James Thomas Sammons Taylor (14 January 1840–4 January 1918) member of the Convention of 1867–1868, was born in Berryville. He was the son of Fairfax Taylor, an African American shoemaker who had purchased his freedom, and his first wife Ellen Sammons Taylor. By 1850 the family had moved to Charlottesville, where his father became a prominent leader in the Black community. He reportedly hired a private tutor for his son and also taught him the cobbler's trade. After the United States War Department established the Bureau of Colored Troops, James Taylor enlisted in the U.S.C.T.'s 2d Infantry Regiment on 24 August 1863, in Washington, D.C. Assigned to Company E, he was named acting commissary sergeant and was promoted to the post on 10 November 1863, with the rank to date from 1 September. In 1864 and 1865 he sent letters to the New York Anglo-African describing military engagements and protesting the lack of African American officers. Taylor was accused of stealing from the commissary stores in 1864, but there are no regimental records of a trial and he was restored to duty in March 1865. While stationed in Key West, Florida, he met, courted, and on 18 April 1865, married Eliza Ann Delancy, the freeborn daughter of Bahamian immigrants. He was mustered out of the army on 5 January 1866 and took his wife back to Virginia.
Taylor returned to Charlottesville and three months later asked the local agent of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to help him secure money still owed to him by the army. In 1872 he purchased more than an acre of his father's property and built a two-story brick house for his family, which included at least eight daughters and five sons among their thirteen children. Like his father, Taylor advocated civil rights for African Americans, but they disagreed on the best means of accomplishing their goals. As required by the Reconstruction Acts passed by Congress in 1867, Virginia had to rewrite its constitution before it could be readmitted to the United States. At a Republican meeting held in Charlottesville on 1 September Taylor was nominated as one of the candidates to represent Albemarle County at a constitutional convention. Fairfax Taylor, however, opposed his nomination and publically refused to support his son because he thought that moderate white Republicans would be more effective in representing the interests of African Americans. Described as a radical, Taylor won election on 22 October 1867 as one of the county's two convention delegates. African Americans, voting for the first time in Virginia, overwhelmingly supported him and white radical C. L. Thompson and elected them by a margin of about three hundred votes out of approximately 4,000 cast.
At the convention, which began on 3 December 1867, Taylor was named to the thirteen-member committee that organized the business of the convention by identifying the numbers and duties of the standing committees. He sat on the Committees on the Basis of Representation and Apportionment and on Prisons and the Prevention and Punishment of Crime. Taylor spoke occasionally on the convention floor and offered an unsuccessful resolution calling for a law to allow former enslaved workers to sue for wages owed them for any work they did for their former owners after the end of the Civil War. He generally sided with the Radicals in the convention, including an unsuccessful vote to require integrated public schools. On 17 April 1868 he voted with the majority to approve the new constitution, which provided for universal manhood suffrage, the establishment of a statewide public school system, and the democratization of local government.
At a meeting in March 1869, Republicans nominated Taylor as a candidate for the House of Delegates. At the election on 6 July, when voters approved the new constitution, Taylor received only 43 percent of the vote and was defeated. He participated in Republican Party politics during the 1870s and attended local and state conventions. In 1875 he joined another African American and a white man on a Republican ticket for Albemarle County's three seats in the House of Delegates. They lost the tight race and Taylor finished 105 votes behind the third place candidate. By 1881 he supported the Readjuster Party, a biracial coalition that sought to reduce and refinance payments on the state's crippling public debt to fund public education and other services. As a poll worker for Readjuster John Sergeant Wise, Taylor was accused of helping ineligible voters cast ballots during the 1882 congressional election. He continued his political activity as a Republican into the twentieth century and remained a prominent member of his community. When Virginia enacted a new constitution in 1902 that severely restricted the voting rights of African Americans, Taylor was one of the few Black men in his neighborhood who was able to register as a voter.
James Thomas Sammons Taylor died of pneumonia at his home on 4 January 1918. He was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, in Charlottesville.
Sources Consulted: Birth and death dates, full name, and parents' names in Death Certificate, Charlottesville, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); date of marriage and list of children in Federal Pension Application Files, certificate numbers 855,062 and 863,849; Records of the Veterans Administration, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, D.C.; Compiled Service Military Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers Who Served With the U. S. Colored Troops, 2nd through 7th Colored Infantry, 1861–1865, Records of the Adjutant General's Office, Record Group 94, NARA; Taylor's request for back-pay from the army, 17 Apr. 1866, in Subordinate Field Offices, Charlottesville (Albemarle County, Asst. Subassistant Commissioner), Letters Received, March 1866–January 1868, Records of the Field Offices for the State of Virginia (1865–1872), Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, M1913, NARA; Journal of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Virginia [1868], esp. 16, 28, 29, 389; Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Virginia (1868), esp. 151, 248, 374, 454, 603–604, 719–720, 736; Richard L. Hume, "The Membership of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1867–1868: A Study of the Beginnings of Congressional Reconstruction in the Upper South," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86 (1978): 461–484; Richard G. Lowe, "Virginia's Reconstruction Convention: General Schofield Rates the Delegates," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 80 (1972): 347; General Orders and Circulars, Headquarters First Military District, 1869 (1870), "Summary of the result of the election for members of the House of Delegates of Virginia, held on the 6th day of July, 1869," 3; Papers and Testimony in the Contested-Election case of John E. Massey vs. John S. Wise, from the State of Virginia at Large, 48th Congress, 1st session, House of Representatives Misc. Document 27, serial 2226, part 1, esp. pp. 174–177; Albemarle County Deed Book No. 69, pp. 152–153, LVA; interview with Mrs. Eliza Ann Taylor by Susie R. C. Byrd (rendered in African American dialect), 5 Mar. 1937, LH01410, Virginia Writers' Project, Accession 36002, Federal Records Collection, LVA ; Luther Porter Jackson, Negro Office Holders in Virginia, 1865–1895 (1945), 41; Joseph C. Vance, "The Negro in the Reconstruction of Albemarle County, Virginia" (Master's thesis, University of Virginia, 1953); Staunton Spectator, 29 Oct. 1867, Alexandria Gazette, 4 Oct. 1867; Charlottesville Chronicle, 3, 24 Oct. 1867; Richmond Daily State Journal, 17 June 1872; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 3 Nov. 1875.