Susie King Taylor (1848-1912)

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African american educator and nurse

Enslavement. Susie King Taylor was one of many African American Southern women who served the Union army as a laundress, nurse, and teacher. She was born a slave on 6 August 1848 on one of the Sea Islands located thirty-five miles off the coast of Georgia. For most of her childhood she lived with her grandmother in Savannah. With the aid of white acquaintances and free African Americans, Taylor broke Southern laws regulating the activity of slaves and learned to read and write, an accomplishment that would help her find employment in the Northern army.

Contraband of War. When the war broke out Taylor was sent to the Georgia coast by her owners. Shortly after she arrived a combined Union naval and army expedition attacked Fort Pulaski, a Confederate stronghold near her current home, and drove the Southern defenders into the Georgia interior. Taylor, along with her uncle and eight cousins, fled to the Union lines and were immediately declared by Federal military authorities as “contraband” of war. As contraband, Taylor and her family were expected to work for the Union army in some capacity, usually as field laborers. Consequently, the Northern liberators moved them to the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast to operate captured cotton plantations. Because Taylor could read and write, army officials asked her to run a school for former slave children.

Off to War. As more and more contraband males found their way to the Sea Islands, military commanders began to organize them into infantry regiments. Although only fourteen years old at the time, Taylor immediately offered her services to the First South Carolina Volunteers, later known as the Thirty-Third United States Colored Troops (U.S.C.T.). The army initially employed her as a laundress, a thankless and unpaid assignment. Taylor, however, rarely served in that capacity. For most of the war, the teenager ministered to soldiers as a nurse. During her off duty hours, she ran an impromptu school for African American soldiers, teaching many of them how to read and write.

Field Duty. Taylor often traveled with the regiment as a medical orderly. During several small engagements she worked close enough to the fighting to hear the whistle of artillery shells over her head. Although assigned to the Thirty-Third U.S.C.T., she served for a brief time with the all-African American Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry during their operations in South Carolina. In July 1863 Taylor assisted the famous Civil War nurse Clara Barton, future founder of the American Red Cross, in treating the heavy casualties following the Fifty-Fourth’s legendary assault upon Fort Wagner. Taylor continued to assist Barton for the next eight months before returning to her original unit. For the rest of the war she continued to move with the regiment on small skirmishes, but most of her time was spent on rear-echelon duty. When the army disbanded the unit in February 1866, Taylor and her husband, a sergeant in the Thirty-Third U.S.C.T., returned to Georgia. Later, she moved to Boston and became active in a veterans’ organization. One of many African American women to serve the Union army without pay or complaint, Taylor in 1902 wrote her memoirs, the first documentation of duties performed by an African American nurse in the Civil War. She died in 1912 at age sixty-four.

Source

Susie King Taylor, A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs: Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops, Late 1st South Carolina Volunteers, edited by Patricia W. Romano (New York: Markus Wiener, 1988).