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In 1858, two years before Abraham Lincoln was to be elected president, he declared: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”
In 1861, the South engaged in hostilities against the North, which had been challenging its sovereign and divine right to expand slavery into the territories of the American West. The Civil War that ensued lasted four bloody years.
Despite promises and formal agreements, black men were not immediately authorized to fight on the side of the free states. They were first obliged to follow the white troops as porters and servants. Then, after the North suffered several setbacks, colored regiments were formed and soon proved themselves illustious on all fronts. In all, 178,895 black soldiers wore the blue uniform, and 38,000 of these men died in it as well.
The 1ST South Carolina Volunteers were the first black troops to fight in the Civil War. Their first mission was to take Jacksonville, Florida, a city deep in the South.
Many black women followed the troops—in the canteen, as cooks and nurses. Most of them were runaway slaves. Probably the youngest among them, “closer to childhood than adolescence,” was a girl “with big, wide, hazy eyes,” who accompanied the black soldiers until the very end, through the blood, the sweat, and the glory: Susie King Taylor.
Historians of the Civil War have not always drawn the clearest picture of the role of black soldiers. As for the deeds of young Susie, they—as those of other black women—have been completely ignored. She would have been erased from the world altogether had we not been left a small book that she wrote before her death, half a century later: Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33RD United States Colored Troops.
Born a slave in 1848, Susie was raised by her grandmother in Savannah. Susie’s mother, known only by her last name Baker, was a domestic enslave. Susie’s grandmother, who went by the name of Dolly, was one outstanding lady, and she could see beyond the appearance and the vicissitudes of the time. As soon as the child could walk, Dolly sent her to a secret school kept by a freed slave woman, the Widow Woodhouse. Susie went there early every morning after having hidden her textbooks in brown packaging paper, so that neither the paddy rollers, nor the militia, nor even the simple white pedestrian should notice those most forbidden treasures: books.
The school took place in Mrs. Woodhouses’ kitchen. The black children would go in one by one under the porch, cross the yard without a sound, and learn to read and write in a kind of low murmur.
Susies progress was quick. Two years later, her grandmother sent her to a certain Ms. Beasley, who was a bit more learned than the Widow Woodhouse. Then, in May 1860, Ms. Beasley said to Grandma Dolly that she had taught the child everything she knew and could teach her nothing more. The child knew as much as the woman did, and that was all there was to it.
Susie had particularly good penmanship and soon Grandma Dolly’s friends and neighbors went to the little girl to get her to forge their night passes, which she did with care and competence. Grandma Dolly herself sought out the talents of her young granddaughter.
One of these documents has in fact been found. It was forged, not without some spite, with the name of the owner of Susie’s grandmother:
Savannah, Ga. March 1st, 1860
Pass the Bearer—from 9 to 10:30 P.M.
Valentine Grest.
Then came the Civil War. Rumors were spread in order to frighten the enslaves. Word went around that the people from the North, the Yankees, were full of fierce hatred for the blacks—that they harnessed them like horses and made them pull barrows, just for laughs.
But Susie knew who the real bogeymen were. She did not care for such tales. By then, she was already a big girl of fourteen who had learned much from those three women of Savannah: Grandma Dolly, Widow Woodhouse, and dear Ms. Beasley, who had taught her every last thing she knew.
When the Civil War erupted, Susie and Grandmother Dolly returned to the plantation on which they lived, after having lived in Savannah, but soon thereafter Susie departed for the Sea Islands of South Carolina with her maternal uncle and his family. Susie accompanied the regiment when it attacked Jacksonville, making herself more and more useful. Susie was only fourteen at the time, but even in old age she vividly recalled her first sight of the Yankees who were then fighting to take over the coastal areas. Susie was immediately pressed into service by the Union forces, first as a teacher to freed enslave children (and some adults). Later, after marrying Sgt. Edward King of the 1ST South Carolina Volunteers, Susie worked as both a laundress and a nurse for the union.
Most of her wartime activities were centered in South Carolina, moving up and down the coast to Florida and Georgia. Susie learned how to handle a musket (becoming adept at taking it apart, putting it back together in record time, and then to shoot like a veteran), as well as bandage and care for the dying—both black and white. In 1863, Susie worked for Clara Barton during the eight months Barton practiced her nursing skills in the Sea Islands. In late 1864, Susie’s nearly died as a result of a boating accident, but after a few weeks of recovery she was back at work and remained with her regiment until the fall of Charleston in February 1865.
After the war, Susie’s movements exemplified those of many freed people during Reconstruction. She and her husband first settled in Savannah, where she opened a school. In 1866, upon the death of her husband Edward, Susie moved to rural Georgia. Finding that country life did not agree with her, however, she returned to Savannah and opened a night school for freed people where she taught until 1872. Then, using her husband’s military pension, she traded her poorly paid career in education for service as a laundress and cook for a wealthy white family in Savannah.
When the family journeyed to New England on summer holiday, Susie accompanied them and soon after moved to Boston. There she married Russell Taylor and became involved in civic activities as a founding member of the Corps 67 Women’s Relief Corps. She was elected president of the organization in 1893.
In 1898, when her son lay dying in Louisiana, Susie ventured to the South one last time. To her dismay, the freedom she had experienced had been replaced by rigid segregation—she experienced this firsthand not only on the train taking her South, but also in myriad ways during the period in which she renewed her Civil War days by nursing her son. Susie even witnessed a lynching in Mississippi. But in her old age she chose to overlook the devastation of the post-Reconstruction era and harked back instead to 1861’s “wonderful revolution”—the phrase she used in the closing words of her brief memoir.
During her four years and three months of service, Susie King Baker Taylor, possibly the youngest soldier in the Union Army, saw no salary.
She was. it was true, but a black volunteer, a simple black volunteer for the cause of freedom.
Hers, and her peoples.
SOURCES:
REFERENCES:
“In Praise of Black Women: Black Heroines of the Slavery Era,”, by Simone Schwarz-Bart.
“Army Life in a Black regiment,” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston: Osgood Fields, 1870.
“The Negro in the Civil War,” by Benjamin Quarles. New York: Russell and Russell, 1968.
“Black Women In America – Second Edition, Volume 3,” Darlene Clark Hine, Editor-in-Chief. Oxford University Press, 2005.
EXTERNAL LINKS:
Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1st S. C. Volunteers. Boston: The author, 1902.
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 
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