James G. Taliaferro

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.

Taliaferro graduated from Transylvania College in Lexington, Kentucky. In a speech to the convention, he said:

At the secession convention he also said:

"Sir, I am behind no man in attachment to Louisiana. I am unable to see that higher and grander position which gentlemen say Louisiana is to assume by the act of secession. Clouds and darkness rather, are before me. The dimness of age, perhaps, prevents me from penetrating the gloom and seeing the bright skies and green fields beyond. In the exercise of my best judgment, and under my honest convictions of the ruinous tendency of this measure, I must pronounce it an act of madness and of folly. Sir, I vote Nay."

Two of his sons served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He is buried along with his wife in Alexander Cemetery in Manifest, Louisiana, Catahoula Parish.