Josiah Taylor: Early Texas Settler and Republican Army Captain (ca. 1781–1830)

Josiah Taylor, captain in the Republican Army of the North, the military force of the Gutiérrez-Magee expedition into Texas in 1812–13, and early settler of Texas, was born around 1781 in Buckingham, Virginia, to James and Frances Taylor. He was also a former U.S. Army officer and a key player in the 1805 Aaron Burr conspiracy, the plot by former Vice President Aaron Burr and his followers to invade and liberate New Spain.

In 1802 Josiah Taylor joined the U.S. Army and was listed as a cadet in the Fourth Regiment of Infantry. By 1806 he was the assistant military agent in New Orleans in charge of procurement of supplies and disbursement of cash on behalf of the army. He was also moonlighting as an agent of the Burr Conspiracy. Taylor visited with and recruited two other key members of the conspiracy, Reuben and Samuel Kemper. He also recruited a former army officer, William Murray, who, like Samuel Kemper, would join Taylor in Texas in the filibuster six years later.

Taylor was the only man discovered in the trials of the Burr conspirators known to both the cells in New Orleans and Upper Louisiana. As purchasing agent, he was perfectly positioned to act as the conspiracy’s quartermaster, and subsequent testimony suggests this was the case. The trials uncovered some questionable expenditures and accounting irregularities by Taylor, including purchases of unjustified extra rations, which Gen. James Wilkinson, the key western conspirator, requested along with “considerable sums of public money unaccounted for,” which included a $3,000 payment to the general.

Before the conspiracy collapsed, however, Taylor was reported to have died “after a violent fever of only four days.” Strong evidence suggests that the report of his death was faked: Both of the senior officers who reported it to the War Department had ties to the conspiracy, and Taylor’s position was such that, if he testified it may have resulted in the conviction for treason of a number of conspirators, including General Wilkinson, then the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Army.

Taylor then appeared 600 miles away in Clark, County, Georgia, where, under his own name, he married Hephzibeth Luker (sometimes spelled Looker) in October 1807. They had nine children. That this Taylor is the same person is proven by census data, as well as the facts of his return to the frontier five years later. In 1811 the same Josiah Taylor who had married in Georgia appeared in Texas, which by then was torn by the Mexican War of Independence, on what an early account euphemistically called an “exploring expedition…to look at the country.” The following summer, he then joined and became a senior staff officer in the Gutiérrez-Magee filibuster alongside the very same people he had recruited for Burr in 1806—Samuel Kemper and William Murray.

Taylor recruited a small company for the expedition “with two important requirements in mind; they had to be well-mounted and proven marksmen with the rifle.” With his experience, he was placed on the staff of Col. Augustus Magee. Initially joining the army as a captain, he was later promoted to major. Traveling with him was his slave and manservant, Thomas.

The army quickly took Nacogdoches in August 1812 and moved south to take the Presidio La Bahía. Taylor and a group of five men were detached to scout towards San Antonio and stumbled upon the main body of the Spanish Royalist army coming down to besiege the rebels. The party was captured and sent to San Antonio to be imprisoned in the Alamo. Sometime in the next two months, Taylor “brained one of the guards with a bench leg and made his escape.” He then returned to La Bahía, where the rebels were besieged, made his way through Spanish lines, and rejoined the Republican Army and resumed command of his company.

On January 24, 1813, Taylor precipitated the first major engagement of the now two-month-old siege. Both sides were nearly starving for want of meat, and a Spanish cow that was to be butchered escaped to the no-man’s land between the fortress and Spanish lines. Taylor led his company out to capture the cow, and a general engagement ensued resulting in a major defeat for the Spanish, who may have lost as many as 200 men in the disorganized melee. The republicans lost only one: Josiah Taylor’s slave Thomas, who fought alongside his master. As veteran Warren D. C. Hall recorded, Thomas “was one of the best soldiers I ever saw, having been with him in several skirmishes I had an opportunity of observing his conduct.”

The Spanish gave up the siege and retreated to San Antonio, with the rebels following them a few weeks later. At the battle of Rosillo on March 29, 1813, Taylor’s company fought on the Republican Army’s left wing under Reuben Ross, where it beat back a Spanish ambush and successfully turned the tide of the battle. The Spanish retreated in disorder to San Antonio, where on April 1, 1813, the governor of Texas, Manuel Salcedo, agreed to terms of surrender. As the Spanish delegation came out of the city, Taylor’s company was the first they encountered. Salcedo attempted to offer his sword to Taylor, who refused, telling him to give it to his superior officer.

In June the Spanish made the first attempt to reconquer Texas from the republicans, with Col. Ignacio Elizondo leading a force up to the outskirts of San Antonio, where the republicans attacked them on June 20, 1813, at the battle of Alazán. By this point, Taylor had been promoted to command of the entire left wing of the rebel force. Elizondo attempted a flanking of Taylor’s force, but a company of reserves arrived in time to counter the attack. The Spanish then collapsed and were routed, with 350 dead to the republicans’ twenty-nine.

 The Spanish returned under Gen. Joaquín de Arredondo. The Republican Army marched out to confront them south of San Antonio. At the battle of Medina on August 18, 1813, Taylor played a crucial role as the commander of the republicans’ right wing. At a vital point in the battle when the republicans had withstood a Spanish ambush and were pressing the enemy close, both Taylor and the Tejano commander Miguel Menchaca were seriously injured and taken from the field. In Menchaca’s case, the wound was mortal. Taylor suffered seven wounds but escaped on horseback as the republican defeat turned into a rout and the first Republic of Texas was crushed by the Spanish.

Josiah Taylor returned to the United States to recover, but after Mexican independence, he, like many other Republican Army veterans, returned to Texas as settlers. Based on census information taken at Atascosita in 1826, Taylor and his family lived in Georgia until about 1817, when they moved to Tennessee. The family then lived in Alabama in the early 1820s and moved from there to Texas in 1824. He settled near Atascosita and was listed as a farmer and stockman before moving into Green DeWitt’s colony in 1829; he died there the next year. He was buried in Taylor Cemetery (also known as Taylor-Bennett Cemetery) in present-day Cuero, Texas. His widow received a grant in 1831 in present-day DeWitt County. The youngest children of Josiah Taylor and his wife were born in Texas. He had five sons who served the Republic of Texas in some capacity, including Creed Taylor, who defended the Gonzales Cannon, fought in the siege of Béxar and at the battle of San Jacinto, and later served as a Texas Ranger and in the Mexican War. Josiah Taylor’s descendants were involved in the Sutton-Taylor Feud, the longest and bloodiest feud in Texas, which took place following the Civil War. Taylor’s grave was memorialized with a Texas Historical Marker in 1973, and Taylor Cemetery received its own marker in 2010.