Robert Love Taylor - Later Life

Later Life

After his final term as governor, Taylor returned to the lecture circuit, though he continuously sought one the state's U.S. Senate seats. In 1907, he defeated the incumbent senator, Edward W. Carmack, in a public primary, and was elected by the state legislature to the seat later that year. He served from 1907 until his death in 1912. Among the legislation he supported was the Sixteenth Amendment, which allowed the federal government to levy income taxes. He helped secure the amendment's passage in the Senate in 1909.

In 1910, when incumbent Democratic governor Malcolm R. Patterson withdrew from the state's gubernatorial contest due to the turmoil created within the party over the Prohibition issue, Taylor agreed to serve as a replacement nominee. He lost in the general election, however, to the Republican nominee, Ben W. Hooper. Hooper had defeated Taylor's brother, Alfred, for the Republican nomination earlier that year.

On March 31, 1912, Taylor suffered a gallstone attack, and died following unsuccessful surgery at Providence Hospital in Washington. A specially-chartered train carried his body to Nashville, where it lay in the capitol for several days. It was then taken to Knoxville, where a funeral procession of over 40,000 people– the largest in the city's history– attended his burial at Old Gray Cemetery. In 1938, he was reburied at Monte Vista Cemetery in Johnson City in a family plot adjacent to his brother, Alfred.