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Strife of wartime Kentucky was behind the TAYLORS not more than a year when the conflict officially concluded on Sunday, April 9, 1865. Only five days later, during the evening of Friday, April 14, President Lincoln was assassinated and died the following morning in Washington, DC. After the President succumbed, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton mused: "Now he belongs to the ages." Commenting on Lincoln's dedication to the nation, Reverend James Reed eulogized: "A greater work is seldom performed by a single man. Generations yet unborn will rise up and call him blessed." Registered Democrat Vice-President Andrew Johnson would succeed the martyred Republican President. Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, "a humor-less farmer who had not practiced medicine in years," aided Lincoln's assassin on his flight from justice. Mudd was an acquaintance of John Wilkes Booth, who had exhibited signs of nuttiness, and he set the fugitive actor's broken leg bone, injured while the crime at Ford's Theater was being committed. Booth enjoyed the night as the doctor's guest at the Mudd farmhouse on a 500-acre spread, while Lincoln lay dying in a boarding house a dozen miles to the northwest, across the street from the theater. The erstwhile physician was later sentenced for conspiracy in helping his friend Booth, and the expression "his name is mud" was born. But while treating typhoid patients in prison, Mudd was later granted a pardon in February, 1869. John Wilkes Booth was himself killed by soldier Boston Corbet on April 25 after the fugitive actor was found by pursuers and trapped in a burning barn. Years later, in 1887, Corbet worked as a doorman at the Kansas state legislature. His bizarre conduct on the job brought confinement to the State Insane hospital in Topeka, but he soon escaped from the mental institution. Corbet reportedly stole a horse and rode off to Mexico, never to be heard from again. During a broiling hot spell of mid-1865, Martha (Winn) Cook was kept exceedingly busy. Fearing the persistent sore on Bessie's face could be cancerous, she was waiting for brother Robert to arrive from Kentucky with all his medical knowledge. Although Martha continued going to regular church services, she reluctantly dropped her regular attendance at Sabbath school to have more time for her mother who was also ailing. But Martha was happy with the Union finally restored, and glad to have her loving husband back with the family at their DuQuoin, IL, residence. Matt's soldiering days were through. And with the war finally over, the Cooks were very active in trying to keep up with their business. Now that they could buy needed materials at lower cost, they were occupied with filling back orders. And the couple wanted some home-remodeling done. They decided to have the carpenters build a front porch and add seating on each side between the pillars. Then Matthew and Martha would put the painters to work at coating the entire house. When the 4th of July came, one weary ex-soldier had been back home in Hawesville again for the past 17 days. Although his last official day of military service was back on May 26, Robert Winn had decided to remain with his outfit a short while longer. The army unit's doctor had no one to replace Robert, so the young medic accommodatingly stayed around Lexington, NC, helping out for a few more days. But the long trek homeward from the Turpentine State, as North Carolina was called, and lingering effects of last year's afflictions changed Robert's immediate plans to celebrate Independence Day of 1865 with his sister's family way over in Illinois. Robert spent the holiday across the Ohio River at Cannelton, IN, and didn't set out for the Cooks' house at DuQuoin until the next day. All through the passing months of early 1865, MARY TAYLOR was attending her family and anticipating the birth of another baby. The significant moment came during a Sunday at their Nebraska farm home. On Sunday, July 9, the infant was delivered and given the name Emma Jane Taylor. MARY's new baby girl was their seventh child. Shortly afterward, JOHN received information regarding their former hometown of Hawesville, KY, and local news of DuQuoin, IL, from old friends still lamenting Abraham Lincoln's shocking death precisely three months earlier. The martyred President was born in Kentucky, grew up in Indiana, and spent most of his life in Illinois, the whole area being entirely familiar to JOHN TAYLOR and his friends. About this same time, conspirators in Lincoln's assassination were hanged in Washington, DC. And in Illinois, the state where Lincoln was recently laid to rest, Matthew Cook knew the nearby Union Mines' coal-mining operation was needfully inquiring around for a blacksmith. But JOHN's friends stressed that even the unassured life of a discouraged farmer was undoubtedly better than being a miner any old day. Currently, JOHN was doing very well in Nebraska and was perfectly content with his agricultural occupation. Martha Cook detailed the anguish and hardship begat by numerous recent deaths and injuries pertaining to accidents inherent to the coal region, reminding JOHN of the attendant strife and dangers he had once before experienced. |
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