Montgomery Little

Montgomery Little (July 18, 1825 – March 8, 1863) was an American slave trader and a Confederate Army cavalry officer who served in Nathan Bedford Forrest's Escort Company. Little was killed in action during the American Civil War at the Battle of Thompson's Station.

Early life and slave trading The youngest of 12 children, Little was born in Rowan, North Carolina, when his father, Samuel Little, was 48 and his mother, Elizabeth Boone, was 39. His mother (who was a first cousin, once removed, to Daniel Boone) died in 1827. When Little was two, the family moved to Smith County, Tennessee, where, in 1829, his father died, leaving Little an orphan at age four. According to historian Frederic Bancroft several Memphis slave traders started out as horse traders: Nathan Bedford Forrest, M. C. Cayce, and Ben Little. Slaves for sale by M & Wm. Little at Benj. Little's old stand, Memphis Daily Appeal, January 6, 1857

In 1860, Montgomery Little lived in what was then the third ward of Orleans, Louisiana, United States. At the time of the 1860 census, his occupation was listed as "slave yard," and his household consisted of his older brother, Chauncey Little, and three other men, who all worked as clerks. In 1861 he was operating in partnership with John J. Poindexter, with a slave dealership located at 48 Baronne in New Orleans. In January 1862 the firm placed a classified ad for their slave depot in the Southern Confederacy newspaper, published in Atlanta, which advertised that Poindexter & Little's Slave Depot was "for receiving, forwarding, and selling, for merchants, planters, and traders. Also, keeps constantly on hand a good assortment of Field Hands, Mechanics, and Servants." Many interstate slave-trading firms had a buy-side in the upper south and a sell-side in the lower south; the ad suggested that Little managed the buy side from Shelbyville, Tennessee. The mention of cotton trading but not slave trading in this narrative may be due to a wider cultural amnesia about slavery that was common in the south in the last quarter of the 19th and first quarter of the 20th centuries. According to Liverpool-based scholar Michael Tadman, "in the South generally much of the slave trade is missing from the historical record [but] slave trading and the forcible separation of slave families were pervasive...[and] traders tended to be men of considerable wealth and status."

Benjamin Little, Chauncey Little, and a third "negro trader" named Sim Eddins, were three of the 22 people killed in the explosion of the river steamboat Kentucky on around 4 a.m. May 19, 1861. The boat either tore a drum-head, or blew her mud-receiver, and thus her steam boilers exploded, shortly after pulling back from the dock at Columbia, Arkansas, near Helena. The gravely injured Little brothers (and Eddins) were debarked into a hay boat and taken to Greenville, Mississippi, for treatment, A report from a 1905 veterans reunion described Little as "a warm personal friend of General Forrest before the war, and had been with him after the fall of Fort Donelson. Though often depleted, this company received many recruits, so that it numbered over one hundred men at the surrender at Gainesville, Ala., May 10, 1865." Little used a plantation there, which belonged to relatives, as his base and "began recruiting men for the Escort under the very nose of the Federal garrison in Shelbyville."

Also in the company was Nathan Boone, a cousin on Little's mother's side; a nephew, Thomas C. Little, would later join as a private. According to the 1868 history, Little "fell by [Forrest's] side, mortally wounded" while the company fought uphill against Union infantry. Montgomery Little and his brothers William, Benjamin, and Chauncey, are all buried at Willow Mount Cemetery in Shelbyville, Tennessee.