Nathaniel Green Taylor

Nathaniel Green Taylor (December 29, 1819 – April 1, 1887) was an American lawyer, farmer, and politician from Tennessee who served two nonconsecutive terms in the United States House of Representatives and later as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He represented Tennessee’s 1st congressional district from 1854 to 1855 and again from 1866 to 1867, and was Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1867 to 1869. As a member of the Unionist Party representing Tennessee, Taylor contributed to the legislative process during two terms in office, participating in the democratic process and representing the interests of his constituents during a significant period in American history.

Taylor was born at Happy Valley in Carter County, Tennessee, on December 29, 1819, the son of James Patton Taylor (1792–1833) and Mary Carter Taylor (1799–1840). He came from a prominent East Tennessee family deeply rooted in the region’s early settlement and public life. His paternal grandfather, General Nathaniel Taylor (1771–1816), a native of Rockbridge County, Virginia, was among the early settlers of the area, served as Carter County’s first sheriff, and began construction of the notable residence Sabine Hill in Elizabethton. His maternal grandfather, Landon Carter (1760–1800), was a veteran of the American Revolutionary War and the namesake of Carter County. Raised in this environment of public service and local leadership, Taylor grew up in Happy Valley, where he would later return to farm and preach.

Taylor received his early education privately before attending Washington College near Jonesborough, Tennessee, one of the region’s oldest institutions of higher learning. He subsequently enrolled at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), from which he graduated in 1840. After completing his collegiate studies, he read law and was admitted to the bar in 1841. He began his legal practice in Elizabethton, in Carter County, where he established himself as a lawyer while also engaging in agricultural pursuits. Like many members of the antebellum Southern elite, he owned slaves, a fact that situated him within the social and economic structures of his time even as his later political career aligned him with Unionist sentiment in East Tennessee.

On the personal front, Taylor married Emmaline (Emma) Haynes (1822–1890), the sister of Landon Carter Haynes, a prominent Democratic politician who served as Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives and later as a Confederate senator from Tennessee. Nathaniel and Emma Taylor had a large family. Two of their sons, Alfred A. Taylor (1848–1931) and Robert Love Taylor (1850–1912), each achieved distinction by being elected both to the U.S. Congress and as governor of Tennessee, Alfred as a Republican and Robert as a Democrat, reflecting the family’s later bipartisan prominence in state politics. Other children who survived both parents included sons James Patton Taylor (1844–1924), Nathaniel Winfield Taylor (1852–1904), David Haynes Taylor (1858–1890), and Hugh Lawson McClung Taylor (1859–1935), and daughters Mary Eva Taylor Jobe (1855–1916), Rhoda Emma Taylor Reeves (1855–1943), and Sanna McClung Taylor Miller (1862–1941).

Taylor’s national political ambitions emerged in the late 1840s. In 1849, he was a candidate for election to the U.S. House of Representatives from Tennessee’s 1st congressional district but lost the general election to Democrat Andrew Johnson of Greene County, who would later become President of the United States. In 1853, Taylor ran again as one of two Whig candidates in the 1st district. In a three-way race, he was narrowly defeated by Democrat Brookins Campbell, losing by only 138 votes out of approximately 14,900 cast; the other Whig, Albert Watkins, then the incumbent from the 2nd district who had been shifted into the 1st district by reapportionment, received 3,988 votes. When Campbell died on December 25, 1853, before qualifying for his seat, a special election was called in 1854. Taylor won this contest and served in the Thirty-third Congress from March 30, 1854, to March 3, 1855. He sought reelection in 1855 but was narrowly defeated by Watkins, now running as a Democrat, by 270 votes out of 15,292 cast. In 1857, after the collapse of the Whig Party, Taylor ran as the “American” (Know-Nothing) Party candidate against Watkins and again lost by a narrow margin of 170 votes out of 15,118 cast. He did not run for Congress in 1859.

In the presidential election of 1860, Taylor served as a presidential elector for the Constitutional Union Party ticket of John Bell and Edward Everett, a ticket that drew heavily from former Whigs seeking to avert sectional conflict. During the Civil War, despite Tennessee’s secession and alignment with the Confederacy, Taylor adhered to the Union cause, reflecting the strong Unionist sentiment prevalent in much of East Tennessee. He joined efforts to assist Southern Unionist residents of East Tennessee living under Confederate rule and traveled throughout the northeastern United States lecturing on their behalf, seeking support and relief for loyal citizens in the region. His Unionist stance during the war positioned him as a leading East Tennessee figure in the complex politics of Reconstruction.

Following the Civil War, Tennessee was readmitted to representation in Congress in 1866. That year, Taylor was elected once more to represent the 1st congressional district, this time as a Conservative candidate. The Conservative faction had broken away from the broader Union coalition that had supported the national government during the war and was associated with the policies of President Andrew Johnson, himself an East Tennessean and former political rival of Taylor. Taylor served in the Thirty-ninth Congress from July 24, 1866, to March 3, 1867. During this term, he sat as a Unionist-aligned Conservative at a time when Congress was deeply engaged in shaping Reconstruction policy and determining the terms under which former Confederate states would be fully restored to the Union.

Taylor chose not to seek reelection in 1867. Instead, President Andrew Johnson appointed him Commissioner of Indian Affairs, effective March 26, 1867. In this capacity, he served for about two years, until his retirement in 1869. As Commissioner, Taylor played a significant role in federal Indian policy on the Great Plains. He traveled to Kansas and other western regions in an effort to help settle the ongoing Plains Wars and headed the Indian Peace Commission. In this role, he participated in negotiations that led to the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, under which several southern Plains tribes, including the Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche, agreed to remove to a reservation in Indian Territory and ceded their traditional lands, including much of what is now Kansas. Taylor took his 19-year-old son Alfred with him on these travels, exposing the younger Taylor to national affairs that would later inform his own political career. Taylor retired from the office of Commissioner of Indian Affairs on April 21, 1869.

After leaving federal service, Taylor returned to Happy Valley in Carter County, Tennessee, where he devoted himself primarily to farming and to lay preaching, continuing the pattern of local leadership that had characterized his family for generations. He remained an influential figure in East Tennessee public life, particularly through the rising careers of his sons. In 1886, when Alfred and Robert Taylor became opposing candidates for governor of Tennessee on the Republican and Democratic tickets respectively, the Prohibition Party sought to nominate Nathaniel Taylor himself in hopes of creating a three-way gubernatorial contest within a single family. He declined the offer, leaving the race to his sons, whose widely publicized “War of the Roses” campaign became a celebrated episode in Tennessee political history.

Nathaniel Green Taylor died at Happy Valley, Tennessee, on April 1, 1887. He was interred in the Old Taylor Cemetery, located on private property off Sylvan Hill Road in Elizabethton, Tennessee, where he rests alongside other members of his prominent family. His life and career, spanning the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras, reflected both the complexities of East Tennessee politics and the broader national struggles of the nineteenth century.