Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/1282

1202 in nearly all the great battles of that army. He was born in Caroline county, Va., in the year 1841, and was reared and given his preparatory education in his native county. When the Virginia convention met to decide the fate of the State, he was a student at the university of Virginia, whence he went, with the cadets, on the day of the adoption of the ordinance of secession, to occupy Harper's Ferry. In the following month he enlisted in the service of the State as a private in the Fredericksburg artillery, an organization with which he was identified during the remainder of the war. After the surrender at Appomattox he returned to his home in Caroline county and found occupation for several years in farming. Then undertaking the profession of teaching, he was engaged in that work at Fredericksburg until about the year 1886, when he removed to Washington to accept a position in the treasury department. Among the engagements in which he took part during the war were an early encounter with a Federal gunboat on the Potomac river, Mechanicsville and Chickahominy and other battles of the Seven Days' campaign before Richmond, Chantilly, Cedar Mountain, Second Manassas, Snicker's Gap, Groveton, Waterloo Bridge, Hagerstown, Md., Sharpsburg, Md., Bolivar and Maryland Heights, Fredericksburg, Spottsylvania (April, 1863), Chancellorsville, Mine Run, Bristoe Station, the battles of the Wilderness, Beaver Dam, North Anna River, or Jericho Ford, Second Cold Harbor, the defense of Richmond, the defense of Petersburg, the defense of the Weldon railroad. Six Mile Station, Blackburn's Ford, Williamsburg, Farmville, High Bridge and Appomattox. During all this service he was never wounded, though hit several times by spent balls. Mr. Taylor is a valued member of the Washington association of Confederate Veterans.

Colonel Walter H. Taylor, a native of Norfolk, was the youthful officer who was assigned, then not twenty-three years of age, to Gen. Robert E. Lee at Richmond soon after the secession of Virginia, and who became a confidential staff officer of that illustrious man during the entire period of the war for Southern independence. He deserves, on his personal merit, as well as for his intimate association with his great chief, the distinction which history awards him. He had been educated at the Virginia military institute, and enlisted in the Confederate service when the orders of Governor Letcher, early in May, 1861, brought him to Richmond to be immediately assigned to duty with Lee who had chief command of the military forces of his State, and was engaged in the rapid and thorough organization of all the resources which Virginia was offering for the defense of the South. In an unpretentious office, furnished with a desk, a table and a few chairs, the work of preparation for war went on under the direction of the experienced head aided by a limited staff of carefully selected men, among whom was this competent young officer, who was destined to close comradeship with his leader in honorable and perilous service, ending in the final scenes at Appomattox. As the result of these office labors the organized army of Virginia was turned over to the Confederacy. General Lee was appointed one of the generals authorized by Congress and on account of the special need of his counsel, was ordered to remain at Richmond as the "military adviser of the president." The reverses in western