Patriotic Fire Read Free

Mississippi, on both sides of the river. By the time war with England broke out in 1812, Elijah had been promoted to first lieutenant, and the regiment was sent north to Ohio and Indiana, to fight hostile Indians who were being stirred up by the British from their bases in Canada.
    By May of 1814 Elijah had been promoted to captain and the 7th Regiment was ordered back to New Orleans to defend it against a possible British invasion of Louisiana. There he remained six months later when Andrew Jackson rode into the city to take charge of all defenses. A month afterward, when the Battle of New Orleans broke out in earnest on December 23, 1814, Elijah rendered outstanding performance during the three bitter weeks of fighting.
    There were no such things as military medals in the American army in those days—the little doodads that were scornfully thought to smack of the be-braided and be-decorated affectations of officers of the enemy, His Royal Britannic Majesty’s imperial army. The “common” Americans wanted nothing to do with any of that. What served instead for medals and decorations in the U.S. Army was to be “Mentioned in Dispatches” by the commanding officer in his reports to the War Department in Washington.*  2
    On January 8, 1815, the day on which the great battle culminated, General Andrew Jackson personally promoted Elijah to the rank of major on the spot, “for gallant conduct,” and mentioned him in dispatches thusly, in a letter dated January 25, 1815, to Secretary of War James Monroe. Jackson wrote: “Captain’s [
sic
] Montgomery, Vail and Allen, of the Seventh Regiment, acted well during the whole campaign. They are certainly good captains, and merit promotion.”
    Elijah remained in the U.S. Army for another seven years; then, on June 1, 1821, he received an honorable discharge at Blakely, Alabama, a small army outpost across Mobile Bay from the city (ironically, the site of the last major battle of the Civil War, some forty-four years later). Obviously he had found something attractive about the place. Mobile was flourishing then, as both a seaport and a river port city, and with the same French-Spanish cultural heritage and architecture as New Orleans, but on a smaller scale.
    Precisely when he met and married my great-great-great-grandmother Carolina Hollinger and when he began working his large plantation near the city is not known to me, though likely it can be found in Mobile’s marriage and property record books. Nor do we know much else about his personal life. Had he fallen in love earlier? Fought duels? Started a business and lost it in those turbulent times? Elijah would have been about four years old when the famous surrender by Cornwallis to George Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, which ended the Revolutionary War, took place very near his family’s home. Might he have witnessed it? At New Orleans, he met General Jackson and surely must have met Jean Laffite and his band of “pirates” as well; after all, he fought alongside them on a daily basis for several desperate weeks.
    During his lifetime Elijah had crossed over from one century to the next, into an age of steamboats, railroads, and the telegraph, and saw his former commanding general elected president of the United States. From scraps of paper in the strongbox, it appears that Elijah in his later years was an esteemed citizen of Mobile, known universally as “Major Montgomery,” who lived out the remaining ten years of his life amassing a fair fortune and leaving behind the wonderful legacy of two young daughters, one of whom, Carolina Montgomery, is the namesake for my own seven-year-old daughter, Carolina Montgomery Groom.
    And what of all his property holdings, those 8,866 acres on the lovely Dog River? I know something about that, too. It was ever-divided among successive generations. Elijah’s daughter Carolina Montgomery married Sterling Thrower and one of their sons, Fremont Thrower, my great-grandfather—the