Faces of the 12th Virginia Infantry ("Petersburg Regiment"): William W. Tayleure, Reached Appomattox though Wounded Twice

Caption:  William Watson Tayleure

Credit:  Confederate Veteran, Vol. 4, No. 4 (April 1897), 170

William Watson Tayleure, born in South Carolina in 1827, worked as a bookkeeper in New York City before the Civil War and belonged to the 7th New York National Guard.  He enlisted in the Petersburg Riflemen, the 12th Virginia's Company E, on April 19, 1861 in Petersburg.  Promoted to sergeant October 1, 1861, he was wounded at Crampton's Gap on September 14, 1862.
  
At the battle of the Wilderness on May 6, 1864, he watched as the Petersburg Regiment's Color Ensign Benjamin Harrison May tried to stop the firing from the 41st Virginia that wounded Lt. Gen. James Longstreet.  “Ben May stood upon a stump, with his lithe, graceful form, a smile upon his face, waving our battle-flag until it was recognized,” recalled Tayleure.

As combat began at Cumberland Church April 7, 1865, skirmishers from Miles’ division drove in the Petersburg Riflemen picketing the front of the 12th Virginia. An enemy bullet nicked Tayleure, the only man wounded in the 12th that day.

At Appomattox on April 9, whispers spread the report that Lee had surrendered the army. The troops were thunderstruck. “We were profoundly convinced that Lee would ultimately triumph in spite of all odds,” remembered Tayleure.  But the reports proved true

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On April 10 the Petersburg Regiment drew rations from the Unionists.  “Nothing so well became the conquerors as their generous treatment of their late adversaries,” remembered Tayleure. “Rations were promptly and freely issued to our starving men, and in many instances money was given them to help on their way homeward.

Tayleure noticed a distinct chill in relations between North and South after Booth’s assassination of Lincoln.  He moved back to New York and managed public housing in South Brooklyn. There he may have rubbed shoulders with his old comrades from the 7th New York National Guard.