Blair, Montgomery

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Montgomery Blair
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    No. of Spouses
    2
    No. of Children
    8
    Family
    Francis Preston Blair (father), Eliza Violet Gist Blair (mother), Francis Preston Blair, Jr. (brother), Elizabeth Blair Lee (sister), Caroline Buckner (first wife, 1836), Mary Elizabeth Woodbury (second wife, 1847)
    Education
    West Point (US Military Academy)
    Transylvania
    Occupation
    Politician
    Attorney or Judge
    Journalist
    Political Parties
    Democratic
    Free Soil
    Republican
    Government
    Van Buren Administration (1837-41)
    Pierce Administration (1853-57)
    Lincoln Administration (1861-65)
    State judge
    Local government
    Military
    US military (Pre-Civil War)

    Montgomery Blair (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    In 1856 Blair became the counsel for the plaintiff Dred Scott, and though he lost this case before the proslavery Roger B. Taney Supreme Court, Blair argued the important principle that the slave Scott was entitled to his freedom by virtue of his residence in free territory. Blair also held that the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery in the territories and that Congress had the authority to prohibit slavery there, a position that put him at odds with southern Democrats and that had been undermined in the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act.

    Blair, along with his influential brother Francis Blair and his father [Francis Preston Blair], had come to oppose slavery and to support the return of freed blacks to Africa, the latter a policy that he believed would encourage southerners to free their slaves. Blair's views on slavery were representative of a body of border-state opinion, which opposed abolitionism and black equality as too extreme but which argued for a containment of slavery and its gradual end. In 1848 he was associated with the Free Soil party, attracted to that new organization during a period of party realignment by friends in New York. By 1852 he had returned to the Democratic party and was a delegate to its national convention. By 1860 he supported the Republican party and worked hard, though largely unsuccessfully, to organize this new political organization in Maryland.
    Jean H. Baker, "Blair, Montgomery," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/04/04-00112.html.
    How to Cite This Page: "Blair, Montgomery," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/index.php/node/5117.