was a slave of Jefferson Da- wis. This man, Isaiah T. Montgomery,
 is the founder of prosperous colony of Colored people in the valley of the Va
 zoo river in Mississippi, and the mayor
 of the village of Mound Bayou, the cen l ter of the colony. MT Montgomery came to Boston to attend the meeting of | the National Negro Business league.
 He is a man of education and refine
 ment and possessed of unusual busi-
 ness ability There are few eX-slaVes | living now who are able to describe
 southern life before the war so intelli- gently as he is. Probably there is no
 one, not even Mrs. Davis herself, who hhpNS Sp HluCu dDOul lHt lllSlul lN 'iH | Davis plantation of four thousand acres
 and the three hundred slaves who lived | upon it.
 | On the Saturday which followed the l sessions of the league in Boston the city I government invited the delegates to go upon an excursion down the harbOr During this trip I had an opportunity to have a long conversation with MT Montgomery, in the course of which he told me many interesting things about his life and about the famous family with which he had been so intimately
 associated.
 ITO really tell my story right" said MT. Montgomery. "and to make plain
 how came to know so much about the Davis plantation l must begin before I was born. When my father was a boy he had q young master about his own age, to whom he was assigned as a con- stant attendant. They played together on the beach a great deal. The white boy had lessons every day, regularly, with a teacher My father wanted to learn, too, and so, afternoons when they were at play out on the beach he would
 get his young master to teach over to
 him what he had learned in the after
 noon, tracing the letters in the sand
 with a stick In this way he learned
 to read and write. When he came to have children of his own he taught them what he knew, and as result 1 learned to read and write, too. When l was nine years old was taken to the big house to be trained for a house servant,
 I ,J lyr,. d and write. l suppose MT Joe took me to be his office boy, and I stayed at that work until the war broke out, five years afterward
 Mir. Joe was MT. Jeff Davis older brother Mr. Joseph F. Davis. He was the one who really managed the whole estate, as MT. Jeff was in politics so much that he was at home but little. The Davis plantation comprised four thousand acres, twenty-five hundred of which were in tillage land and fifteen hundred in woods. There were two mansion houses The one where MT. Joe lived was called Hurricane" be- cause once a hurricane had swept over the place and done a great deal of dam age Hurricane was destroyed during lIlt NdIs NItu lllutil bl .tNS ItlitCilNS' lli- eluding fine library MT. Jeff's place was called Briarfields
 "The plantation lay in big bend of the Mississippi, and the river ran al most around 1t. The place was called Davis Bend It was thirty miles below Vicksburg We had a landing which the smaller boats could make. and a mail at certain times there, but the reg ular mail came three times a week to a landing three miles down the river, and when passengers were to take one of the big river boate they had to be rowed to that landing. The morning MT Jeff was to start for the inauguration we were late in getting away from the house Before we had got far out on the river we heard the steamer blow at the landing. We knew we couldn't get to the landing in time, so we headed for the upper end of an island which lay out in the river. so as to meet the steamer when she came out from behind the island I remember she was old Tom Leathers' boat. the Natchez The captain was expecting MT Davis on that trip, and when he found that Mr. Davis was not at the landing was look ing out for him. When the steamer came along MT Davis made q signal to her, and the captain blowed, to show that he saw us We roWed up and MT. Davis was taken on board. That was the last time l ever saw him"
 Did he act as if he was impressed with the greatness of the journey which he had undertaken" I asked, its sig nificance and far-reaching possibili- tes?"
 Jeff Davis was a man you couldn't | tell what was in his mind' Mir. Mont gomery replied. He chatted with us just the same as usual. Said we were late, praised the oarsmen for their ex trai efforts, and said what good time we were making, Mir Davis was a master in the art of speaking or writing for the public, though. He could say more in one sentence than most men can in half l a page
 'I wish you would tell me something | more about the life on the place before l the war as you remember it." I said
 inc hnr u5 on oft hot