The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.9, page 318, July 1907, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers gomery was left behind with his father, however, to assist in taking care of the plantation. After the destruction of the Federal gunboat Indianola, at Hurricane, and the passage of the Federal gunboats under the batteries of Vicksburg, Isaiah entered the service of the United States as a cabin-boy for Rear-Admiral Porter. He was present, in his capacity as cabin-boy, at the battle of Grand Gulf, accompanied the first expedition up Red River, and was a witness of the operations at the siege and capitulation of Vicksburg. In the winter of USE, he lost his health and was discharged from the navy at Mound City. From there he went to Cincinnati, where, through the kindness of Admiral Porter, his parents had been able to precede him. Immediately after the war, Isaiah's father returned to the plantation and in 1866 put himself in communication with Mr. Davis. Very soon they had perfected plans with him for the purchase of the Hurricane and Brierfield plantations, containing something like 4,ooo acres of land, upon which the elder Montgomery and his sons, under the name of Montgomery & Sons, conducted the third largest plantation in the state. It was the desire of Joseph Davis, after the war, to keep together as far as possible the slaves who had grown up on his plantations. His notion was, no doubt, that the interests of all concerned demanded that there should be just as little break in the old relations as possible and that the transition from slavery to freedom should be made gradually, with the idea that the freedmen should, however, eventually become the owners of the land upon which they had previously been slaves. The plantations were conducted with this end in view until 1880, when it became apparent to the Montgomerys that unless there was a modification of the terms upon which the project had been left to them after Joseph Davis's death, it would be impossible to succeed. The heirs could not agree to an alteration in terms, and so the scheme was finally abandoned. It was with the same notion of carrying out, under new conditions, the plan which his father and his former master had formed years before, that, in ~S8~7, Mr. Montgomery—as he says in a brief autobiography- ''sought to begin anew, at the age of forty, the dream of life's young manhood,'' the dream of doing something to build up the fortunes of his race. It thus appears that the history of Mound Bayou is deeply rooted in the past, and is, in a certain 318