John Taylor 1753-1824, American political philosopher. Known as John Taylor of Caroline, he was born in Virginia, probably in Caroline co., where he later lived at "Hazlewood." Orphaned at 10, he was adopted by his maternal uncle, Edmund Pendleton, who sent him to the College of William and Mary and under whom he studied law. Taylor fought in the American Revolution, rising to the rank of major, and was a member of the Virginia house of delegates (1779-81, 1783-85, 1796-1800) and of the U.S. Senate (1792-94, 1803, 1822-24). The states' rights doctrine (see Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions ) was introduced in the Virginia house by Taylor, who became a leading publicist of Jeffersonian democracy, or "agrarianism." Although a strict constructionist, he defended the constitutionality of the Louisiana Purchase in A Defense of the Measures of the Administration of Thomas Jefferson (1804). In Thomas Jefferson's second term Taylor was a leader of the Quids, who, disliking James Madison, supported James Monroe for President, but he became a peacemaker between the factions. His greatest work, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (1814), was an attack on the growing power of finance capitalism and its harmful effects on agriculture and democracy. In Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated (1820), Tyranny Unmasked (1822), and New Views of the Constitution (1823), he opposed John Marshall and the growing power of the federal government. An agrarian liberal, he was much concerned with the economic and political well-being of the farmer, and his Arator (1813) was one of the first analytical treatises on American agriculture and its problems. He is best known, however, as one of the first formulators of the states' rights doctrine.

Bibliography: See biography by H. Simms (1932); study by R. E. Shalhope (1980).

John Taylor

John Taylor (1753-1824), American politician and political theorist, was a major spokesman for southern agrarian, planter society.

John Taylor was born in Virginia in December 1753. His parents died while he was a child, and he was raised by his uncle, Edmund Pendleton. Taylor attended William and Mary College (1770-1772), read law in Pendleton's office (1772-1774), and then began to practice law.

At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Taylor joined the Virginia militia and then the Continental Army. He soon became a major. When the Continental Army was reduced in 1779, he resigned and returned home. In 1783 he married Lucy Penn, the daughter of a wealthy North Carolina planter. His legal practice prospered during the next 10 years, and building on his wife's properties, he acquired a number of plantations. By 1792 Taylor was able to devote all of his time to his two major interests: scientific agriculture and public office.

From 1779 to 1785 and again from 1796 to 1800, Taylor sat in the Virginia House of Delegates. He served as a U.S. senator in 1792-1794, 1803, and 1822-1824. He early allied himself with the emerging Jeffersonian Republican party. During the 1790s he strongly opposed the financial program of Alexander Hamilton. Toward the end of the decade Taylor introduced James Madison's famous resolutions condemning the Alien and Sedition Acts in the Virginia Assembly. In 1800 he worked enthusiastically for Thomas Jefferson's election.

By about 1808, however, Taylor had become disillusioned with Jefferson's administration, accusing it of abandoning its original principles of agrarianism and states' rights. During Madison's two terms as president, Taylor moved even more sharply into opposition, speaking out vigorously against the War of 1812 and its centralizing consequences—the increased national debt, tax program, and expanded armed forces.

Much of Taylor's lasting significance rests with his published writings. Unsystematic and tedious, they nonetheless offer a cogent criticism of Hamiltonian Federalist policies and a defense of the South's agrarian, states'-rights philosophy. Among his most important publications are An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (1814) and Constructions Construed and Constitutions Vindicated (1820). Linked with these were his Arator essays (1803), suggesting agricultural reforms necessary for southern equality in the struggle against northern interests. He died on Aug. 21, 1824, at his plantation home, Hazelwood, in Virginia.

Further Reading

The modern biography of Taylor is by Henry Simms, Life of John Taylor (1932), which provides an adequate introduction to his life and thought. Eugene Mudge, The Social Philosophy of John Taylor of Caroline (1939), offers a more systematic treatment of Taylor's political and economic thought. A valuable discussion of Taylor's political activities, set in the context of the Old Republican movement, is in Norman Risjord, The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism (1965).

Additional Sources

Shalhope, Robert E., John Taylor of Caroline: pastoral republican, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1980.

Simms, Henry Harrison, Life of John Taylor: the story of a brilliant leader in the early Virginia state rights school, Littleton, Colo.: F.B. Rothman, 1992. □