Taylor, Susie Baker King

By: Patricia W. Romero

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Taylor, Susie Baker King

Sex:  Female

Born:  Isle of Wight, Georgia, United States
6 August 1848

Died:  Boston, Massachusetts, United States
6 October 1912

Activity/Profession:  Educator, Nurse, Autobiographer / Memoirist, Slave Narrative Author

(b. 1848; d. 1912),
Civil War teacher, nurse, and laundress.

Taylor is the only black woman to write of her participation in the Civil War, and it is for these experiences that she is remembered. A cursory reading of her memoir, however, reveals something as unique as Taylor's reminiscences. Through oral tradition, Taylor traces her maternal line back to a great-great-grandmother who, she believed, lived to be 120 years old. According to family tradition, five of this woman's sons served in the American Revolution, establishing the precedent for patriotism that Taylor would later follow. This female ancestor also must have been among the first African slaves brought to the colony of Georgia, which was founded in 1732. A daughter of this ancestor, Taylor's great-grandmother, was said to have given birth to twenty-five children, only one of whom was a son. One of her many daughters was Taylor's grandmother; born in 1820, she was responsible in part for Taylor's upbringing.

Susie Baker King Taylor was a nurse with a black regiment during the Civil War and a teacher afterward. She is the only black woman to write of her participation in the Civil War.

Austin/Thompson Collection, by permission of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

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Taylor's mother was born in 1834, and Taylor herself, the first child, in 1848. These remarkable genealogies indicate that the matrilineal black family was in place early, possibly from the beginning of African migration into pre–Revolutionary War Georgia. None of the men in the line, including Taylor's own father, is remembered.

Taylor's mother, known only by the last name Baker, was a domestic slave. While Taylor was still quite small, her grandmother obtained permission to remove her from plantation life to freedom in Savannah, where the older woman eked out a living primarily by bartering chickens and eggs for goods. In Savannah, Taylor was fortunate enough to come into contact with two white children who taught her to read and write, skills forbidden to blacks in the pre–Civil War South.

When the Civil War erupted, Taylor and her grandmother returned to the plantation, but soon thereafter Taylor departed for the Sea Islands of South Carolina with her maternal uncle and his family. Taylor 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. Taylor was immediately pressed into service by Union forces, first as a teacher to freed slave children (and some adults). Later, after marrying Sgt. Edward King of the first South Carolina Volunteers, she 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. Taylor learned how to handle a musket as well as bandage and care for the dying—both black and white. In 1863, Taylor worked with Clara Barton during the eight months Barton practiced her nursing skills in the Sea Islands. In late 1864, Taylor 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, Taylor'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 King's death, Taylor moved to rural Georgia. Finding that country life did not agree with her, however, she returned to Savannah and opened a night school for freedmen 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, Taylor 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, Taylor 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. Taylor even witnessed a hanging in Mississippi. But in 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.

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