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Note: "; Last Confederate General to Surrender East of the Mississippi; Youngest Major-General in the Confederate Army; Son of President Zachary Taylor; Brother of Jefferson Davis' first wife Sarah Knox Taylor; Richard Taylor, Confederate General, only son of Margaret Mackall (Smith) and Gen. Zachary Taylor, was born at the Taylor family home, Springfield, near Louisville, Kentucky, on January 27, 1826, and named for his grandfather, a Virginian who had served as a Revolutionary War officer. He attended private schools in Kentucky and Massachusetts before being admitted to Yale College in 1843. He graduated two years later, having merited no scholastic honors but instead concentrated on reading widely in classical and military history. He agreed to manage the family cotton plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi, and in 1850 he persuaded his father (now President Taylor by virtue of his election in 1848) to purchase Fashion, a large sugar plantation in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. After Zachary Taylor's untimely death in July 1850, Taylor inherited Fashion. Steadily he increased its acreage, improved its sugar works (at considerable expense), and expanded its labor force to nearly 200 slaves, making him one of the richest men in Louisiana. But the freeze of 1856 ruined his crop, forcing him into heavy debt with a large mortgage on Fashion, a fragile condition underwritten largely by his generous mother-in-law Aglae Bringier, a wealthy French Creole matriarch whose daughter, Myrthe, Taylor had married in 1851. (They eventually had two sons and three daughters.) Yet he still projected an image of aristocratic affluence by racing thoroughbred horses at the famous Metairie Track and appearing at the gaming tables of the exclusive Boston Club in New Orleans. Taylor was elected to the Louisiana Senate in 1855; he was affiliated first with the Whig party, then the American (Know-Nothing) party, and finally the Democratic party, veering cautiously toward a strong antiRepublican yet reluctant proslavery position. His sense of nationalistic, Whiggish conservatism, although thoroughly laced with a Southern disdain for agitating abolitionists, also made him distrustful of demagogic Southern fire-eaters' demands for disunion. Both of these volatile expressions of the nation's expansive democracy Taylor found repulsive and ultimately tragic. As a rueful delegate from Louisiana to the 1860 national Democratic Convention in Charleston, he witnessed the party's fatal splintering along sectional lines. There he attempted, but failed, to forge a less radical course for the South, arguing for a compromise between stunned moderates and implacable secessionists. Now viewing war as inevitable, Taylor willingly served as a delegate to the Louisiana secession convention in January 1861 and voted with the convention's majority for immediate secession. Yet his prophetic pleas to protect the state from military invasion went largely unheeded by overconfident fellow secessionists. He retired in disgust to his plantation, recognizing the Confederacy's fundamental lack of unity and even predicting eventual defeat, but he remained willing to serve if called. Taylor was elected colonel of the Ninth Louisiana Infantry, assumed command in July, and took the regiment to Virginia. Surprisingly, in late October he received promotion to brigadier general by order of President Jefferson Davis (his brother-in-law by Davis's first marriage to one of Taylor's sisters). Although devoid of formal military training or combat experience, Taylor enjoyed his brigade's strong respect along with a reputation as a consummate student of military history, strategy, and tactics. "Dick Taylor was a born soldier," asserted a close friend. "Probably no civilian of his time was more deeply versed in the annals of war." Taylor was placed in command of the Louisiana Brigade, which included Maj. Chatham Roberdeau Wheat's notorious battalion of "Louisiana Tigers," and proved vital to Maj. Gen Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's brilliant Shenandoah Valley campaign during the spring of 1862. Jackson used Taylor's brigade as an elite strike force that set a crippling marching pace and dealt swift flanking attacks. At Front Royal on May 23, again at Winchester on May 25, and finally at the climactic battle of Port Republic on June 9, he led the Louisianans in timely assaults against strong enemy positions. He was promoted to major general on July 25, 1862, at thirty six years of age the youngest Confederate officer to attain such rank to date. He suffered terribly from chronic rheumatoid arthritis, however, and so was given command of the District of West Louisiana and charged with reviving his home state's severely deteriorated war effort. Almost from the start he feuded with his superior, Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department, mainly regarding Taylor's desperate need for troops to defend Louisiana's civilian population against destructive federal forays. Smith also thwarted Taylor's desire to free New Orleans from federal occupation, a goal that received strong, although temporary, approval and encouragement from Secretary of War George Wythe Randolph and President Davis. During 1863 Taylor directed an effective series of clashes with Union forces over control of lower Louisiana, most notably at Fort Bisland and Franklin (April 13-14), Brashear City (June 23), and Bayou Bourbeau (November 3). In the early spring of 1864, after withdrawing up the Red River Valley in the face of Maj. Gen Nathaniel P. Banks's invasion force of more than 25,000 men, Taylor became appalled at the devastation inflicted by the enemy upon Louisiana's heartland. On April 8, with an army of no more than 9,000 men, mostly Louisianans and Texans, he ignored Smith's explicit instructions to delay, instead attacking Banks's disorganized column a few miles below Mansfield near Sabine Crossroads. The Confederates swept the terrorstricken Yankees through the thick pine forest and then pursued them southward to Pleasant Hill. There, the next day, the federals withstood Taylor's assaults, forcing him to retire from the field. But Banks's generals compelled him to withdraw to Alexandria on the Red River. Taylor was outraged when Smith abruptly detached Walker's Texas Division for fighting in Arkansas, and he was left with only 5,000 men to lay siege to Alexandria. Taylor repeatedly demanded Walker's Division in order to crush Banks and liberate New Orleans, but Smith stubbornly refused. Finally Banks's army escaped from Alexandria on May 13. Convinced of Smith's arrogant ambition and incompetence, Taylor exploded with a series of insulting, insubordinate diatribes against Smith and submitted his resignation. Although unwilling to admit his strategic blunder in failing to allow Taylor to keep Walker's Division, Smith harbored no personal grudge. Taylor, however, never forgave Smith. Despite his heroic status for having saved most of Louisiana and virtually all of Texas from military conquest, Taylor viewed the Red River Campaign as a profound disappointment. Preferring to ignore the Taylor-Smith feud, on July 18 President Davis placed Taylor in command of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana and promoted him to lieutenant general, thus making him one of only three non-West Pointers who achieved such high rank in the South. From September 1864 until war's end Taylor struggled to defend his department, receiving scant cooperation from state governors, legislatures, and local militia units, while also contending with Jefferson Davis's poor coordination of the Confederacy's cumbersome bureaucracy, especially its divisive departmental system. Fortunately, Taylor enjoyed the benefit of Nathan Bedford Forrest's superb cavalry, which resisted federal incursions and supported the embattled Army of Tennessee by raiding enemy supply lines. Forrest showed genuine admiration for Taylor's leadership, remarking candidly, "He's the biggest man in the lot. If we'd had more like him, we would have licked the Yankees long ago." In January 1865 Taylor briefly assumed command of the shattered ranks of the Army of Tennessee after Gen. John Bell Hood's catastrophic defeats at Franklin and Nashville several weeks earlier. As the Southern cause rapidly disintegrated during the spring, Taylor saw his own department gutted by Brig. Gen. James H. Wilson's massive cavalry raid through Alabama and Maj. Gen. Edward R. S. Canby's triumphant siege of Mobile. Taylor had "shared the fortunes of the Confederacy," as he later recalled, having "sat by its cradle and followed its hearse." Indeed, the war had inflicted harsh personal sacrifices: he lost his plantation to destruction and confiscation by federal soldiers; his two young sons died of scarlet fever as wartime refugees; and his wife suffered so severely that she lapsed into a slow decline that ended with her premature death in 1875. After surrendering his department to Canby on May 4, 1865, Taylor took up residency in New Orleans and tried to revive his finances by securing a lease of the New Basin Canal from the state. He also garnered the support of a wealthy New York City attorney, Samuel Latham Mitchell Barlow, one of the Democratic party's most effective powerbrokers. At Barlow's bidding Taylor negotiated with presidents Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant and also lobbied members of Congress, all in an attempt to advance democratic principles, mainly by gaining lenient treatment for the South. Increasingly distrustful of Radical Republicans, Taylor finally cursed Reconstruction as a loathsome evil, with Johnson as its inept victim and Grant as its corrupt handmaiden. The continual racial and political strife, much of which Taylor witnessed personally in New Orleans, gradually pushed him along with many other genteel conservatives into a reactionary position that lent tacit approval to the corrupt, blatantly violent backlash by Southern white Democrats against freedmen's efforts to assert their new voting rights under Republican sponsorship. Shortly after his wife's death in 1875, Taylor moved with his three daughters to Winchester, Virginia. Intimately involved in New Yorker Samuel J. Tilden's Democratic presidential campaign in 1876, Taylor vainly attempted to influence congressional maneuverings in the wake of the disputed election returns, a national crisis ultimately diffused by the pervasive breakdown of solidarity among Democratic leaders. On April 12, 1879, Taylor died at Barlow's home in New York City, succumbing to severe internal congestion resulting from his long battle with rheumatoid arthritis. Although Taylor had never demonstrated strong religious convictions, an Episcopal clergyman was present to minister to him. He was buried in a family crypt in Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans. Only a few weeks before his death he completed his memoirs, Destruction and Reconstruction, one of the most literate and colorful firsthand accounts of the Civil War era. Report of Brig. Gen. Richard Taylor, C. S. Army, Commanding Eighth Brigade, of the Battle of Port Republic HEADQUARTERS EIGHTH BRIGADE, June 11, 1862. Major BARBOUR, Assistant Adjutant-General, Third Division. MAJOR: I have the honor to submit the following report of the Eighth Brigade as connected with the actions of the 8th and 9th instant: On the morning of the 8th I received orders to march the brigade to Port Republic to assist in repelling the attack commenced on the bridge at that point by Shields' forces. When within 1 miles of the bridge the column was halted, by order of Major-General Jackson, to await further orders. These were shortly received-- in effect to return to the front and act as a reserve to the troops there engaged against Fremont. Here the brigade became separated, two regiments, the Seventh and Eighth Louisiana, being ordered to Major-General Ewell to the support of a battery in the center or on the left, of our line, while I marched the remaining two regiments and Wheat's battalion to the right to support General Trimble's brigade, then much pressed. The display of force caused the enemy to retire still farther from the position to which he had been driven by the vigorous charge of Trimble's command. The brigade, though not actually in action on this day, was much exposed to the enemy's shell, and suffered a loss of I private killed, 1 officer (Captain Green, Seventh Louisiana) and 7 privates and non-commissioned officers wounded. On the 9th I marched from camp near Doukard's [Dunkard's?] Church, according to orders, at daylight, and proceeded across Port Republic Bridge to the field where General Winder's troops had already engaged the enemy. Here I received orders from the major-general commanding to leave one regiment near the position then occupied by himself, and with the main body to make a detour to the right for the purpose of checking a formidable battery planted in that locality. The nature of the ground over which we passed necessarily rendered our progress slowOn reaching the position indicated the charge was made, and the battery, consisting of six guns, fell into our hands after an obstinate resistance on the part of its supporters, our troops being at the same time subjected to a most destructive fire from the enemy's sharpshooters, posted in a wood above the battery. After holding the battery for a short time a fresh brigade of the enemy's troops, moving up from their position on my left flank, and where they had been fronting the troops of Winder's brigade, made a determined and well-conducted advance upon us, accompanied by a galling fire of canister from a piece suddenly brought into position at a distance of about 350 yards. Under this combined attack my command fell back to the skirts of the wood near which the captured battery was stationed, and from this point continued their fire upon the advancing enemy, who succeeded in reclaiming only one gun, which he carried off, leaving both caisson and limber. At this moment our batteries in my rear opened fire, and re-enforcements coming up, led by Major-General Ewell, the battle was decided in our favor, and the enemy precipitately fled. The Seventh Louisiana Regiment, Colonel Hays, being the regiment left in the front by order of General Jackson, was meanwhile engaged in another portion of the field, and suffered heavy loss. The guns captured by the brigade were five in number, and one other-- a brass 12-pounder howitzer-- was afterward discovered deserted in the woods near the Brown's Gap road by Lieutenant Dushane, quartermaster of Wheat's Battalion, and by him brought off. The above record is a mere statement of facts, but no language can adequately describe the gallant conduct of the Eighth Brigade in the action of the 9th instant. Disordered by the rapidity of their charge through a dense thicket, making the charge itself just as the loud cheers of the enemy proclaimed his success in another part of the field, assailed by a superior force in front and on the flanks with two batteries in position within point-blank range, nobly did the sons of Louisiana sustain the reputation of their State. Three times was the captured battery lost and won, the enemy fighting with great determination. Colonel Seymour, of the Sixth Louisiana, and Major Wheat, of the battalion, on the left; Colonel Stafford, of the Ninth, in the center, and Colonel Kelly, of the Eighth, on the right, all acted with the most determined gallantry and were as gallantly supported by their officers and men. Members of each of the regiments engaged in the charge were found dead under the guns of the captured battery. Captain Surget, assistant adjutant-general, distinguished himself greatly, and rendered the most important service on the left. Lieutenant Hamilton, aide-de-camp, gave me valuable assistance in rallying and reforming the men when driven back to the edge of the wood, as did Lieutenant Killmartin, of the Seventh Louisiana Regiment, temporarily attached to my staff. Circumstances unfortunately retained the Seventh Regiment, under the gallant Colonel Hays, in another part of the field. Its record of 156 killed and wounded-- -50 per cent. of the number carried into action-- shows the service it performed. Respectfully, your obedient servant, R. Taylor, Brigadier General
Note: Confederate General; Louisiana State Legislator; Author of "Deconstruction and Reconstruction
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