A local TV Station has a very nice recounting of the history of Captain Jonathan Taylor:
Source: (
visit link)
'Somewhere off of this picture is 20-year-old Jonathan Taylor of Bethlehem and at that moment no one had to tell him how terrible war was. As a Captain of Company C of the 129th Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers he found himself in one of the bigger failures of Union military leadership in the Civil War, the battle of Fredericksburg, one that would eventually lead to his wounding and later death. The Civil War monument in Bethlehem’s Rose Garden, recently restored, honors Taylor and his fellow soldiers from the Bethlehem and Northampton County area.
Born in Kidder Township, Carbon County on the 21st of April 1842, Taylor moved with his family to Bethlehem in 1858. At the outbreak of the war in 1861 he was a student at the Weaversville Academy, a private school of 100 students, some of whom boarded at the school and included male and female scholars. The academy favored a classical education, which meant an emphasis on Greek and Latin classics in the original languages. If it was like other schools of this type, it included writings of Homer and Caesar and other tales of soldiers from antiquity. The fact that Taylor attended a private school where his parents had to pay tuition rather than a public school suggests that they were of some means if not exactly wealthy.
Shortly following the bombardment of Fort Sumter the 19-year-old Taylor enlisted in Company A, First Pennsylvania Volunteers. The regiment was mustered in at Harrisburg on April 20th 1861. If he was like many young soldiers at the time Taylor might have assumed that the war would be over before he had a chance to fight. His regiment was at Harpers Ferry on July 21, 1861, when the battle of Bull Run took place. Washington socialites in their carriages with picnic baskets quickly fled following a Union Army battered against Jackson’s “stone wall.” It signaled the war would be a long one.
Taylor’s unit had only been mustered in for three months of service. For some that brief stint with war was enough. But in the summer of 1862, Taylor was one of the first in Bethlehem again to respond to Lincoln’s call. Although young and inexperienced Taylor must have had something, what some would call natural leadership qualities or others would call charisma. Whatever it was, it is clear he enjoyed both the respect of his men and the confidence of his superiors.
After a period of training the 129th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment was sent to join the Army of the Potomac in late September of 1862, shortly after the battle of Antietam. The leaves were gone from the trees by that December when the Army of the Potomac finally caught up with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia on the banks of the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg, Virginia. “Almost 200,000 men stared at each other across that barrier,” notes one source.
Facing Lee was 38-year-old General Ambrose Burnside. Well-liked with a fierce demeanor, he looked like what a fighting general should look like. He had managed to convince Lincoln he could swiftly smash Lee’s army and win the war. Better known later for the lavish facial hair later called sideburns, Burnside’s plans for the battle were marred by a series of mishaps, including a delay in the arrival of pontoon bridges. House to house fighting took place in Fredericksburg as Union troops struggled to control the ground by the riverbank.
The goal of the Union Army was a stonewall atop Marye’s Heights manned by the Confederates. The task was daunting. After they left the city, soldiers had to descend a valley bisected by a water-filled ditch and ascend an open slope of 400 yards to reach the base of the heights. “Artillery atop Marye’s Heights and nearby elevations would thoroughly blanket the Federal approach,” states the National Park Service website. “A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it,” a Confederate cannoneer succinctly stated. The cannoneer’s remarks were not an idle boast. And what exactly Burnside hoped to achieve is still debated. But around noon on December 13th the assault began, and it went on until dark. In the first hour over 3,000 Union soldiers were dead.
“And still the madness continued,” notes the National Park Service’s account. “More units tested the impossible,” it continues. “We came forward as though breasting a storm of rain and sleet, our faces and bodies being only half-turned to the storm, our shoulders struggled,” remembered one Federal. “Everybody from the smallest drummer boy on up seemed to be shouting to the full extent of capacity,” recalled another. But each blue wave crested short of the goal. Not a single Union soldier laid his hand on the stone wall.
It was in the gloom and dark that the 129th advanced. They were told to take the stone wall at the point of a bayonet. Dying men were all about them in the churned-up earth as they charged through mud up to their ankles. The darkness enveloped the battlefield and still they charged forward. One of the first to fall was Taylor, shot through the shoulder and lung. Yet he refused to leave the field, only retreating finally with his men. In less than an hour the 129th saw 142 men killed, wounded, or missing. “The hideous cries of the wounded, weird, unearthly terrible to hear and bear,” echoed through the night,” states the National Park Service’s account.
Today some historians note that despite the terrible death toll suffered by the Union it was in one way more harmful to the Confederates. It had forced Lee to expend a huge amount of his supplies and munitions, things that the South had little of. At the same time the North was in the process of turning itself into an industrial war machine. Finally, Burnside was about to lead a charge himself but was dissuaded by his aides. He would go on to a blunder at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 in which thousands of white and Black Union soldiers died. Grant felt looking back on it that Burnside should not have held a rank any higher than colonel.
But Burnside’s failures on the battlefield did not mar his post-war career. He sat on the boards of several railroads, was elected to three terms as Republican governor of Rhode Island and two terms representing that state in the U.S. Senate. In 1871, according to his Wikipedia bio, Burnside was named the first president of a fledgling organization called the National Rifle Association. He died in the 1880s.
At first, the reports reaching Bethlehem on the battle were relatively positive. It was believed no one was killed and a few wounded. But then the truth, especially about the wounded, came out. Battlefield medicine being what it was in the 1860s, death gradually took its toll. At times Taylor seemed to be getting well. His father David visited him and brought items for other members of the 129th and visited with them. Over the next 105 days Taylor was moved from one place to another by railroad and steamboat. Pain killers and antibiotics were unknown and his suffering from all that movement must have been great.
Finally, he died with his parents at his bedside in a private house in Georgetown (the hospitals in Washington were full) on March 28, 1863, 24 days before his 21st birthday. Like the Greek and Roman heroes he read about in his classroom at the Weaversville Academy, he died a no less heroic death.
At Taylor’s funeral a huge number of Bethlehem citizens turned out. Because he attended Moravian services since coming to Bethlehem and at his parents' request, the Moravian Church gave permission for Taylor to be buried in God’s Acre cemetery.
The local press covered the arrival and funeral this way:
“The train from Philadelphia containing the remains of the gallant dead arrived at regular time –at half past nine, on Monday morning March 30th. All the principal places of business were closed; flags floating at half-mast could be seen on the Bethlehem Female Seminary buildings on the Eagle and Sun Hotels, and at several other places; bells were tolled from the time the procession left the depot, until it reached the home of the deceased. The Bethlehem Band, the Moravian Day School –hundreds of patriotic girls and boys—in charge of the principal and his assistants: the Burgess and the Town Council and the Diligent Fire Company, formed on the Lehigh Bridge and took the right of procession. Hundreds of citizens followed the vehicles containing his parents and family members, making altogether a most imposing and highly appropriate ceremony in honor of a true patriot, who voluntarily sacrificed his own life in order that the Republic might live.” Taylor was buried the next day not far from his parents’ West Market Street home.
When the war was over a Grand Army of the Republic Veterans post was formed. It was named Post 182, the Jonathan K. Taylor Post.
On October 11, 1887, in what is believed to have been the biggest parade in Bethlehem’s history was held to celebrate the installation of a statue to honor Taylor, their forever young friend, as well as all Bethlehem Civil War veterans, living and dead. Cast of 99.3 percent zinc by the Monumental Bronze Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, it is a generic figure, one of many made by the company from 1874 to 1914 on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Originally placed on West Market Street not far from Taylor’s home in 1967 it was moved to a more secure location at Bethlehem’s Rose Garden.
By 2015, in fear that it was leaning left and might topple over, the statue was removed and restored and in May 2017 was securely returned to its place.
Perhaps Ed Root, past president of the Civil War Roundtable of Eastern Pennsylvania said it best of Taylor: “He was brave, he was patriotic, and he was earnest. ” Even all these years later Bethlehem has not forgotten Taylor’s sacrifice, “in order that the Republic might live.”'