Born into slavery on the Isle of Wight, one of the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia on August 5, 1848, Susie Baker King Taylor was raised as an enslaved person. She went to live with her free grandmother in Savannah at the age of seven. Susie’s grandmother lacked the ability to read and write. She knew how important it was to learn. So, when Susie and her brother came to live with her, she sent them to school. The school was at the home of Mrs. Woodhouse, and she taught any kid in the neighborhood that wanted to learn It was here that Taylor began her secret education by teachers and tutors that defied laws prohibiting formal education for Black Americans. Susie King Taylor excelled academically to the point that she exceeded her teachers.
After Mrs. Woodhouse taught Susie everything she knew, her grandmother found two other teachers for Susie, both White students who agreed to teach Susie as long as their parents didn’t find out. Dolly, Susie's grandmother, worked hard to support her granddaughter's education. Susie also became friends with a White girl named Katie O’Connor. Katie went to a local convent and secretly gave Susie lessons. This lasted for four months until Katie went into the convent for good. Susie Baker excelled academically to the point that she exceeded her teachers. Being able to read and write gave Susie a lot of power.
As a child, she would write special passes for Black people. These passes helped them avoid being arrested if they were out after the nine o’clock curfew. In April 1861, the Civil War erupted when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Once Union forces launched their attack on Confederate-held Fort Pulaski, Baker fled with her uncle’s family and other African Americans to the South Carolina Sea Islands, not knowing what is to become of them. They had a lot of obstacles to cross before finally reaching St. Catherine Island, then leaving by boat to their destination, the Union-occupied St. Simons Island off Georgia's southern coast aboard the Union ship USS Potomska. They remained there for two weeks under the protection of the Union fleet.
Next they were taken aboard a federal gunboat, and she became free at fourteen years old. Susie impressed Commander Lieutenant Pendleton G. Watmough so much with her intellect that he gave her a job upon their arrival at the Union base. While aboard ship, she met Captain Whitmore. Talking with him revealed her ability to read and write, she felt she could trust him with her secret. Whitmore arranged for her to teach at a children’s school on St. Simon’s Island. Since most African Americans did not have an extensive education, word of Baker’s knowledge and intelligence spread among the Army officers on the island. At just fourteen years old, she became the first African American teacher to openly educate other Blacks in Georgia and started the first free African-American school for children in Georgia. In this position, Taylor taught as many as 40 children each day and even more adults at night.
Her abilities proved invaluable to the Union Army as they began to form regiments of Black American soldiers. When the island was evacuated that October, Taylor moved to Beaufort, South Carolina where she settled at Camp Saxton and tended to the all-Black 1st South Carolina Volunteers Infantry Regiment (later named the 33rd U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment), which was a legion of escaped slaves who joined in the Union’s fight against the Confederacy and the institution that dehumanized them. The all-Black 1st South Carolina Volunteers inspired a change in the Union Army’s mindset toward Black soldiers.
Earlier in the war, Union soldiers simply sent escaped slaves back to their owners, but now Union officials classified them as “contraband” so that they could be legally conscripted into service. Hired by the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment Volunteers as a laundress in 1862, her primary role was nurse to wounded soldiers. This made Susie, the First African American Army Nurse. While in the service of the Volunteers, Susie King Taylor formed deep friendships with the colonels who saw past their racial differences. The Volunteers were formed on Nov. 1, 1862, by Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Lieutenant Colonel Charles T. Trowbridge, both of whom would befriend Taylor. Higginson was a staunch abolitionist and Trowbridge, who later replaced him, was respected by his all-Black regiment. One of his soldiers was Sergeant Edward King, whom Taylor married — and accompanied during his tour.
The war brought another killer into the camps besides fighting. It came here by way of England over 100 years earlier. There was a way to get rid of this killer, but people became afraid of the cure. The killer was a virus called Smallpox. Even though there was a vaccination for smallpox, most states outlawed the vaccination for fear the vaccine itself would spread the virus. Because of this action, the virus was allowed to spread. The outbreak spread in the camps since almost all of the troops had never been vaccinated. Smallpox caused skin lesions that left deep scars. It also caused fever, vomiting and often death.
There was an outbreak of smallpox in Susie’s regiment, which led her to become a nurse. Her knowledge of folk remedies that her grandmother taught here and what she learned of more conventional medicine enabled her to nurse the regiment’s sick and wounded. One of the important plants that her grandmother taught her to use as medicine was "sassafras". It was used to purify the blood and reduce joint inflammation. Susie wasn’t afraid of smallpox because she remembered this lesson. She brewed and drank a lot of sassafras tea on a regular basis, believing that purifying the blood would prevent her from catching this virus. She treated the men and never sickened with smallpox. Susie Taylor fearlessly helped soldiers inflicted with malaria, measles, cholera, and smallpox.
As a nurse in South Carolina, Susie also met and worked beside Clara Barton, the pioneering nurse and humanitarian who would establish the American Red Cross. However, her other talents, especially her ability to read and write, soon gave her a wider scope of responsibility. She also taught the regiment of former slaves how to read and write. This would make her a beloved figure in the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Colonel, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, would later write of them, “Their love of the spelling-book is perfectly inexhaustible.” Susie and her husband, Sergeant King, spent their free time teaching many African American soldiers how to read and write. The regiment name was later changed to 33rd United States Colored Infantry Regiment.
During that time Taylor apparently developed into a dead shot, possibly even serving on picket duty. Some accounts describe her as having a ready capacity with the mechanism and the use of rifled muskets. She packed bags and cartridge packs for soldiers going into battle. She also carried out orders for the commanders. People believed she was a very good shot with a rifle. She even helped with guard duty, showing she contributed more than just teaching and nursing. But Susie King Taylor would see little reward for her hard work. Nurses received pay and pensions, but laundresses did not. Trowbridge later apologized for what this “technicality” in her title cost her.
Taylor’s wartime experience grew more tumultuous in 1864 as the war dragged toward its bloody end. Violent clashes at Fort Wagner echoed in her mind as the Volunteers led a charge against Fort Gregg on Morris Island, which yielded losses too graphic for Taylor to forget. The experience of battle deeply impacted Susie King Taylor. She began visiting hospitals like Beaufort, South Carolina’s “Contraband Hospital,” which was designated specifically for fugitive slaves or wounded African American soldiers. After the war, Susie King Taylor and her husband moved to Savannah, GA. in 1866 and later had a son.
Nearly a year after the war ended, Colonel Trowbridge assured his troops that their “valor and heroism has won for your race a name which will live as long as the undying pages of history shall endure.” But this was not entirely true. Even though the Civil War ended and ushered in the freedom of American slaves, racism had not been destroyed. Newly-freed Black Americans faced huge challenges in the period that followed, known as the Reconstruction Era, including the struggle to be seen as human. Susie King faced numerous challenges in the post-war years herself. She hoped to continue her teaching career by opening a private school for the children of freedmen. Her husband, a skilled carpenter, struggled to find a job. Sadly, her husband died shortly after the opening.
Competition caused her private school venture to fail and Susie had to find work as a domestic servant. In 1872, she relocated to Boston where she worked for the Thomas Smith family and later she worked for Mrs. Gorham Gray. Susie stayed there until she married Russell Taylor in 1879. There she engaged in active work with the Woman’s Relief Corps, which was a national organization for female veterans of the Civil War. She also saw the plight of Black soldiers during the Spanish American War and sent supplies to them and to hospitals serving them. During the Reconstruction Era, Susie King Taylor became a civil rights activist. She saw a lot of unfair treatment in the South. Laws like Jim Crow and groups like the Ku Klux Klan caused fear and violence for African Americans.
Mrs. Susie King Taylor was a teacher, nurse, wife and mother who had a remarkable life. She lived in a period where women were treated as second class citizens, and African American women treated even worse. Through all the pain suffered, Susie persevered. Susie published her memoirs, "Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops" in 1902. She became the first and only Black woman to publish an account of her experiences as an African American nurse during the Civil War. Susie Taylor King died ten years later in 1912. She never received any pension from the government for her services as a nurse in the Army or from her husband's service. She remains a symbol of courage and caring even in the face of malevolence, and is one of the unspoken heroes of the American Civil War.