Taylor later won election to the Virginia House of Delegates and served part-time for one term before losing to the man he had defeated.

James Craig Taylor married fellow Montgomery County native Catherine Rebecca Wade (1832–1893) on December 23, 1851.

[4] Taylor soon raised a company (C in the 54th Virginia Infantry), and became its captain on September 10, 1861, later fighting in the Battle of Middle Creek in Kentucky and earning a promotion to Major on May 13, 1862.

In 1863, voters in Carroll, Floyd, Grayson, Montgomery and Pulaski Counties elected Taylor to represent them in the Virginia Senate, which he did until the Commonwealth's surrender.

[6] Taylor replaced John Calhoun Dickenson, a planter and merchant who had represented Grayson County in the Virginia General Assembly since 1853.

[8] As attorney general, Taylor became involved in what became a decades-long controversy over funding of Virginia's prewar debt, as well as the public schools established by the new 1869 Constitution.

[9] The second-post-Reconstruction General Assembly had in the Funding Act of 1871 attempted to repeal the favored tax status accorded bonds issued to repay post-war debt, but in the first decision, only his mentor and Christiansburg attorney turned justice Walter Redd Staples supported the readjustment in his dissent, which argued the new bondholders had not given up anything of value (the bonds being worthless after the war because the underlying railroads and other improvements had been destroyed) and that the new state Constitution required fines paid into the old Literary Fund be expended solely for the benefit of the public schools rather than bondholders.

[11] James C. Taylor died in Christiansburg on October 25, 1887, and was buried in Christainsburg's Sunset Cemetery, which he had helped charter in 1879.