Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,672

This is the grave of Dick Taylor.

Born in 1826 at his family’s plantation outside Louisville, Kentucky, Richard Taylor (though always known as Dick, which you don’t see so often in the 19th century, at least publicly) grew up in the most elite version of the southern elite. His grandfather was the prominent Revolutionary War colonel Richard Taylor and his father was Zachary Taylor, general and later president. With his father often on the frontier doing his military service, Taylor was educated at elite private schools and then went to Harvard, though he transferred to Yale, where he graduated in 1845. The kid wasn’t anything too special. He joined his father down in Matamoros at the start of the Mexican War and wanted to be his aide-de-camp, but it didn’t work out. Theoretically, it was because he was sick, but it sounds more like he wasn’t really considered qualified for it when you read about it.

Anyway, in 1850, Taylor convinced his father, now in the White House, to buy a sugar plantation for him in Louisiana. Old Rough and Ready did and Dick became rich on it. He was very into slavery. His father was a slaver too, but if one can be a moderate about slavery, it was Zachary Taylor, who did not do the South’s bidding in his brief time as president. Dick on the other hand was all in. He ran the plantation, made it successful, and bought lots of humans to run it. At its peak, he probably owned 200 human beings. He nearly lost everything when a deep freeze hit Louisiana in 1856, destroying an entire year’s crop, but his rich in-laws bailed him out.

Like his father, Dick Taylor was a Whig, but as the nation moved closer to civil war, he embraced the Democratic Party. He wasn’t quite the most extreme of your fireeaters. At the 1860 Convention, he tried to work out a compromise between the Douglas forces and the Breckinridge forces, but to no avail. In any case, when secession happened, Taylor was all in.

Now, one thing Taylor was known for is his love of military history. He read just about everything there was available on this subject. Based on that alone, Braxton Bragg asked Taylor to be his aide-de-camp at the start of the war, figuring Taylor’s knowledge of military history would help him devise strategy. Quite a qualification there! Originally, that was an unpaid volunteer position, but soon, the 9th Louisiana Regiment offered Taylor a colonelship. These things were elected positions from the men in these days. The reason they elected Taylor, who was not even aware of what was happening, is that he was rich and well-connected and also Jefferson Davis’ brother-in-law, as the traitor in chief had married Zachary Taylor’s daughter (though she had died by this time) and so based on that, they hoped the connection would get them into battle sooner. Ah, the ardor for killing from people who have never been in battle!

It worked too. They were immediately sent north and made it to Manassas just hours after the Confederates had won the first battle of the war. Taylor was soon promoted to brigadier general under Stonewall Jackson and Richard Ewell in the Shenandoah Valley. He was right there in all the early battles of the war. He did have severe arthritis that would pop up from time and time and basically make him immobile, so he wasn’t always with his men. Despite this, in 1862, he was promoted to major general, the youngest person in the Confederacy to hold that position.

But because of his health, despite his position, Davis sent Taylor to Louisiana to recruit troops. He was there for most of the rest of the war. He attempted to lead the Confederate resistance to the Union taking New Orleans and the Mississippi River, but he really didn’t have the troops to do this. One upside though–Union troops came to his plantation and burned it to the ground and he knew it at the time. Sometimes in life, you get what you ask for. The details of Taylor’s attempts to retake New Orleans are kind of boring and can basically summed up this way: he didn’t have enough troops to make a serious attempt and Union gunboats on the Mississippi rained holy hell down on the troops he did have.

Taylor did play a major role in the Red River Campaign, the attempt by Union general Nathaniel Banks to march west into Louisiana and take out Shreveport and end the war in northern Louisiana and southern Arkansas. It didn’t go well for the Union, but one thing the Confederates never worked out that the Union more or less finally did was the issue of the political general. With Grant, most of these political generals were sidelined. But the Confederacy, more dependent on a society based around a few elite families than the Union, never did. So these rich guys all hated each other and the incompetent ones were never really moved out. In this case, while Taylor’s forces did defeat Banks’ forces, the hatred that Taylor and his immediate commander Edmund Kirby Smith had for each other completely got in the way of any useful follow-up. Taylor wanted his troops to go after Banks. Smith ordered them to Arkansas. Taylor then asked to be relieved of his command. The whole thing was a mess, which was good because these were terrible people fighting a terrible war for terrible reasons.

At the end of the war, a desperate Confederacy gave Taylor command of the Army of Tennessee after John Bell Hood got his ass whooped at the Battle of Nashville by Southern non-traitor George Thomas. He actually didn’t surrender his army until nearly a month after Appomattox, but that was basically a formality. Taylor was a dick at the surrender. When some German-born officer told Taylor that the South needed to change their ways, he did this whole bit about how his family had been here since early Virginia and his father was president and all that blah blah, but of course the German-born officer was correct.

Luckily, Taylor lost his mansion and human property during the war. He lived in New Orleans after the war and after his wife died in 1875, moved to Winchester, Virginia. He played a role in getting Andrew Johnson to release Jefferson Davis from prison, which is a disgusting moment in American history. Davis should have been hanged. Taylor published a memoir in 1879 and died that year in New York City, while visiting friends. He was 53 years old. It was heart failure.

Dick Taylor is buried in Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans, Louisiana.

If you would like this series to visit other treasonous generals who I am glad are dead, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Braxton Bragg is in Mobile, Alabama and Richard Ewell is in Nashville. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.