“I now present these reminiscences to you, hoping they may prove of some interest, and show how much service and good we can do to each other,” wrote Susie King Taylor in 1902’s “Reminiscences of my Life in Camp”, “...what sacrifices we can make for our liberty and rights, and that there were ‘loyal women,’ as well as men, in those days, who did not fear shell or shot, who cared for the sick and dying; women who camped and fared as the boys did, and who are still caring for the comrades in their declining years. ... So, with the hope that the following pages will accomplish some good and instruction for its readers, I shall proceed with my narrative.”
Susan Baker was born into slavery, the first of nine children. Only six of her younger siblings would survive infancy. “I was born on the Grest Farm (which was on an island known as Isle of Wight), Liberty County, about thirty-five miles from Savannah, Ga., on August 6, 1848, my mother being waitress for the Grest family,” she said.
At age 7, Susie, along with a brother and sister, were permitted to move to Savannah to live with their grandmother. At the time Georgia’s anti-literary laws made it illegal for any Black person, free or enslaved, to “read or write either written or printed characters” under the threat of a “fine and whipping,” according to an 1829 act. Despite this, Susie’s grandmother sent the kids to a widow named Mrs. Woodhouse to learn. “We went every day about nine o’clock, with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them,” Susie recalled later. The children went in one at a time, to further avoid suspicion, and then left the same way.
By age 12, Susie was using this education to secretly forge travel passes. “All colored persons, free or slaves, were compelled to have a pass,” she wrote. “Every person had to have this pass, for at nine o’clock each night a bell was rung, and any colored persons found on the street after this hour were arrested by the watchmen.” Susie created passes granting them free travel until 10:30 p.m.
The first battles of the Civil War drew blood when Susie was just months from turning 13. Stories of the “Yankees” in the north trickled to the enslaved people in the south, especially those who could read the newspapers. “I wanted to see these wonderful ‘Yankees’ so much, as I heard my parents say the Yankee was going to set the slaves free,” Susie said. “Oh, how those people prayed for freedom!”
Southern slavers insisted that the Yankees offered no freedom, but instead even worse bondage. White people only “told them these things to frighten them,” Susie’s grandmother assured her. Frighten them they did. The crackdown on pro-Union sentiment was intense and personal. Decades later, Susie still remembered well the night her grandmother went to a church in the suburbs for a meeting. Together, the churchgoers sang an old hymn: “Yes, we all shall be free/When the Lord shall appear.”
“The police came in and arrested all who were there, saying that they were planning freedom, and sang ‘the Lord,’ in place of ‘Yankee’ to blind any one who might be listening.” This experience frightened Susie’s grandmother so much she never traveled outside the city limits again.
In April of 1862, the war came to Fort Pulaski in Savannah. Thirteen-year-old Susie “was sent out in the country to my mother. I remember what a roar and din the guns made. They jarred the earth for miles.” Union forces took the fort. Susie and her family “landed under the protection of the Union fleet” and she finally met a Yankee.
Susie’s ability to read and write made her stand out. While at the fort on St. Simon’s Island in Georgia, she was asked to “take charge of a school for the children on the island. ... I received two large boxes of books and testaments from the North. I had about forty children to teach beside a number of adults who came to me nights, all of them so eager to learn to read, to read above anything else.” Teenage Susie was likely the first teacher in Georgia to educate African Americans openly and publicly.
“During the era of Civil War and emancipation, as the momentum toward freedom built, so did the momentum for literacy,” observed Heather Andrea Williams in “‘Clothing Themselves in Intelligence’: The Freedpeople, Schooling, and Northern Teachers, 1861-1871,” for The Journal of African American History. “Realizing their success as a free people in a literate society would be severely limited by illiteracy, many newly freed African Americans latched onto the spelling book as a symbol and tool of liberation. ... Freedpeople wanted to ensure that they counted as voters and legislators who could exercise power over their own futures.”
Susie lived and taught on St. Simon’s Island until October of 1862 when she joined the ranks under Charles T. Trowbridge, a captain of the Union Army who lead a company of Black soldiers. Fourteen-year-old Susie “was enrolled as laundress.” Around this time, she married Edward King, one of the officers of Charles’s 33rd United States Colored Infantry Regiment. “I had a number of relatives in this regiment,” sh wrote. “Several uncles, some cousins, and a husband in Company E, and a number of cousins in other companies.”
She was one of several hundred named women, and certainly even more unnamed, who served in the Civil War. “Medical historians estimate that roughly one thousand Confederate women performed nursing services during the war, a ridiculously low number considering that most of the Civil War took place on Southern soil and that Southern diaries make regular mention of women assisting in hospitals without formal arrangement,” noted Indiana University Indianapolis professor Jane E. Schultz in “The Inhospitable Hospital: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine.”
Women’s work during the war was further obscured by both gender and racial biases. Jane observed that Black women like Susie were usually listed as “cooks” or “laundresses,” regardless of their actual duties. The title “nurse” was reserved for hand-picked, usually upper class white women. As Jane said, “The nomenclature had less to do with the job description than with a worker’s race and class; it thus functioned as coded language.”
Susie’s own account supported this theory. She wrote, “I was enrolled as a company laundress, but I did very little of it, because I was also busy doing other things through camp.” (These titles also often related to pay, but Susie herself was never paid for her service.)
She taught the soldiers to read and write, with husband Edward helping when his duties permitted. She traveled with the company from Georgia to Florida to Virginia. “I learned to handle a musket very well while in the regiment, and could shoot straight and often hit the target,” she said. “I assisted in cleaning the guns and used to fire them off. ... I thought this great fun. I was also able to take a gun all apart, and put it together again.”
Like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, she eventually took on more nursing tasks for the sick and wounded. “Although the title of ‘Nurse’ may not have been applied to them, their activities were clearly nursing as it was then practiced,” wrote M. Elizabeth Carnegie in “Black Nurses at the Front” for The American Journal of Nursing. “In crisis, it was natural for many black women who had practical experience to volunteer their service.”
“Military historians of the war have downplayed or ignored altogether the presence of female hospital workers in the studies because of women’s institutional invisibility (women were noncombatants and volunteers, so few official records document their travel in military circles) and because of a perception that only men make, fight, and matter in wars,” Jane wrote.
Susie noted this omission in history even during her lifetime. “There are many people who do not know what some of the colored women did during the war,” she said. “There were hundreds of them who assisted the Union soldiers by hiding them and helping them to escape. Many were punished for taking food to the prison stockades for the prisoners.”
While Civil War stories often extol the dramatic turns of battle and brotherhood, Susie recorded the hidden bookends: The goodbyes and the return of the wounded. “The call was sounded, and I heard the first sergeant say, ‘Fall in, boys, fall in,’” she said, describing how the company waited 30 minutes for the darkness of night to deepen before leaving to attack Virginia’s Fort Gregg. “They did not want the enemy to have a chance to spy their movements. ... I have never forgotten the good-bys of that day, as they left camp. Colonel Trowbridge said to me as he left, ‘Good-by, Mrs. King, take care of yourself if you don’t see us again.’”
She walked with them for some time, then stayed watching until they marched out of sight. She returned to a far quieter camp. “It was lonesome and sad, now that the boys were gone, some never to return.”
She and friend Mary Shaw decided to share a tent that night. “We went to bed, but not to sleep, for the fleas nearly ate us alive. We caught a few, but it did seem, now that the men were gone, that every flea in camp had located my tent, and caused us to vacate. Sleep being out of the question, we sat up the remainder of the night.” Sitting together in the dark, Susie and Mary heard guns firing at the fort around 4 a.m. The wounded began to arrive after 8 a.m.
“The first one brought in was Samuel Anderson of our company. He was badly wounded. Then others of our boys, some with their legs off, arm gone, foot off, and wounds of all kinds imaginable. They had to wade through creeks and marshes, as they were discovered by the enemy and shelled very badly. A number of the men were lost, some got fastened in the mud and had to cut of the legs of their pants to free themselves. … Now, my work began.”
“It seems strange how our aversion to seeing suffering is overcome in war,” she acknowledged. “…how we are able to see the most sickening sights, such as men with their limbs blown off and mangled by the deadly shells, without a shudder; and instead of turning away, how we hurry to assist in alleviating their pain, bind up their wounds, and press the cool water to their parched lips, with feelings only of sympathy and pity.”
In November 1864, 16-year-old Susie took a perilous boat journey to Beaufort, South Carolina to be nearer to husband Edward. Her boat capsized near Ladies’ Island. An infant on board died, as did a solider. Susie herself “was very ill and under the doctor’s care for some time,” but husband and wife were eventually reunited.
A year later, the violence of the war was over. In February of 1866, the 33rd United States Colored Infantry Regiment was officially released from service. Susie and Edward settled in Savannah. She quickly, though briefly, returned to teaching. “I opened a school at my home on South Broad Street, now called Oglethorpe Avenue, as there was not any public school for negro children,” she said. Students paid one dollar a month, but with education no longer outlawed, public schools soon replaced private, in-home ones. Susie taught just one year before closing her home school.
On Sept. 16, 1866, husband Edward died. Susie, now 18 and a pregnant widow, “welcome[d] a little stranger alone.” She moved to teach at a rural school for a time, but “country life did not agree with me,” and she returned to the city. For a time, she tried teaching adults at a night school. This path, too, didn’t last for long.
Susie’s father died in 1867. After this, her mother opened a grocery store to earn a living, accepting either cash or cotton, corn and rice in payment. “These were colored merchants, doing business on Bay Street in that city,” Susie wrote proudly. “Mother bought her first property, which contained ten acres.”
In her early 20s, Susie was forced to leave her infant son with her mother and take work as a live-in servant with a family in Boston, Massachusetts. She would remain in this occupation until she married Russell L. Taylor in 1879 at age 31.
Susie donated much of her time and energy to support “the boys in blue” as the veterans of the Civil War aged or grew ill. “My hands have never left undone anything they could do towards their aid and comfort in the twilight of their lives.” She formed a Boston chapter of The Women’s Relief Corps, an auxiliary coalition to the Grand Army of the Republic (itself an organization of Civil War veterans). As the head of Corps 67, Susie was one of only three Black women to ever be in an officer position. The WRC was a largely segregated organization. Black women were not permitted at all in the southern chapters.
In 1898, Susie’s son, now in his early 30s, fell ill and she traveled to Shreveport, Louisiana to care for him. The journey highlighted for her the new forms racism had taken. Slavery may have been abolished, but freed people were far from equal citizens. “I asked a white man standing near (before I got my train) what car I should take. ‘Take that one,’ he said, pointing to one. ‘But that is a smoking car!’ ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘that is the car for colored people.’ I went to this car, and on entering it all my courage failed me. I have ridden in many coaches, but I was never in such as these. I wanted to return home again, but when I thought of my sick boy I said, ‘Well, others ride in these cars and I must do likewise,’ and tried to be resigned, for I wanted to reach my boy.”
Susie made it to her son and saw to his care. As she lived for this brief time in Shreveport, Black men and women told her how their city differed from Boston. She heard the story of a man murdered “in cold blood for nothing.” She recalled, “He was a colored man and a ‘porter’ in a store in this town. A clerk had left his umbrella at home. It had begun to rain when he started for home, and on looking for the umbrella he could not, of course, find it. He asked the porter if he had seen it. He said no, he had not. ‘You answer very saucy,’ said the clerk, and drawing his revolver, he shot the colored man dead. He was taken up the street to an office where he was placed under one thousand dollars bond for his appearance and released, and that was the end of the case. I was surprised at this, but I was told by several white and colored persons that this was a common occurrence, and the persons were never punished if they were white, but no mercy was shown to negroes.”
The continued racial malice and exclusion was front of Susie’s mind as she wrote her book in 1902, a woman of 54 living in Boston. “I wonder if our white fellow men realize the true sense or meaning of brotherhood?” she said. “For two hundred years we had toiled for them; the war of 1861 came and was ended, and we thought our race was forever freed from bondage, and that the two races could live in unity with each other, but when we read almost every day of what is being done to my race by some whites in the South, I sometimes ask, ‘Was the war in vain? Has it brought freedom, in the full sense of the word, or has it not made our condition more hopeless?’”
“In this ‘land of the free’ we are burned, tortured, and denied a fair trial, murdered for any imaginary wrong conceived in the brain of the negro-hating white man. There is no redress for us from a government which promised to protect all under its flag.”
Despite Susie’s efforts, her son died of his illness. She returned to Boston. Husband Russell died in 1901. Fortunately, it seems the men she’d nursed, taught, and comforted during the war did the same for her after it. “I am pleased to know at this writing that the officers and comrades of my regiment stand ready to render me assistance whenever required,” she wrote. “It seems like ‘bread cast upon the water,’ and it has returned after many days, when it is most needed. I have received letters from some of the comrades, since we parted in 1866, with expressions of gratitude and thanks to me for teaching them their first letters.”
Susie’s 1902 “Reminiscences of my Life in Camp” provides a rare, first-person account of the daily life of these soldiers. In his introduction to the book, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote, “Actual military life is rarely described by a woman, and this is especially true of a woman whose place was in the ranks, as the wife of a soldier and herself a regimental laundress. No such description has ever been given, I am sure, by one thus connected with a colored regiment; so that the nearly 200,000 black soldiers (178,975) of our Civil War have never before been delineated from the woman's point of view.”
With her book, Susie joined a small but unique group of what historian Dr. Earl E. Thorpe called “historians without a portfolio.” He defined these as “non-professional persons…who have a fondness for the discipline of history, feeling that their life experiences peculiarly fit them for chronicling some events.” Exploring Earl’s definition in “Black Women Historians from the Late 19th Century to the Dawning of the Civil Rights Movement,” Michigan State History professor Pero Gaglo Dagbovie added, “Though not formally trained, they challenged the widely accepted notion that a woman’s place was in the domestic sphere and their scholarship was often innovative, polemic, and vindicationist in nature.”
Susie Taylor King ends her “Reminiscences” with a list of the still-living members of the 33rd that she was able to contact. She died in Boston in 1912, at the age of 64.
Sources:
Reminiscences of my Life in Camp by Susie King Taylor
National Park Service: Susie King Taylor
The Inhospitable Hospital: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine by Jane. E. Schultz
The Journal of African American History: Black Women Historians from the Late 19th Century to the Dawning of the Civil Rights Movement by Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, “Clothing Themselves in Intelligence”: The Freedpeople, Schooling, and Northern Teachers, 1861-1871 by Heather Andrea Williams
The American Journal of Nursing: Black Nurses at the Front by M. Elizabeth Carnegie
ResearchGate: Slavery and the Origin of Georgia’s 1829 Anti-Literacy Act
Find a Grave: Russell L. Taylor (1852-1901)