She married early, and about the year 1847 removed with her husband, Dr. Taylor, and her two children, to New Orleans, where she has since resided. Consequently she was there through the entire secession movement, during which, by her firm and unswerving loyalty, she contrived to render herself somewhat obnoxious to those surrounding her, of opposite sentiments.
Mrs. Taylor watched anxiously the progress of the movements which preceded the outbreak, and fearlessly, though not obtrusively, expressed her own adverse opinions. At this time her eldest son was nineteen years of age, a noble and promising youth. He was importuned by his friends and associates to join some one of the many companies then forming, but as he was about to graduate in the high school, he and his family made that an objection. As soon as he graduated a lieutenancy was offered him in one of the companies, but deferring an answer, he left immediately for a college in the interior. Two months after the college closed its doors, and the students, urged by the faculty, almost en-masse entered the army. Mrs. Taylor, to remove her son, sent him at once to the north, and rejoiced in the belief that he was safe.
Immediately after this her persecutions commenced. Her husband had been ill for more than two years, while she supported her family by teaching, being principal of one of the city public schools. One day she was called from his bed-side to an interview with one of the Board of Directors of the schools.
By him she was accused (?) of being a Unionist, and informed that it was believed that she had sent her son away "to keep him from fighting for his country." Knowing the gentleman to be a northern man, she answered freely, saying that the country of herself and son was the whole country, and for it she was willing he should shed his last drop of blood, but not to divide and mutilate it, would she consent that he should ever endanger himself.
The consequence of this freedom of speech was her dismissal from her situation on the following day. With her husband ill unto death, her house mortgaged, her means of livelihood taken away, she could only look upon the future with dark forebodings which nothing but her faith in God and the justice of her cause could subdue.
A short time after a mob assembled to tear down her house. She stepped out to remonstrate with them against pulling down the house over the head of a dying man. The answer was, "Madam, we give you five minutes to decide whether you are for the South or the North. If at the end of that time you declare yourself for the South, your house shall remain; if for the North, it must come down."
Her answer was memorable.
"Sir, I will say to you and your crowd, and to the world if you choose to summon it—I am, always have been, and ever shall be, for the Union. Tear my house down if you choose!"
Awed perhaps by her firmness, and unshrinking devotion, the spokesman of the mob looked at her steadily for a moment, then turning to the crowd muttered something, and they followed him away, leaving her unmolested. This man was a renegade Boston Yankee.
Such was her love for the national flag that during all this period of persecution, previous to General Butler's taking possession of the city she never slept without the banner of the free above her head, although her house was searched no less than seven times by a mob of chivalrous gentlemen, varying in number from two or three score to three hundred, led by a judge who deemed it not beneath his dignity to preside over a court of justice by day, and to search the premises of a defenseless woman by night, in the hope of finding the Union flag, in order to have an excuse for ejecting her from the city, because she was well known to entertain sentiments inimical to the interests of secession.