Susie King Taylor: “Nurse, Educator, Witness to History”

AI generatd image of Susie King Taylor and Civil War

Susan King Taylor was born enslaved in 1848 on a plantation near Savannah, Georgia, into a world designed to deny her every form of power. Even learning to read was illegal for Black people in the South, yet from childhood she pursued literacy in secret, taught by Black women who risked punishment to pass on knowledge. In a society built on keeping Black people uneducated, her ability to read and write was itself an act of resistance.

When the Civil War broke out, Taylor seized the moment that history cracked open. In 1862, she escaped slavery with her family and fled to Union-occupied St. Simons Island, Georgia. There, she joined the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, one of the first regiments of formerly enslaved Black men to fight for the Union Army. Taylor did more than just follow the troops, she became indispensable to them.

She served as a nurse, tending to wounded soldiers under battlefield conditions with limited supplies, exhausting hours, and constant danger. She treated everything from gunshot wounds to deadly outbreaks of smallpox and cholera.

In her own memoir, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers (published in 1902), she explicitly states that she was vaccinated against smallpox. This allowed her to safely nurse soldiers who contracted the disease (or a milder form called varioloid) during outbreaks in Union camps,

But she also did something just as revolutionary: she taught soldiers to read and write. In makeshift classrooms, in tents and camps, Taylor used literacy as a weapon of survival. Many of the men she taught had been enslaved only months before. Now they were fighting for the Union and learning how to read the world that had once been closed to them.

Taylor is widely recognized as the first Black Army nurse to serve with a Union regiment during the Civil War, and she did it without pay, official rank, or the protection afforded to white nurses. Like many Black women who carried the war on their backs, her labor was vital and largely unrecognized at the time.

Letter telling Susie King Taylor shes debarred from an Union Army nurse pension

After the war, Taylor moved north and continued serving the same community she had fought beside. In Boston, she became deeply involved with the Women’s Relief Corps (WRC), the official auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic, the powerful Civil War veterans’ organization. The WRC was responsible for caring for aging soldiers, widows, and orphans—providing food, clothing, housing assistance, and burial services when the federal government failed to do so. Taylor was a prominent leader in Boston’s Black WRC chapter, advocating for the rights of Black veterans who were often denied pensions, medical care, and recognition for their service.

Her activism wasn’t symbolic. She fought for soldiers who had bled for the Union only to be abandoned by it. She helped ensure veterans received proper burials and that their families were not left destitute. In a city that was a hub of abolitionist history but still steeped in racial discrimination, Taylor became a living bridge between wartime sacrifice and postwar justice.

In 1902, she published Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, one of the only memoirs written by a Black woman who served with Union troops during the Civil War. The book documents not just battles, but the racism Black soldiers endured, the unpaid labor of Black women, and the quiet heroism that never made it into official histories.

Susan King Taylor lived her life at the intersection of literacy, healing, and resistance. She understood that reading could free a mind, nursing could save a body, and organizing could protect a people from being erased.

This garment honors her not only as a nurse or a teacher, but as a defender of Black veterans and a woman who refused to let the truth of Black courage fade into silence.

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Susie King Taylor: “Nurse, Educator, Witness to History”

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