CIVIL WAR MEMOIRS”

Susie King Taylor

Markus Wiener Publishing, New York 1988

Mrs. Taylor began her connection with the Union Army one morning in early April of 1862, when, she tells us, she was brought aboard a Federal gunboat from St. Catherine’s, a small island not far south of Savannah. Young Susie was only fourteen years old at the time, and was in the company of an uncle who had seized upon the opportunity afforded by the Federal attack on Fort Pulaski, the guardian fortress of Savannah harbor, to place his own family and young Susie outside the reach of the Confederate authorities.

What Mrs. Taylor does not remember to tell us about the event, is that the action her family had taken was in direct response to the most exciting lure conceivable to slaves: freedom. Much of the rare value of Mrs. Taylor’s book is owing to her having gained her freedom so early in the war, and having been in consequence, in a position to observe some of the most interesting “firsts” of the Civil War.

On April 12, 1862, Major-General David Hunter, in command of the Department of the South, made a successful assault on Fort Pulaski, and immediately announced that all slaves in the immediate vicinity of the Fort would be regarded as free men. This was the second such step taken during the war, but the first that President Lincoln did not countermand. Earlier in the war, which was by now a year old, General John G. Freemont had attempted to get the same emancipating policy adopted in Missouri. President Lincoln had then rebuked Fremont by countermanding his order. This time he did not renounce Hunter’s action, and men observed that Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s new Secretary of War, was a man of strong antislavery inclinations, just as Fremont and Hunter were.

Slaves had presented problems of status once they escaped to the Federal lines, but all these had been resolved before Hunter’s attack on Fort Pulaski by the fairly expedient formula on categorizing such escapees as “contraband of war” and refusing to return them to their masters. Although this policy had had a tremendous advantage as compared with the policy on returning slaves followed by some officers in the first months of the conflict, it was still a very insecure hold on freedom from the runaway’s point of view. Therefore General Hunter’s new policy was welcomed by antislavery men and women everywhere, and particularly by slaves, as an indication of still better things to come.

The impact of this news resulted immediately in an increasing number of fugitives within the Federal lines in the whole coastal area between Charleston and Savannah. Therefore one supposes that it was not be chance that Susie’s family gathered so near the guns of Fort Pulaski. Very shortly this family of escapees found itself involved deeply in another Civil War “first.” In no time Susie’s uncle and many of her fellow escapees from Georgia were enlisted in a newly-forming regiment of Black soldiers being organized under the charge of General Hunter at the headquarters of his army on Port Royal Island,north of Savannah on the Sough Carolina coast. The South Carolina Sea Islands had been occupied in the fall of 1861 as a means of providing a haven in stormy weather for the Federal blockading squadrons that patrolled the coastline and as a good location for the training of raw recruits from the North during the first winter of the war. Although the choice of this particularly vulnerable district was made with no particular reference to the demography of the region, the fact that the population was composed almost entirely of slaves was to prove to be of enormous significance in the course of the war. Only 17 percent of the population of the islands stretched along the coast south of Charleston was white; the rest were slaves who had lived in the greatest possible isolation from the outside world. When their masters fled in haste from the invading forces of the Union Army, the slaves remained on the plantations, relieved no doubt to be rid of one set of masters, but uneasy about what the future held in store.

One of the largest cotton crops in recent memory was also largely abandoned by the retreating Confederates, and the juxtaposition of the slaves and the cotton formed the rationale for a highly interesting and experimental effort to demonstrate that the Blacks would work at securing this cotton to the United States Treasury Department for wages, and without compulsion. Although Susie King Taylor does not tell us about this recent development in the island country where she came to live and work during the war, it is a very important fact in the background of her store. The region had become a proving ground for freedom and had attracted many Northern men and women of antislavery conviction, who came to supervise the planting of cotton on a free labor basis, to teach the exslaves to read and write, and to play a semipaternal role in the period of transition from slavery of freedom that the people of the islands were experiencing. It was therefore not surprising that the first black soldiers to fight in the Union armies were enlisted in this theater of the war. Although Hunter’s little band of recruits was not immediately recognized by the war Department, and was partially disbanded in the summer of the same spring, it was organized, it was not entirely dissolved before official recognition came. The unit was reconstituted in August under the ironic denomination of the First South Carolina Volunteers, led by an antislavery officer of national reputation, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson. This was the regiment that several of the men of Susie’s family had joined, and the regiment in which she became a most extraordinary laundress.

Because she had learned to read and write while still a slave girl in Savannah, Susie found herself doing as much teaching as washing and ironing. As a part of the classic tableau of the black soldier bending over his book in the light of the campfire, Susie found her services in great demand. According to Colonel Higginson, whose "Army life in a Black Regiment" has become a minor classis of Civil War literature, the soldiers’ “love of the spelling-book” was “perfectly inexhaustible,” and those who held the key to it were constantly pressed into service.

Once the troops engage in combat, Susie found further usefulness in nursing the wounds of soldiers, men cut down in the small-scale but sanguinary encounters that marked the semi-guerilla fighting along the marshy coastline of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. The most famous of the engagements was the assault on Battery Wagner, which controlled Charleston Harbor. This struggle, which took place on July 18th of 1863 was one of several engagements in that year that demonstrated to skeptical Northern opinion, that the black man was a formidable soldier, and an ally of great potential. The solders who distinguished, indeed, immolated themselves, were men of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers, free blacks from the North, but because they were stationed in the same region as Susie King Taylor’s regiment, she formed a part of their nursing corps, and these men became “our boys” to her, as the men of the First South Caroling already were.

These were exciting times for a young girl not out of her teens, and Susie King Taylor’s recollections of them are invaluable for those who wish to understand the Civil War from the black woman’s point of view. One wishes, however, that Susie had written as much about herself as she wrote about “our boys.” What no doubt seemed to her of little consequence would have been treasured today in light of the feminist movement. That in 1862 she married Edward King, a sergeant in Colonel Higginson’s regiment, is given only passing mention, and that she was only seventeen at the end of the war must be calculated through simple arithmetic. The trials of the months at the end of the war, when the Kings came back to Savannah and Susie, opened a private school for black children, are indicated in the sketchiest of outlines. What were the thoughts of a young mother-to-be upon the sudden and accidental death of her husband, the reader must only guess. Mrs. King’s second marriage, contracted when she was thirty-one, to Russell L. Taylor, is recorded with equal brevity.

Young Susie was not thoroughly aware of the unique character of the sector of the war in which she participated, or of the white people with whom her lot was cast. The inability to set her war experiences, into a wider perspective results through no fault of Susie’s, but it deprives the reader of a certain detachment that must be supplied on one’s own. It also explains in part the shock and disillusionment Mrs. Taylor experienced in the 1890’s –post-Reconstruction—when she was obliged to observe at last the shallowness of the national commitment to equality, a commitment she had trusted completely at the time it was being made.

On the other hand, what Susie King, Taylor described, she described with economy and feeling, in a forthright and unadorned chronicle of events. “It was a glorious day for us all,” she recalls of the celebration held on January 1, 1863 of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. She found herself among the only gathering of blacks anywhere in the country where the Proclamation could have had an effective emancipatory function, for other occupied areas of the South were specifically excluded from the terms of the Proclamation. It was, nevertheless, an important turning point in the war, the official advent of a policy that had been subtly inaugurated in August of 1862, when the War Department gave its blessing to the recruitment of black soldiers.

Among the most interesting sections of Mrs. King’s book are those dealing with the reactions of her grown-up relatives to the prospect of freedom opened up by the war, and the nervousness of the white population about that reaction. The usual prayer-meetings could no longer be tolerated with “freedom” of the heavenly future might conceivable be interpreted by the slaves as an earthly possibility. “Oh, how these people prayed for freedom.” It is remarkable how much insight the reader may gain on slavery from the few pages Mrs. Taylor gave to the theme at the beginning of her book.

The striking figure of her grandmother eclipses others who emerge less distinctly from the shadows of that old life. Susie’s grandmother got enough money through steady application to her chicken and egg barter with the plantation slaves to invest in the Freedmen’s Bank after the war, money which she lost, of course, when the bank failed. But she had the detachment not to hate the Yankees for the result. “I will leave it all in God’s hand. If the Yankees did take all our money, they freed my race; God will take care of us.” The shrewd head for business appears from Susie’s account to have descended through the maternal line, and in this respect her story reinforces the view of slavery as matri-focal in its family organization. Susie’s mother, by her account, managed to secured seven hundred acres of land in the post-bellum period, an astonishing amount of real estate for anyone, black or white, to have accumulated in that period.

Susie King Taylor went North after the war, and led a full life of service. She never forgot “our boys,” and from her home in Boston found the time and energy for an active part in the work of the Women’s Relief Corps. She scrutinized national policy for racial implications, and charged the United States with bringing a kind of racism to Cuba that was unknown there before. She never ceased to wave the bloody shirt, for she could not forget the horrors of the war, and she reminds. The United Daughters of the Confederacy of their blindness it regard to the barbarities committed daily upon Southern blacks.

The close of Mrs. King’s book makes plain her indignation over the betrayal of the black men who had fought for the Union. She does not probe deeply the responsibility national leaders must bear for the betrayal before the bar of history, even though one reads between the lines that she is aware of it. Nor does Mrs. King seem fully aware of the not-so-subtle economic disadvantages her race endured in the North in this “nadir” of race relations. And yet, Mrs. King struggles for understanding, and a hopeful view of the future. Her passionate and disillusioned closing pages are saved from despair by her faith that ultimately justice will prevail.

There seems no reason to question the authenticity of Mrs. King’s work. We may believe Colonel Higginson’s immodest and somewhat presumptuous remark that he only changed the spelling of proper names, with the implied suggestion that the work might have been more stylish had he done more. Although the tempo and urgency Mrs. Taylor’s account accelerates sharply when she moves from what she remembered of the war to what she was experiencing at the time of writing, the style of the work remains basically the same, and it remains what Colonel Higginson said it was, “the plain record of simple lives led in stormy periods.” The simplicity of Mrs. King’s life, however, is simple only as the world in its simplicity judges these matters.

Introduction By:
Willie Lee Rose
Baltimore, Maryland
December, 1987

The book can be purchased on Amazon.com.