Andrew Jackson Montague was an American lawyer and politician. He was a governor of Virginia and Congressman.
Background
Andrew Jackson Montague was born on October 3, 1862, in Campbell County, Virginia, to which his parents, Robert Latané and Gay (Eubank) Montague, had fled when Union troops invaded Middlesex County, in which the Montague ancestral home was located. He was the second son of seven children, of whom four died in infancy. His father, a descendant of Peter Montague who emigrated to Virginia in 1624 and served in the House of Burgesses, was a gifted public speaker and president of the Virginia secession convention of 1861.
Education
After studying under tutors at home, young Montague entered Richmond College, from which he graduated in 1882; three years later he received the LL. B. degree from the law school of the University of Virginia and immediately began the practice of law at Danville, Virginia.
Career
Montague was ideally fitted to win success in Virginia politics in the doldrum days following the overthrow of the William Mahone machine. Montague was proud of his family heritage, handsome, well educated, gracious and dignified in manner, and possessed of oratorical powers unsurpassed by any Virginian of his day. In 1893, President Cleveland appointed him United States attorney for the western district of Virginia; five years later he was elected attorney-general of the state. He was diverted from a routine political career by the conviction that the political machine headed by Thomas S. Martin was perverting the best traditions of Virginia. Backed by Congressman William Atkinson Jones, Montague ran in 1901 for the Democratic nomination for governor against Claude A. Swanson, the choice of the Martin forces. The odds against Montague seemed insurmountable, but the bold independent went into every corner of the state, delivering "hammer blows with gloved hands" against Swanson and Martin and in favor of Democratic nominations by direct primaries. He won control of the state Democratic convention and was nominated and elected governor, in which office he served from 1902 to 1906. Montague's achievements as governor confirmed, within the limits of the South's racial proscriptions, to the progressive pattern of the times. He accepted the restrictions which the state constitutional convention of 1902 imposed upon Negro suffrage but at the same time pressed for regulation of corporations and railroads, prison reform, and highway improvements and led a successful fight for the direct primary.
Following the lead of reform governors Charles B. Aycock of North Carolina and Braxton B. Comer of Alabama, Montague personally led a campaign in May 1905 to prepare public sentiment for the inauguration of an extensive public school system. In a sanguine mood, Governor Montague entered the Democratic primary in 1905 in hopes of wresting from Thomas S. Martin a seat in the United States Senate and thereby ending the dominance of the Martin machine. His administration as governor had been successful, but the machine had not been seriously weakened. Though he advocated direct election of United States Senators and attacked the machine as the instrument of unprincipled spoilsmen, his opponent won by a large majority. Tradition has it that a joint debate between the two candidates at King George Courthouse, where Martin compelled Montague to take back an offensive personal reference, put the Governor on the defensive, from which he never recovered. Whatever the reason, Martin achieved for his machine an invincibility which lasted as long as he lived. Following his retirement from the governorship, Montague served for three years as dean of the law school of the University of Richmond. At the Democratic National Convention of 1912, along with Congressmen Carter Glass and William A. Jones, he led the Virginia faction supporting Woodrow Wilson, whom the Martin forces opposed, but thereafter Montague seems to have made his peace with the machine. In 1912, he was elected to Congress, where he was able to retain his seat for twelve successive terms. Although he remained in Congress until his death, he had never, according to Douglas S. Freeman, recovered at heart from his defeat in 1905.
Montague died at his home in Urbanna, Virginia, of a heart attack following a long siege of pneumonia and was buried in the graveyard of Christ Church, Middlesex County, Virginia.
Achievements
A man of broad abilities, Montague wrote a scholarly account of John Marshall which was published in volume II (1927) of American Secretaries of State and their Diplomacy, edited by Samuel Flagg Bemis. He took a deep interest in international accord, serving as United States delegate to the Pan-American Conference at Rio de Janeiro (1906) and to the Third International Conference on Maritime Law (Brussels, 1909 - 10), and as president of both the American Society for Judicial Settlement of International Disputes (1917) and the American Peace Society (1920 - 24). In addition, he held many executive positions in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Despite his strong opposition to a prohibition on constitutional grounds, Montague voted for the proposed Eighteenth Amendment, and, in common with most of Virginia's congressional delegation, he gave firm support to President Wilson's legislative program.
Connections
In December 1889, Montague married Elizabeth Lyne Hoskins, who served him well as adviser and hostess. They had three children: Matilda Gay, Janet Roy, and Robert Latané.
