Susie King Taylor – Black Nurse in The Civil War
By
John C Abercrombie
Susie King Taylor is an important although largely unknown participant in the American Civil War. Entering with an all-volunteer unit from South Carolina, she was a laundress, nurse and eve an armory specialist. King Taylor became the first Black nurse in the Civil War. King Taylor has even written a book about her memoirs that will be discussed in this post.
Born August 6, 1848, on Liberty County, Georgia, Susan Ann Baker was the first of 9 children born to slaves Raymond and Harar Ann Baker, owned by Valentine Grest.
. When she was about 7 years of age, she was given a rare opportunity to live with her grandmother Dolly Reed in Savannah, Georgia. She moved there with a younger brother and sister. In Savannah, she was able to attend an underground school, sometimes called a “bucket school” because the students had to hide their books in buckets or in some other way conceal them, so Whites did not think they were being educated. After all, educating a Black person was a crime. Susie Baker took her books wrapped in paper.
Georgia law made it illegal for enslaved people to be educated. Their teacher Mrs. Woodhouse would have the students enter one by one as not to draw attention to the school. Their books were covered to keep the secret. There were 25 to 30 other students.
Her grandmother, Dolly Reed continued to support her education. She even received support from a playmate, Katie O’Conner a White student who studied at a local convent. Susie also received education from the son of a landlord. She valued her education. Her ability as demonstrated by so many shows that laws against education of Blacks was not because of an inability, but as justification for the evil treatment of Blacks.
Her literacy proved invaluable to her, and she educated many other Blacks. She had become free at the age of 14 when her uncle led her to a federal gunboat near Confederal held territory near Fort Pulaski.
Fort Pulaski National Monument is located on Cockspur Island between Savannah and Tybee Island, Georgia.
Baker was one of thousands of Blacks seeking refuge behind Union lines in the South Carolina Sea Islands. She attached herself to the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first Black regiment in the United States Army.
As a laundress she performed duties cooking and washing, however her literacy enabled her to serve as the leading instructor of former slaves. Th unit’s White head, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote of her skills, “Their love of the spelling book is perfectly inexhaustible.”
She began working with the military as a laundress working with the 33rd regiment, an all-Black unit. It was during this time she was asked to help as a nurse. Later Colonel CT Trowbridge certified that she had been a nurse although she was denied a pension for her work. Trowbridge stated that she deserved the pension.
She even learned to clean weapons and developed into a marksman although she never picked up a weapon in war.
Among the patients that she cared for was Edward Davis a smallpox patient. Since she was vaccinated from smallpox she assisted in their care. While working a nurse, she met Clara Barton who later founded the American Red Cross. Susie would often tend patients at Camp Shaw in Beaufort, South Carolina where she would tend to the wounded and sick.
Susie Baker married Sergeant Edward King of the 1st South Carolina in 18662 and they remained with the unit until it was mustered out in 1866. They moved to Savannah, and she started a school for the children of freedmen. Edward struggled trying to find a job using his skills as a carpenter, however strong prejudices prevented his employment.
In a most unfortunate turn of events, her husband died, and a free public school opened causing the loss of too many students to keep the enterprise profitable. She was forced to find work as a domestic servant.
Susie became a civil rights activist during Reconstruction after witnessing racial discrimination, Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan who mocked and terrorized Blacks. She speaks to the constant lynching of Blacks.
After the Spanish American War, she provided aid to Afro-Cubans noting that Afro-Cubans were being discriminated against like African-Americans had been during the Reconstruction Era.
Susie King moved to Boston in 1872 where she met and married Russell Taylor in 1879. She worked with Women’s Relief Corps a national organization for Civil War veterans. She published a memoir “Reminiscences of M Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st SC Volunteers” in 1902, becoming the first Black woman to publish an account of her experiences in the Civil War. She acknowledged the racism that persisted decades after the war.
Susie King Taylor died in 1912
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Lunch and Learn:
Susie King Taylor’s Civil War Susie King Taylor was the only African-American woman to publish a memoir about her wartime experiences. Interpretation and Programs Manager Kelly Hancock explores the role she played as both a nurse and teacher with the 33rd United States Colored Troops.
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Reminiscences of My Life in Camp:
An African American Woman’s Civil War Memoir Near the end of her classic wartime account, Susie King Taylor writes, “there are many people who do not know what some of the colored women did during the war.” For her own part, Taylor spent four years―without pay or formal training―nursing sick and wounded members of a black regiment of Union soldiers. In addition, she worked as a camp cook, laundress, and teacher. Written from a perspective unique in the literature of the Civil War, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp not only chronicles daily life on the battlefront but also records interactions between blacks and whites, men and women, and Northerners and Southerners during and after the war. Taylor tells of being born into slavery and of learning, in secret, to read and write. She describes maturing under her wartime responsibilities and traveling with the troops in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. After the war, Taylor dedicated herself to improving the lives of black Southerners and black Union Army veterans. The final chapters of Reminiscences are filled with depictions of the racism to which these efforts often exposed her.
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A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs
“These are the memoirs of a black woman who was born a slave, who had the good fortune to gain her freedom early in the war, with the education and ability to observe and the will to recall in later years the significance of the events in which she was a vigorous participant. Susie King Taylor’s recollections are invaluable for those who wish to understand the Civil War from the black woman’s point of view. … A treasure in the light of today’s feminist movement.” (from the Introduction by Willie Lee Rose)
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Susie King Taylor Join Miss Aaliyah to learn about the incredible journey of Susie King Taylor from slave to activist.
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Memoir of Susie King Taylor:
A Civil War Nurse (First-Person Histories) Susie King Taylor, born a slave in 1848, would learn to read at secret schools and go on to teach countless others to read and write. Follow the course of the Civil War in her own words as she remembers her work as a nurse and teacher with an Army troop of African-American soldiers.
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Unsung History Episode 3:
Susie King Taylor Susie King Taylor was born into slavery in Georgia in 1848. With the help of family members, she was educated and escaped, joining the Union army at the age of 14, to serve ostensibly as a laundress, but in reality, as a nurse, teacher, and even musket preparer. In 1902, Taylor published Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, an autobiography that covers not just her experiences during the Civil War, but also her childhood and her later years. Taylor includes in the work her powerful analysis of race relations at the beginning of 20th Century.
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Forgotten Angels:
The lives of African American women who served as nurses in the Civil War Thousands of African American women nursed soldiers and refugees during the Civil War. Yet they seldom were given the respected title of “nurse,” and because many could not read or write, their stories went unrecorded. Forgotten Angels recounts the histories of seven of these remarkable women, who endured racism and sexism while struggling to build a brighter future for their country, their families, and themselves. Based on extensive research yet told in an easily readable style, this book brings to life heroic role models who have too long been overlooked in the study of the Civil War.
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New exhibit dedicated to Susie King Taylor’s legacy
“She used her literacy to become the first federally-funded teacher in the state of Georgia,” Hill said. “Her story is one of great transformation during that watershed moment of American history.”
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We see another example where education has benefits that are often for nothing when there is no opportunity to use those skills. By keeping opportunities for education and the ability to use those skills is a loss for the entire country. It is time to become inclusive.