Susie King Taylor: Escape to Fort Pulaski, Army Nurse and Teacher

A story from Fort Pulaski National Monument.

Susie King Taylor, who wrote: "I was born under the slave law in Georgia, in 1848, and was brought up by my grandmother in Savannah." Library of Congress.

Susie King Taylor's memoir is one of only a few accounts of life in the United States Colored Troops, and one of only a handful of memoirs of that time written by an African American woman.

Learning in secret

Being born under Georgia's slave law meant Taylor was legally someone else's property. It limited where and when she could go, and it forbade her to learn to read or write. Across the South, Savannah included, many white people feared that educating enslaved people would cost them their control and power, so teaching an enslaved person to read and write was against the law. Taylor defied it from a young age.

With her grandmother's encouragement, she attended two secret schools run by Black women and learned to read and write there. "We went every day about nine o'clock, with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them," she remembered.

She put her forbidden education to use by writing passes for her grandmother. Every African American in the city, enslaved or free, needed a pass to be out after nine o'clock at night, or risked arrest.

When the Civil War began in 1861, Taylor began to long for freedom. "I wanted to see these wonderful 'Yankees' so much," she recalled, "as I heard my parents say the Yankee was going to set all the slaves free. Oh, how those people prayed for freedom!"

Escape to Fort Pulaski

In April 1862, Confederate-held Fort Pulaski fell to Union forces. Days after the battle, Union General David Hunter issued General Orders No. 7, declaring all enslaved people on Cockspur and Tybee Islands free. The order did not reach Savannah, still firmly Confederate, but it gave hope to many enslaved people nearby, who believed that if they could reach Cockspur Island they would be free.

Two days after the fort fell, Taylor, fourteen years old, escaped with her family to the waters around the fort, where they "landed under the protection of the Union fleet." She was one of several hundred formerly enslaved people who freed themselves by escaping to Fort Pulaski.

Many stayed on Cockspur Island for the rest of the war, living in the old construction village that stood near today's parking lot. Others moved on. Taylor went to the South Carolina Sea Islands, where, she wrote, "at last, to my unbounded joy, I saw the 'Yankee.'"

Freed children with their teachers. Library of Congress.

Laundress, nurse, teacher

On the Sea Islands, Taylor found work as a nurse and laundress for the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, one of the first infantry units made up of formerly enslaved men. The unit was soon renamed the 33rd Regiment, United States Colored Troops (USCT), and Taylor spent the next four years with it.

Teaching soon called to her as well. "I had about forty children to teach," she recalled, "besides a number of adults who came to me nights, all of them so eager to learn to read, to read above anything else." For several months she ran her school, teaching young and old to read and write, without pay, happy that her efforts in camp succeeded and grateful that they were appreciated.

When the 33rd left the Sea Islands, she went with it — officially as a laundress, but most often as a nurse. She cared for sick and wounded soldiers and came under fire herself in several engagements.

Dress parade of the First South Carolina (U.S.C.T.), Beaufort, South Carolina. Library of Congress.

After the war

When the war ended, Taylor returned to Savannah with her husband, Sergeant King, who had served in the 33rd. She soon opened a school for African American children in her downtown home: twenty pupils, each paying $1 a month, plus a few older children who came at night. It lasted only about a year before a free public school opened and she lost many of her pupils. Her husband then died shortly before their child was born, and a few months later she had to give up teaching.

She kept going. Seeing few openings for a teacher in Savannah, she opened a school in Liberty County, Georgia, but after a year decided country life was not for her. Back in Savannah she opened a night school to teach adults to read and write — and again, a year later, a free night school opened and she had to close.

After working for various families, Taylor decided Savannah held no future for her. In the 1880s she moved to Boston, where she met her second husband and devoted herself to the Women's Relief Corps, an auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic that cared for Union veterans. "My hands," she wrote, "have never left undone anything they could do towards their aid and comfort in the twilight of their lives."

Her memoir

In 1902 Taylor wrote Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers. Much of it describes the war, but she also wrote about the America of her own day:

"In this 'land of the free' we are burned, tortured, and denied a fair trial, murdered for any imaginary wrong conceived in the brain of the negro-hating white man. There is no redress for us from a government which promised to protect all under its flag."

In 1898 she travelled to Louisiana to care for her sick son. She tried to buy him a berth in a sleeping car and was refused because of the colour of her skin. "It seemed very hard," she wrote a few years later, "when his father fought to protect the Union and our flag, and yet his boy was denied, under this same flag, a berth to carry him home to die."

Still, she ended with a demand for justice: her people, she wrote, were striving to reach the full standard of all other races, and had often succeeded. They asked to be citizens of the United States, where so many had shed their blood beside white comrades.

Legacy

Susie King Taylor died in Boston on October 6, 1912, at 64, and was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery. She died in relative obscurity, but in 2018 she was inducted as a Georgia Woman of Achievement, an honour for women who have made significant contributions to Georgia.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Lift Every Voice", Fort Pulaski National Monument. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/lift-every-voice.htm
• Quotations are from Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp (1902).
• Correction: the source says Taylor was "induced" as a Georgia Woman of Achievement; the word is inducted.
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.