Susie King Taylor

Susie Baker was born into slavery on the Grest plantation in Liberty County, Georgia, on the sixth of August 1848. She was sent at the age of seven to live with her free Black grandmother in Savannah, where she received clandestine education at a school run by Mary Woodhouse — the operation of which was a criminal offense under Georgia law. She emerged from her childhood literate in defiance of statute.

She escaped to the Union-occupied Sea Islands in April 1862 — at thirteen — along with her uncle and his family. She arrived at the Union camp at Saint Simons Island, where her literacy was almost immediately put to use organizing a school for the Black children of the Union-occupied territory. She thus became, by the contemporary regimental records of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first Black teacher of the Civil War-era Black freedom schools at fourteen years of age.

When the First South Carolina Volunteers — the Union's first Black combat regiment, comprising approximately one thousand formerly enslaved soldiers — was raised in November 1862, she enlisted as a laundress, nurse, and de facto schoolteacher for the troops. She served four years and three months with the regiment — through every engagement in the Department of the South — including the Combahee River Raid of June 1863 led by Harriet Tubman (also placed in this archive).

She was never paid for her four-year service. Her formal petition for a Civil War pension was denied by the United States War Department in 1894.

Her memoir Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops (1902) — published when she was fifty-three — is the only first-person Civil War memoir published by a Black woman. The book was published at her own expense; the print run was three hundred copies.

She died in Boston on the sixth of October 1912, age sixty-four.

She is honored here as the Civil War's only published Black woman memoirist.