John Taylor was born in Orange County, Virginia, in 1750, one year
before James Madison, and the boys were neighbors; but Taylor afterwards
moved to Caroline County, where he lived for the rest of his life, and
died in 1824, at the age of seventy-four years. To distinguish him from
others of the same name as himself he was called John Taylor of
Caroline. He was an officer in the Revolutionary War, and ranked with
the foremost men of his State. He did not approve of the Constitution,
but was not a member of the State Convention in which its ratification
was so bitterly contested. December 12, 1792, he took a seat in the
United States Senate made vacant by the resignation of Richard Henry
Lee, and served until he resigned in 1794. In 1803, from October 17 to
December 13, he filled an unexpired term by appointment, caused by the
death of Stevens Thomson Mason, and again he served from December, 1822,
to his death in August, 1824. He was in the State Legislature several
times, and in 1798 introduced the famous Virginia Resolutions which
Madison had prepared. He was one of the conference of Jefferson, George
Nicholas, Wilson Cary Nicholas, John Breckinridge, and Madison, at which
it was determined to formulate the creed which the Virginia and
Kentucky Resolutions announced. He was always a consistent state rights
man, and the preservation of the division of power between the general
and state governments was the keynote to his political belief. “The
federal party,” he said in one of his newspaper letters, to Thomas
Ritchie, printed in *“The Spirit of Seventy-six,” March 27, 1809, “were
in favor of a government founded upon a balance of power between the
departments of the government, their opponents of one founded upon its
division between government and the people, and between two
governments.” It is not known whether he was an emancipationist, as
nearly all the leaders of thought in Virginia of this period were, but
he denounced any interference with slavery by the general government,
and the fear that there would be such interference, if the policy of the
general government should be shaped by an unchecked majority, was
really the fundamental cause of his insistence upon state rights.
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*My friend and I were going to open a bar of the same name in Saigon but when we arrived the day of the takeover with two 22K BTU Carrier air conditioners, the owners wouldn't answer the door. :) Evidently they had been bought off by the competition. When we went to sell them we had a good offer, but when they found out the pair had been built in Singapore instead of the US, they backed out.