page_title: Benjamin Ogle Tayloe
section_title: Birth, schooling and diplomatic career
hierarchical_section_title: Benjamin Ogle Tayloe / Birth, schooling and diplomatic career
caption_attribution_description: English: Bust of Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, by Powers.
context_page_description: Benjamin "Ogle" Tayloe was an American businessman, bon vivant, diplomat, and influential political activist in Washington, D.C. during the first half of the 19th century. Although he never held elective office, he was a prominent Whig and influential in presidential electoral politics in the 1840s and 1850s. His home, the Tayloe House, became a salon for politically powerful people in the federal government and socially influential individuals in the United States and abroad. Tayloe was also a party in the important 1869 contract law case, Willard v. Tayloe, 75 U.S. 557.
context_section_description: Tayloe was born on May 21, 1796, at Ogle Hall in Annapolis, Maryland, a home belonging to his maternal grandfather, Benjamin Ogle, the ninth governor of Maryland.  His maternal great-grandfather was former provincial governor Samuel Ogle, descended from an ancient Northern English Family, the Barons Ogle, a family allied with the Manner's of Rutland, Cavendish's of Newcastle, and even earlier Baron de Ros. Tayloe's father was Colonel John Tayloe III, one of the richest people in Virginia. Colonel Tayloe had built The Octagon House in 1800, and his great-grandfather. John Tayloe II, had built the great country estate house of Mount Airy in Richmond County, Virginia, in 1762 on an estate his father, John Tayloe I inherited from his father William Tayloe (the nephew) previously known as "Tayloe's Quarter." In addition, he counted as his progenitors' such men of the tidewater gentry at Col. Thomas Addison of Oxon Hill Manor, and Benjamin Tasker Sr..
  He was tutored by Samuel Hoar, a prominent lawyer and politician in the state of Massachusetts. When he was 13 years old, he entered Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. His roommate was John Adams Dix, later the United States Secretary of the Treasury, a U.S. senator, and 24th governor of New York.  He entered Harvard College in 1811, where his classmates included some of the most prominent Americans of the next half-century: historian Jared Sparks; jurist Theophilus Parsons; cleric and politician John G. Palfrey; Unitarian minister Convers Francis; businessman John Amory Lowell; and historian William H. Prescott. He was a member of the Porcellian Club. While in college during the War of 1812, he witnessed the famous battle between HMS Shannon and USS Chesapeake.  He dined with Chesapeake's captain, James Lawrence, the night before the battle. He graduated from Harvard in 1815.
  From 1815 to 1817, Tayloe studied law under United States Attorney General Richard Rush. When Rush was appointed Minister to Great Britain in 1817, Tayloe was named his Private Secretary. While in London, he lived at 15 King Street, Portman Square. He visited often with many of Great Britain's most influential politicians and nobility, and became close friends with the young painter Washington Allston and the author Washington Irving. He was presented to the Prince Regent, George, in 1818. He also traveled widely in Europe, Ireland, and Scotland, and was an observer at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818. He traveled to Paris in the spring of 1819, where Minister to France Albert Gallatin introduced him to King Louis XVIII and Talleyrand.
  Tayloe returned to the United States in November 1819 and settled at Windsor (his inherited family estate in King George County, Virginia), where he began writing for various horse racing and horse breeding publications. 
  On November 8, 1824, Tayloe married Julia Maria Dickinson of Troy, New York. The couple had six children: John (born 1826), Edward (born 1829), Estelle (born 1833), Anna (born 1834), Eugenie (born 1835), and Julia (born 1838). Anna died when just two years old.  Although Tayloe preferred to live at Windsor, his wife asked that they move into the city where she was more comfortable.
  On March 23, 1828, Tayloe's father, Col. John Tayloe III, died. In 1816 Col. Tayloe had built six two-story houses facing Pennsylvania Avenue at 14th Street NW, and in 1817 had leased them to John Tennison who ran them as a hotel. The structures served as a hotel for the next three decades, the leaseholder and name changing several times: Williamson's Mansion Hotel, Fullers American House, and the City Hotel.
  He adopted his father's coat of arms, Purpure a sword palewise proper between two lions rampant addorsed [Argent?]. The sword John III and Benjamin displayed was an epee; the only child of Sarah Knowles Bolton, librarian Charles Knowles Bolton, considered that the lions were likely Ermine rather than Argent.
caption: Bust of Benjamin Ogle Tayloe by Powers
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