L. P. Brockett, Women's work in the civil war: a record of heroism, patriotism and patience

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.

Before the South ran mad with treason, Mrs. Taylor and the wife of this judge were intimate friends, and their intimacy had not entirely ceased so late as the early months of 1862. It was