Richard Taylor (Confederate general)
Richard Taylor died on the 12th of April, 1879, exactly eighteen years to the day after the Battle of Fort Sumter opened the Civil War he had fought so fiercely. That symmetry is almost too neat for history. He died in New York City, visiting a friend, far from the Louisiana sugar fields he had built into one of the wealthiest plantations in the state, and far from the armies he had commanded without ever having attended a military academy.
Taylor was the son of a president, the brother-in-law of a Confederate president, a Yale man who collected no academic honors because he spent his student years reading military history instead. He entered the war as a colonel with no battlefield experience and rose to lieutenant general, one of only three men to reach that rank in the Confederacy without a West Point diploma. Nathan Bedford Forrest said of him that he was the biggest man in the lot, and that if the Confederacy had more like him, they would have beaten the Union.
How does a sugar planter from St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, become one of the most respected field commanders of the Civil War? The answer runs through Kentucky frontier posts, a Yale secret society, the swamps of the Bayou Teche, and a confrontation at a surrender ceremony that Taylor turned into a quiet act of defiance.
Richard Taylor was born on the 27th of January, 1826, at Springfield, his family's plantation near Louisville, Kentucky. His father, Zachary Taylor, held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the United States Army at the time. The children grew up moving between frontier forts, because their father commanded them, and all of the family lived with him at those posts.
At Harvard, Taylor began college studies but transferred to Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, where he graduated in 1845. He joined Skull and Bones, Yale's social club, and received no academic honors. His time was spent on classical and military history books rather than coursework. That private education in strategy would matter enormously later.
When the Mexican-American War opened in 1846, Taylor traveled to the Mexican town of Matamoros in July of that year to visit his father and reportedly volunteered as an aide-de-camp. Rheumatoid arthritis, a condition that would shadow him for the rest of his life, forced him away from that conflict. He returned to manage the family cotton plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi.
In 1850, Taylor persuaded his father, then serving as the 12th president, to buy Fashion, a large sugar cane plantation in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. After his father's sudden death in July of that year, Taylor inherited the property. He married Louise Marie Myrthe Bringier on the 10th of February, 1851, and steadily added acreage and expanded the enslaved labor force to nearly 200 people. A freeze in 1856 ruined his crop and drove him into debt, and it was his mother-in-law, Aglae Bringier, who helped him and his wife through that crisis.
By 1855, Taylor was in the Louisiana State Senate, where he served until 1861. He moved through three parties in that time: Whig, then the American Party (also called the Know Nothing Party), and finally Democratic. At the first Democratic Convention of 1860 in Charleston, South Carolina, he witnessed the party splinter over slavery and failed in his own attempt to broker a compromise between its two factions.
Confederate General Braxton Bragg asked Taylor to serve as a civilian aide-de-camp without pay at Pensacola, Florida, at the outbreak of the war. Bragg had known Taylor beforehand and believed his knowledge of military history could help organize and train troops. Taylor had been opposed to secession but accepted the appointment.
While training recruits, Taylor learned he had been commissioned as a colonel of the Confederate 9th Louisiana Infantry Regiment. The regiment's members voted for him partly because of his family connection: his sister Sarah Knox Taylor had been the first wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis before dying of illness in 1835. The soldiers believed Taylor's ties to Davis would get them into battle faster. On July 20, Taylor arrived in Richmond, Virginia, with his regiment and received orders from Confederate Secretary of War LeRoy Pope Walker to board a train toward the First Battle of Manassas. The 9th Louisiana arrived at Manassas Junction hours after Confederate forces had already won that engagement.
On the 21st of October 1861, Taylor was promoted to brigadier general and placed in command of a Louisiana brigade under Richard S. Ewell, serving in the Shenandoah Valley campaign led by Stonewall Jackson. Jackson used Taylor's brigade as an elite strike force, setting a rapid pace and delivering flanking attacks at critical moments. At the Battle of Front Royal on May 23, the First Battle of Winchester on May 25, and the Battle of Port Republic on June 9, Taylor led timely assaults against strongly held enemy positions.
His brigade included Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat's "Louisiana Tiger" battalion, a notoriously undisciplined group. Taylor imposed order on them. Wheat disagreed with his methods at first but came to respect Taylor. The rheumatoid arthritis struck again during the Seven Days Battles around Richmond. Taylor could not leave his camp to command during some of those engagements, and at the Battle of Gaines Mill, Colonel Isaac Seymour led the brigade in his place and was killed in action.
On the 28th of July 1862, Taylor was promoted to major general, becoming the youngest officer of that rank in the Confederacy. Three more senior commanders objected, claiming favoritism. President Davis wrote them directly, noting Taylor's capabilities and citing Stonewall Jackson's personal recommendation for the promotion.
Taylor was ordered to the District of Western Louisiana to conscript and organize troops. He found the district almost entirely without soldiers or supplies. Governor Thomas Overton Moore had pressed for a capable officer, and Taylor set about building an effective force from almost nothing. He secured two experienced subordinates: Alfred Mouton, a veteran infantry commander, and Thomas Green, a veteran cavalry commander. Both would prove essential in the campaigns ahead.
Before Taylor arrived, U.S. forces had already raided his Fashion plantation during the spring of 1862 and plundered it. Throughout 1863, Taylor directed a series of engagements against U.S. Major General Nathaniel P. Banks for control of the Bayou Teche region in southern Louisiana. The Battle of Fort Bisland and the Battle of Irish Bend were fought over Banks's push toward Port Hudson. After those clashes, Taylor formed a plan to recapture Bayou Teche, seize New Orleans, and cut off Banks's supply line.
That plan had approval from Confederate Secretary of War James A. Seddon and President Davis. But his immediate superior, General Edmund Kirby Smith, redirected part of Taylor's force to attack U.S. positions on the Louisiana banks of the Mississippi near Vicksburg. Taylor marched his army to Richmond, Louisiana, where he joined with Confederate Major General John G. Walker's Texas Division, who called themselves Walker's Greyhounds. The resulting Battle of Milliken's Bend showed early Confederate success before U.S. gunboats shelled them back. The action at Young's Point ended prematurely as well. Both battles failed to achieve their Confederate objectives.
During those operations, U.S. General Ulysses S. Grant wrote directly to Taylor, urging the Confederates to treat captured Black U.S. soldiers as legitimate military prisoners rather than as insurrectionist slaves subject to summary execution. Taylor continued south with his army, captured Brashear City, present-day Morgan City, Louisiana, gaining large quantities of supplies and weapons. He moved his forces to the outskirts of New Orleans, then held by a small garrison under Brigadier General William H. Emory. He was preparing to attack the city when word arrived that Port Hudson had fallen, forcing him to withdraw north along the Bayou Teche to avoid being cut off.
In 1864, Banks returned with a larger operation: the Red River Campaign, aimed at driving Confederate forces from northwestern Louisiana. Taylor met him with a smaller force. At the Battle of Mansfield and the Battle of Pleasant Hill, fought on April 8-9, Taylor defeated Banks decisively and then pursued him back toward the Mississippi River.
The two subordinate commanders Taylor had cultivated since his arrival in Louisiana, Brigadier Generals Alfred Mouton and Thomas Green, were both killed leading their men into combat during those two battles. Their loss was severe. Still, Taylor's victory was recognized at the highest level: the Confederate Congress issued a joint resolution officially thanking Taylor and his soldiers for their service in the campaign.
On the 8th of April, 1864, the same day as the Battle of Mansfield, Taylor was promoted to lieutenant general. The promotion came despite the fact that he had already asked to be relieved because of his deep distrust of General Edmund Kirby Smith, his superior throughout the campaign. He was one of only three men in the Confederacy to hold that rank without a West Point background; the other two were Nathan Bedford Forrest and Wade Hampton III.
In his 1879 memoir, Taylor described two habits he credited for whatever success he had in command. The first was to examine roads, distances, and terrain at every halt and sketch them from memory. The second was to imagine an enemy force before him on every march and work through how he would attack or receive them. He wrote that his imaginary maneuvers were "sad blunders" at first, but that he corrected them against the lessons of actual battles.
Near the war's end, Taylor was given command of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana. After General John Bell Hood's catastrophic Franklin-Nashville Campaign in Tennessee and the near-total destruction of the Army of Tennessee at the Battle of Nashville, Taylor briefly commanded what remained of that force before its remnants were redirected north through the Carolinas.
Taylor surrendered his department at Citronelle, Alabama, to U.S. General Edward Canby on the 4th of May, 1865, nearly a month after Appomattox. It was the third and last major Confederate force still active east of the Mississippi. He was paroled three days later. The remainder of his command was paroled on the 12th of May 1865, in Gainesville, Alabama.
In his memoir, Taylor described what happened at the surrender ceremony. A Union officer present, a German-born immigrant who had recently become an American citizen and soldier and whom Taylor chose not to name, informed Taylor and the assembled Confederate officers that they would quickly come to recognize their ignorance and errors and would rejoice at the war's outcome. Taylor recounted that General Canby and another Union general tried in vain to quiet the man.
Taylor responded with deliberate precision. He told the officer that his ancestors had settled in Virginia in 1608, that his grandfather had commanded a regiment against Hessian soldiers at Trenton during the Revolutionary War, and that his father had been president of the United States. He then offered an ironic apology for his own ignorance, and expressed regret that his forebears had found no time to transmit to him "the correct ideas of the duties of American citizenship." The exchange captured something essential about Taylor: he was not a man who lost arguments quietly.
The war cost Taylor nearly everything material: his home, the sugar cane plantation, and a library he had prized throughout his life. He moved his family to New Orleans at the war's end. He served as president of the Boston Club from 1868 to 1873. After his wife Louise died in 1875, he relocated with their three daughters to Winchester, Virginia, and traveled often to Washington, D.C., and New York City to see friends and political allies.
Taylor remained a force in Democratic politics. He worked to secure the release of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who was then imprisoned at Fort Monroe, by interceding with President Andrew Johnson. He also became a prominent opponent of Reconstruction policies in the postwar South.
In 1879, he published Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War, widely regarded as one of the most credible firsthand accounts of the conflict. The historian T. Michael Parrish wrote that Taylor had "finally gave enhanced dignity to defeat and surrender." A full-length biography by Parrish, Richard Taylor, Soldier Prince of Dixie, appeared in 1992.
Taylor's two sons had died of scarlet fever during the war, losses that both he and Louise felt deeply. Of their five children, three daughters survived. On the 12th of April 1879, he died of dropsy, a condition related to congestive heart failure, while visiting his friend and political ally Samuel L. M. Barlow I in New York City. His body was returned to Louisiana and buried at Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans. The Lt. General Richard Taylor Camp #1308, Sons of Confederate Veterans, was chartered in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1971 and bears his name.
Continue Browsing
Common questions
Who was Richard Taylor the Confederate general?
Richard Taylor (the 27th of January 1826 - the 12th of April 1879) was a Louisiana sugar planter, politician, and Confederate general during the Civil War. He was the only son of U.S. President Zachary Taylor and the brother-in-law of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. He rose to the rank of lieutenant general without any prior military training or a West Point education.
What was Richard Taylor's role in the Red River Campaign?
Taylor commanded the Confederate forces in the Red River Campaign of 1864, defeating U.S. General Nathaniel P. Banks at the Battle of Mansfield and the Battle of Pleasant Hill on April 8-9. He pursued Banks back to the Mississippi River, and the Confederate Congress issued a joint resolution officially thanking Taylor and his soldiers for their service in the campaign. He was promoted to lieutenant general on the 8th of April 1864.
How was Richard Taylor related to Zachary Taylor and Jefferson Davis?
Richard Taylor was the only son of Zachary Taylor, the 12th president of the United States. His sister Sarah Knox Taylor was the first wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, though she died of illness in 1835, three months after their marriage. This family connection to Davis influenced Taylor's Confederate commission.
Where did Richard Taylor surrender at the end of the Civil War?
Taylor surrendered his department at Citronelle, Alabama, to U.S. General Edward Canby on the 4th of May 1865, nearly a month after Appomattox. It was the third and last major Confederate force remaining east of the Mississippi River. The rest of his command was paroled on the 12th of May 1865, in Gainesville, Alabama.
What did Richard Taylor write about the Civil War?
Taylor published Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War in 1879, the same year he died. It is considered one of the most credible firsthand accounts of the Civil War. The historian T. Michael Parrish wrote that Taylor had given enhanced dignity to defeat and surrender in that memoir.
What college did Richard Taylor attend and what did he study?
Taylor began his college studies at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and completed them at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, graduating in 1845. He was a member of Skull and Bones and received no academic honors, having spent most of his time reading classical and military history books rather than pursuing formal coursework.
All sources
11 references cited across the entry
- 1bookFleshing Out Skull and Bones: Investigations into America's Most Powerful Secret SocietyMillegan, Kris — Trine Day — 2003
- 5webLetter to Richard TaylorUlysses Grant — 1863