“My Work Now Began” Susie King Taylor, Nurse to the 33rd US Colored Troops

On April 10, 1862, Union brigadier general Quincy Gillmore asked for the surrender of the Confederate stronghold, Fort Pulaski. When they refused, he used his newly arrived rifled cannons to decimate the stone wall of the fort, causing its quick surrender, and changing the local momentum of the war in the process. One of the great unspoken consequences of this victory was that it convinced the uncle of a fourteen year old girl named Susan Ann Baker (1848-1912) to leave the plantation where they labored and seek protection in the arms of the victorious Union Army.

This decision was taken by many families during the early years of the American Civil War seeking freedom from bondage, but this particular instance took a notable turn, because young Susan Baker, or “Susie” as she was generally known, was a special child. While living with her grandmother, Dolly Reed, in Savannah as a child, she was the unique beneficiary of the underground education system there for Black children. Georgia had long been among the most adamant of states against the education of its Black population. Since colonial times, it had been illegal for a white individual to teach a Black person to write, and in 1829 the Anti-Literacy Law went one step further, and made it illegal to teach a Black person to read, in order to make the slave population easier to control and manipulate.

It was up to individuals, then, in Georgia to create and run schools that circumvented the law and allowed Black children to gain basic literacy. Susie Baker attended an underground school run by a Mrs. Woodhouse, a free woman and widow who was a friend of Susie’s grandmother. As King explained it in her 1902 memoir, 

We went every day about nine o’clock, with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them. We went in, one at a time, through the gate, into the yard to the L kitchen, which was the schoolroom. She had twenty-five or thirty children whom she taught, assisted by her daughter, Mary Jane. The neighbors would see us going in sometimes, but they supposed we were there learning trades, as it was the custom to give children a trade of some kind.

For two years, Susie learned from Mrs. Woodhouse, and then continued her studies under a Mrs. Mary Beasley until May of 1860, when a white friend named Katie O’Connor agreed to teach her every night for four months, on the condition that Susie never tell her father what they were doing. She then put her literacy to immediate work, writing out passes for members of the local Black community to walk freely after the regular curfew hour of nine o’clock. 

After Fort Pulaski, it was Baker’s literacy that attracted the attention of the commander of the gunboat that was transporting the Baker family. He asked her if she could read and write, and upon her saying that she could, and demonstrating her ability, he passed on word of her abilities to Commodore Goldsborough, who asked Baker to start a school for the Black children on St. Simon’s Island, where the Union army had brought the Black families under its protection. Though she was only fourteen years old at the time, she accepted readily, and soon had a class of forty students during the day, and a small collection of adults who would come to her at night, eager beyond reckoning to at last learn to read. 

While Baker was teaching reading, the Union army was busy organizing the influx of Black volunteers it was receiving into fighting units. Among the first of these was the 1st South Carolina Colored Infantry Regiment, formed in May of 1862, a month after the surrender of Fort Pulaski. They were trained in guerrilla warfare with the object of liberating the slave population of the South, and in August of 1862 its commanding officer, C.T. Trowbridge, arrived at St. Simon’s Island, to recruit fresh volunteers, where he met Baker. The two took to each other immediately, beginning a lifetime of mutual respect, and when the 1st headed out to Beaufort in October of 1862, Susie went with them in the capacity of “laundress.” 

This was not something she had to do. She could have continued to teach in relative safety, but she chose to move with a unit heading into Confederate territory and share the danger with them. Almost immediately, she began expanding the responsibilities of her official title, learning how to clean and fire a gun and quickly developing a reputation as a crack shot, who was entrusted by the men with the cleaning of their weaponry and loading of their cartridges. Mostly, however, she devoted her time to caring for the soldiers and became the regiment’s unofficial (and unpaid) nurse, particularly when varioloid broke out in February of 1863. Though varioloid is usually a minor form of smallpox that can affect those vaccinated against it, this strain manifested itself more severely in the men, and Baker (now Susie King after her marriage to Edward King, a non-commissioned officer) threw herself into the task of nursing the infected, confident in the power of both her vaccination and her steady consumption of sassafras tea to protect her from infection.

In her multiple roles of laundress, teacher, weapons handler, morale booster, and nurse, Susie King became an indispensable member of Company E, who had to be directly ordered away from exposure during episodes of enemy shelling for her safety. She witnessed the towns and cities evacuated by the Confederate army, full of desperate women and children who had been left with nothing to eat by their supposed protectors, who hated the invading Union army, and loathed in particular the Black regiments now walking among them, but who at the same time had to depend on them for any chance of survival, a situation which King closely observed and recorded in her memoirs.

Though the war ended in 1865, King’s service did not. The Black troops of the Union had gone through the war, often not getting paid for years at a time, and afterwards struggled to re-establish themselves in civilian life. In 1886, King (now King-Taylor after the death of Edward King in 1866 and her remarriage in 1879 to Russell Taylor) was a driving force behind the formation of the 67th section of the Women’s Relief Corps, which devoted itself to charitable services for the veterans of the Civil War, and in 1893 was elected President of the 67th Corps in recognition of her unflagging services.

The post-war years were by no means easy ones for King-Taylor. She tried to return to teaching, but had to close down the schools she founded when free government-run schools opened in the same region and attracted her students away from her. Ultimately, she drifted North and fell into domestic service, in which profession she was employed for over a decade until her marriage to Russell Taylor. Meanwhile, she looked on in dismay as the promise of freedom for the Black population of the South melted away with the death of Reconstruction in 1876, and the long shadow of Jim Crow fell resolutely across the South, while violence towards and political intimidation of the Black race returned with a vengeance. By this time, King-Taylor was established in Boston, which she cherished as a true reflection of the ideals of equality of the Civil War, but her heart ached for the situation of those she left behind in the South, and wondered what the future could be for a region that seemed constitutionally incapable of shaking off its darkest tendencies towards discrimination and domination.

The schoolhouse where King-Taylor taught after the war

Over the years of her service with the Women’s Relief Corps, she had been repeatedly asked by friends and former members of her Regiment to write down her experiences, and was particularly encouraged in this by the former commander of the 1st South Carolina Colored Regiment (later the 33rd US Colored Troops), Lieutenant-Colonel Trowbridge. One of the great frustrations of writing about the history of women is that, though often encouraged to write memoirs, many, after years of social programming, do not do so, feeling that their lives and contributions aren’t “significant enough” to merit putting to paper, leaving us as historians with great gaping holes in the historical record. Fortunately, King-Taylor heeded the calls all around her, and in 1902 published Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United Stated Colored Troops, the first war memoir published by a Black woman, and an indispensable piece of primary literature documenting the experience of the Union Black regiments in the Civil War.

Ten years later, Susie King-Taylor passed away at the age of just 64. Her great-great grandmother had lived to 120, and her great-grandmother to 100, but that longevity, for whatever reason, was denied to Susie. Thanks to her memoirs, however, she has not been lost to history, and the 21st century in particular has seen a boom in Susie King-Taylor celebration, with schools and squares named in her honor, and a new memorial headstone placed at her grave in 2021. She learned when it was against the law, gave others literacy even though just a child herself, went to war when she could have stayed in safety, and told us of her time when so many others stayed silent, in a through-line of personal bravery and duty that flagged neither in the face of systemic persecution nor grand societal disappointment, always working to nourish the good in the hope and faith that it would grow to vanquish the world’s intolerance, given time, and encouragement.

FURTHER READING:

The Reminiscences are, simply, required reading, if you are a fan of women in medical service, or a military history buff, or a race and gender scholar. For me, though, the frustrating thing about them has always been that, in her zeal to accurately reflect the movements and missions of the 33rd, King-Taylor often pushes herself and her own actions into the background. We get glimpses here and there, of her learning to shoot, treating smallpox patients, and observing the crumbled society left behind in the wake of the retreating Southern armies, but for most of its length, we have the detailing of troop movements, and though I’m interested in that as a Civil War nerd, if I had a time machine, one of the first things I would do would be to zip over to 1901 and encourage Susie to tell us more of her day-to-day experience as a laundress/nurse/munitioner.