Taylor, Susie King
1848-1912 · Contribution: 1862-1866
Became the first African American Army nurse in U.S. history, serving four years unpaid with the 1st South Carolina/33rd U.S. Colored Troops, and the only Black woman to publish a Civil War memoir
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
After escaping slavery to Union lines at age 14, Taylor combined nursing, laundry, and teaching duties for the 1st South Carolina Volunteers (later the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops) for four years and three months, entirely without pay or official military rank, since no formal Army Nurse Corps yet existed; she worked alongside Clara Barton, later founder of the American Red Cross, learned to handle a musket and was reportedly a skilled shot, and taught reading and writing to soldiers in her off hours, most of whom had never held a book. Her 1902 memoir, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, remains the only known Civil War account published by a Black woman who served on the front lines, offering an unflinching record of both wartime conditions and the racism that persisted decades after emancipation.
Life & background
Born Susan Ann Baker into slavery on August 6, 1848, on the Isle of Wight off coastal Georgia, Taylor was sent to live with her grandmother in Savannah as a child, where she secretly attended illegal schools for enslaved children, walking to class with her books hidden in paper to avoid detection. Freed at 14 in 1862 when her uncle led her family to a Union gunboat near Fort Pulaski, her literacy was immediately put to use teaching children on St. Simon's Island before she married Sergeant Edward King of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers and began her wartime service. After the war she opened one of the first schools for freed Black children in Savannah, was widowed in 1866, and eventually moved to Boston in 1872, remarrying Russell Taylor in 1879 and becoming a founding organizer of Corps 67 of the Massachusetts Woman's Relief Corps, a Union veterans' auxiliary, in 1886. She died October 6, 1912, in Boston; in 2021, after a researcher discovered her name had never been added to her grave marker, Boston's mayor dedicated a new headstone in her honor, and in 2023 Savannah renamed a city square for her.
Sources
- National Park Service; American Battlefield Trust; Emerging Civil War
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