James G. Taliaferro
American judge (1798-1876)
James Govan Taliaferro (September 28, 1798 – October 13, 1876) was a lawyer, newspaper publisher, and judge in Louisiana. As the secession movement grew he remained a staunch Unionist and was held for some time in a Confederate prison during the American Civil War.
A Whig, he later joined the Republican Party and was an outspoken opponent of secession. He was an opponent of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery and ran for Lieutenant Governor in 1865 on a platform against Black suffrage. He remained active in Republican Party politics during the Reconstruction Era and was a candidate for governor in 1868 with the backing of Louis Charles Roudanez and his African American newspaper The New Orleans Tribune. He ran for governor with running mate Francis Ernest Dumas, an "almost white" Union officer and former slaveholder. They lost to Henry C. Warmoth, a Civil War veteran officer from the North who ended up undermining civil rights legislation and being removed from office for election corruption in 1872. Taliaferro's family papers are at Louisiana State University.
Early years
Taliaferro was born to Zacharias Taliaferro and Sally Warwick on September 28, 1798, in Amherst, Virginia. The family moved to Claiborne County, Mississippi in 1806 and then to Catahoula Parish, Louisiana in 1815.
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This entry incorporates text from “James G. Taliaferro” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.