The Mad Hatter

[Craig Hipkins]

Craig,

That is a great blogspot! I especially liked the cherries and milk speculation on Zachary Taylor. I had heard that story before, and it always reminds me of a cousin of my grandmother who died in our Huntt home. I was always told that he climbed the cherry tree and ate too many cherries. His death came quickly also and was diagnosed as a ruptured appendix from eating too many cherries - some of which were not ripe enough.

Laurie,

That's a great story! He must have ate a ton of them. I wonder if he washed them down with milk I always wondered if Taylor might have gotten sick from the unpasteurized milk. I can remember reading another story about unripe fruit. During the American Revolution, General Horatio Gates men on the march in South Carolina were not provided with proper rations. Therefore, along the way they stopped at various apple orchards and consumed large quantities of unripe apples. A lot of them became sick so that when they met Cornwallis and the British at Camden the army was routed.

Craig

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Fellow Forum members-do you view Boston Corbett ultimately as a "hero" or lunatic or something of a combination of both? I think I read Stanton "decided" to make him a hero- but wasn't happy that Booth was killed. Or-was Stanton inwardly pleased Booth was dead?

Bill,
That's a good question. In my humble opinion I wouldn't consider Corbett to be a "hero" or a "lunatic" as the term applies itself. He was a complicated individual, and he definitely had issues! He castrated himself with a pair of scissors. Obviously no one in their right mind would do this. However, he seemed to always have possession of his faculties even if he was doing something irrational like holding the Kansas State Legislature at gunpoint. I am no doctor, and certainly not qualified to give an expert opinion on his illness, but I suspect that it might have been some sort of genetic thing, perhaps a form of schizophrenia. His father, who's name was Bartholomew Corbett was found in his house in England sleeping among walls of birdcages, old clothes and other junk. The only way that he could move around the house was by way of a cleared path to his bedding. I guess that today he would be a prime candidate for one of those reality TV shows where people live in trashed houses (I forget the name of the show.)
As far as Corbett being a hero. He never considered himself one. To him, he was just a soldier doing his duty. By shooting Booth at Garrett's farm he stated many times that he believed that Booth was going to shoot at his comrades. I don't believe that there is any evidence that Stanton ordered anyone to bring Booth back alive. If he did, I think that Corbett would have been court martialed. There has been some speculation that Stanton was happy that Booth was dead because "dead men tell no tales" But that is another subject

Craig