July, 2025
Washington — Looking again through the family tree to see who may be perching nearby, I've discovered two remarkable cousins of ours in my father's Strother branch. Both were generals in the Civil War: one Confederate, Richard Strother Taylor; and one Union, Joseph Pannell Taylor.
This is not entirely a surprise, given earlier discoveries. David Hunter Strother, already known to us as an important figure in the Civil War, is a second cousin, now four generations removed. He was widely known as a writer and illustrator for Harper's magazine under his pen name, "Porte Crayon," before accepting brevet general rank for the Union. I've been reading his entertaining books and Civil War diaries for several years. And President Zachary Taylor, another Strother, is our first cousin, seven times removed. Jefferson Davis's first wife was a Strother. So we've known about this family line for some time.
Newly discovered second cousin Richard Strother Taylor, overlooked in the tree until now, was the son of Zachary Taylor. He was a prominent Confederate general who, after the war, wrote critically of both the South's efforts and the Reconstruction program imposed by the North. His uncle, the president's brother Joseph Pannell Taylor, was a Union general and an advisor to President Lincoln. An expert in logistics, he died in 1864 and is buried in Oak Hill cemetery in Washington's Georgetown neighborhood.
All the Strothers trace back to William Strother (1630-1702), who emigrated from the Northumberland area of England to colonial Virginia and became a prominent planter. Our own direct Strother branch goes back to Anthony Dabney Strother and his wife Frances Eastham, from the Culpeper, Virginia, area, who freed their slaves sometime after 1782 — on moral grounds according to a son — when it became legal to do so. A century later our Strother line moved to Nebraska.
Several cousins in the more famous Strother branch were slaveowners, including Zachary Taylor and his son. Many early presidents and their families were slaveowners, including another Strother relative, James Madison. Porte Crayon apparently was not a slaveowner.
It's unclear how well contemporaries Richard Strother Taylor (1826-79), born in Kentucky, and Porte Crayon (David Hunter Strother, 1816-88), born in Virginia, knew each other. They both lived in France in 1843, according to some sources.* Neither attended West Point. Taylor studied at Harvard and Yale. Porte Crayon studied art and art history with Samuel F. B. Morse in New York City.
The two may have faced each other on the battlefield in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign, when Richard Strother Taylor led Louisiana troops for Stonewall Jackson and Porte Crayon, as he was widely known, was staff to Union general Nathaniel P. Banks. They shared many close associations with others, especially after the war, most notably with Ulysses S. Grant and George B. McClellan, admired by both. Taylor interceded successfully with Grant and with President Andrew Johnson to release Jefferson Davis, his brother-in-law and former Confederate president, from prison.
Both Taylor and Porte Crayon wrote vivid and consequential books on the Civil War, as they were battlefield instigators and participants. In his book Destruction and Reconstruction, Taylor often cannot contain his sarcasm and contempt for how the South deluded itself into thinking it could win the war, which is remarkable as Taylor himself was among the largest cotton and sugar cane planters in Mississippi and Louisiana. Taylor writes of the Confederacy (p. 256):
Richard Strother Taylor was also a friend of Braxton Bragg (of Fort Bragg notoriety), but does not spare him in the book. Were he alive today, Taylor would likely not take kindly to commemorating anything Confederate, especially with Bragg's name. When as the last Confederate general east of the Mississippi to surrender his troops at the end of the war, he asked Union general Edward Canby's army band not to play "Dixie," as Canby offered, but "Hail Columbia." He had been against secession in 1860. How Taylor convinced himself to put his military talents to work in Confederate service is his life's great contradiction. He died in 1879 at the home of political ally Samuel L.M. Barlow in New York City and was first interred in Marble Cemetery before being reinterred two years later at Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans, in the family crypt.We set up a monarch, too, King Cotton, and hedged him with a divinity surpassing that of earthly potentates. To doubt his royalty and power was a confession of ignorance or cowardice. This potent spirit, at the nod of our Prosperos, the cotton-planters, would arrest every loom and spindle in New England, destroy her wealth, and reduce her population to beggary. The power of Old England, the growth of eight hundred years, was to wither as the prophet's gourd unless she obeyed its behests. And a right "tricksy spirit" it proved indeed. There was a complete mental derangement on this subject. The Government undertook to own all cotton that could be exported. Four millions of bales, belonging to many thousands of individuals, could be disposed of to better advantage by the Government than by the proprietors; and this was enforced by our authorities, whose ancestors for generations had been resisting the intrusion of governments into private business. All cotton, as well as naval stores, that was in danger of falling into the enemy's possession, was, by orders based on legislative enactment, to be burned; and this policy continued to the end. It was fully believed that this destruction would appall our enemies and convince the world of our earnestness. Possibly there was a lurking idea that it was necessary to convince ourselves.
*According to American History Central: The Encyclopedia of American History, Taylor's years in Scotland and France are not noted, however, in Parrish's biography of him, for lack of solid documentation.
