Richard Taylor, the only son of President Zachary Taylor, was born at his father’s plantation, Springfield, outside Louisville, Kentucky in 1826. He graduated from Yale in 1845, and spent most of the succeeding years in Mississippi and Louisiana, where he became a sugar planter and earned a reputation as politician, gentleman-scholar and raconteur. A delegate to the Democratic convention in 1860, he worked there to avert the disruption of the Northern and Southern wings.