Susie King Taylor - "Fearless in the Face of Calamity"

Susie King Taylor was born a slave, the first of nine children at Grest Farm (35 miles south of Savannah) in Liberty County, Georgia on Aug. 6, 1848. Her mother was a domestic servant for the Grest family. At the age of about five she had mastered the skills of reading and writing. Taylor soon became a skilled reader and writer. Those abilities to read and write proved invaluable to the Union Army as they began to form regiments of African American soldiers. Two days after Fort Pulaski was taken by Union forces, Taylor fled with family to St. Catherine Island, where they receive Union protection and a transfer to the Union-occupied St. Simons Island where she claimed her freedom. Since most blacks were illiterate, it was soon discovered that Taylor could read and write. Five days after her arrival, Commodore Louis Goldsborough offered Taylor books and supplies if she would establish a school on the island. She accepted the offer and became the first black teacher to openly instruct African Americans in Georgia. She would meet and eventually marry Sergeant Edward King while teaching at St. Simon Island, and the two would move to Port Royal Island off the coast of South Carolina. When Union officers raised the First South Carolina Volunteers of African American soldiers, Taylor signed on as a nurse, and soon started a school for black children and soldiers. Taylor would then serve for more than three years traveling with her husband's unit, the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops , as a doctor’s aid, washing, cooking, and burning or burying human limbs. In 1890, after a trip to care for her dying son in Louisiana, Taylor wrote her memoirs which she privately published them as a book in 1902 as Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd US Colored Troops. Taylor spent much of the remainder of her life in the North, serving as a teacher, domestic servant and cook.