American Historical Ephemera & Photography

Ninth plate daguerreotype portrait of Bayard Taylor. (Slight discoloration to image, tarnish to edges.) Housed in half pressed paper case (wear and some surface loss).

Born in Chester County, PA, Bayard Taylor received his early instruction in an academy at West Chester, PA, and later at nearby Unionville. At the age of 17, Taylor was apprenticed to a printer. He was encouraged by the influential critic and editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold to write poetry, which resulted in his first volume of verse, Ximena, or the Battle of the Sierra Morena, and other Poems, published in 1844. With The Saturday Evening Post and the United States Gazette, Taylor journeyed abroad in return for publication rights to his travel letters, which were compiled in Views Afoot (1846). He began a career in journalism in New York in 1847.

He then ventured west as a newspaper correspondent to write about the California gold rush and subsequently described those experiences in Eldorado (1850), including the following poetic excerpt: "The security of the country is owing, in no small degree, to this plain, practical development of what the French reverence as an abstraction, under the name of Fraternité. To sum up all, in three words, LABOR IS RESPECTABLE: may it never be otherwise, while a grain of gold is left to glitter in Californian soil!"

It is said that Horace Greeley was the one who commissioned Taylor to "go west" and document his travels, perhaps inspiring the famous phrase "Go West, young man."

Taylor continued to travel to remote parts of the world, including the Orient, Africa, and Russia. He became secretary of the US legation at St. Petersburg, Russia in 1862 and later served as US Minister to Prussia in 1878.