Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. II.djvu/184

 142 LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS she survived, and died there in 1910, the last of General Taylor s children. His only son, RICHARD, soldier, born in Jeffer son County, Ky., January 27, 1826; died in New York city, April 12, 1879, was sent to Edinburgh when thirteen years old, where he spent three years in studying the classics, and then a year in France. He entered the junior class at Yale in 1843, and was graduated there in 1845. He was a wide and voracious though a desultory reader. From col lege he went to his father s camp on the Rio Grande, and he was present at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. His health then became im paired, and he returned home. He resided on a cotton-plantation in Jefferson County, Miss., until 1849, when he removed to a sugar-estate in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, about twenty miles above New Orleans, where he was residing when the civil war began. He was in the state senate from 1856 to 1860, was a delegate to the Charles ton Democratic convention in 1860, and afterward to that at Baltimore, and was a member of the Secession convention of Louisiana. As a mem ber of the military committee, he aided the gov ernor in organizing troops, and in June, 1861, went to Virginia as colonel of the 9th Louisiana volun teers. The day he reached Richmond he left for Manassas, arriving there at dusk on the day of the