Civil Discourse encourages guest submissions from academic and popular historians alike. Today's guest author is Ron Roth, author of The Civil War in the South Carolina Lowcountry: How a Confederate Artillery Battery and a Black Union Regiment Defined the Civil War.

In the Civil War and post-Civil War eras, decades in which there were precious few voices of Black women, that of Susie King Taylor’s was especially eloquent, and is especially prescient today in the era of Black Lives Matter. Her legacy rests on a remarkable work, A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs. A laundress for the legendary 1st South Carolina Regiment—the first Black Civil War regiment formed to fight for the Union cause—she found herself at the epicenter of a profound revolution in the history of United States race relations, one that she describes with clarity and conviction.

The overarching theme of her life and her book is her reverence for literacy and her passionate mission to teach Blacks how to read and write. She is consumed with the realization that freedom in no way guarantees equality, but the doorway to equality can be opened, if just by a necessary crack, by literacy. She was born and raised in antebellum Savannah, a city with a white elite profoundly committed to the belief that slave labor was necessary for economic prosperity. Indeed, slavery was incorporated into every aspect of the economic, social, and political fabric of the city. Georgia’s anti-literacy laws of 1829 were driven by the planter classes’ obsessive fear that literate slaves were more likely to lignite slave insurrections, creating for Savannah’s Blacks the chilling environment of a police state. Thus, the one-mile walk from Suzie’s grandmother’s house where she lived to the ad hoc school of a Mrs. Woodward—part of an underground network of secret schools Blacks provided in their homes—could easily draw unwanted attention. Every precaution was taken to mask the purpose of these daily excursions: the schoolbooks were wrapped in paper to prevent the police or other suspicious whites from seeing them. The children arrived at the school room one at a time, in irregular intervals.

The path to literacy was not a straight one for Suzie and subject to the vagaries of chance. In addition to the surreptitious lessons she received at Mrs. Woodward’s, a white playmate gave her lessons without the knowledge of her parents; and her grandmother’s landlord’s son gave her a few lessons until he was drafted by the Confederate army in 1861. (That a white Savannahian would volunteer to teach her is instructive of Savannah’s complex race relations in the antebellum era.) Taylor was quick to put her writing skills to work. In the antebellum years, after the hour of 9:00 pm, Blacks were required to carry a pass signed by their slave master. The enterprising, Taylor used her literacy forging passes for her family and friends.

As a writer, Taylor has the crisp, straight-forward style of a journalist, with an eye toward telling details. During the period when the First Regiment was camped on Morris Island near Fort Wagner, she described the site of the massacre of the famed 54th Massachusetts, immortalized in the film, Glory:

Outside of the Fort were many skulls lying about; I have often moved them on one side out of the path. The comrades and I would have quite a debated as to which side the men fought on. Some thought that they were the skulls of our boys; others thought they were the enemy’s. . . .The were a gruesome sight, those fleshless heads and grinning jaws, but by this time I had become accustomed to worse things.

Her observations and descriptions of the military activities of the 1st are trenchant and enriched by her empathy for the men. Her role went far beyond her official status as a laundress, helping the men pack their haversacks and cartridge boxes in preparation for an attack, then nursing them on their return.

It seems strange how our aversion to seeing suffering is overcome in war,--how we are able to see the most sickening sights, such has men with their limbs blown off and mangled by the deadly shells, without a shudder; and instead of turning away, how we hurry to assist in alleviating their pain, bind up their wounds, and press the cool water to their parched lips, with feelings often of sympathy and pity.

With chilling immediacy she describes the bitterness and cruelty the Confederates visited upon the regiment despite the men’s efforts to help them. In the emergency of a Charleston that was burning out of control she describes:

When we landed, under a flag of truce, our regiment went to work assisting the citizens in subduing the flames. It was a terrible scene. For three or four days the men fought the fire, saving he property and effects of the people, yet these white men and women could not tolerate our black Union soldiers, for many of them had formerly been their slaves; and although these brave men risked life and limb to assist them in their distress, men and even women would sneer and molest them whenever they met them.

After the war, the era of Reconstruction was a time of hope and optimism for Blacks, but it soon became clear to Taylor that freedom could not be equated with equality. Hardly had the last Confederate flag been surrendered that southern legislatures began vigorously instituting a series of “Black Codes” designed to roll back any advances Blacks might have enjoyed. In addition to drastically limiting their civil rights, the codes enforced vast, economic disparities between whites and Blacks. The plan was for Blacks to remain mired in low income tenant farming with no title to their lands and few opportunities for advancement.

Taylor soon experienced the many ways whites would perpetuate their bigotry through secretive, unscrupulous practices, well under the radar screen of the occupying Federal forces during Reconstruction. The use of public transportation remained closed to Blacks. To address this problem, Taylor along with other freed Savannah blacks, purchased a used steamboat to provide transportation services to Blacks between Beaufort, Charleston, and Savannah. The steamer soon broke down on one of its trips, breaking up on a sand bar. An examination of the ruins of the boat by authorities made clear it was an old poorly built boat: Taylor and the other Black investors had been swindled.

Undaunted, Taylor continued her mission of educating newly freed Blacks, opening a school in Savannah. She married one of the veterans of the 1st, Sergeant King, who, though a first-rate carpenter, found little employment due to prejudice, forcing him into work as a laborer, loading and unloading ships on the Savannah docks. He died in 1866, and his loss forced her into work as a domestic servant. She was employed by a series of Savannah families over the coming years, one of whom she accompanied to Boston, where she would spend the rest of her life, enjoying an atmosphere of freedom that would have been impossible in Savannah.

In the final two chapters of her book, Taylor eloquently sets out her “thoughts on present conditions.” “I wonder,” she reflects, “if our fellow white men realize the true sense and meaning of brotherhood? For two hundred years we had toiled for them; the war of 1861 came and was ended, and we thought our race was forever free from bondage.” But she despairs, suggesting that the promise of the war was not fulfilled. “In this ‘land of the free’ we are burned, tortured, and denied a fair trial, murdered for any imaginary wrong conceived in the brain of the negro-hating white man…No we cannot sing ‘My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty! It is hollow mockery…For the South still cherishes a hatred toward the blacks.’”

She continues with a harsh indictment of the south. The United Daughters of the Confederacy are especially singled out for their racist crusades to nurture the “lost cause” narrative being propounded by southerners. She recalls an article she read describing how the Tennessee chapter of the UDC sent a petition to the managers of theatres and concert halls to prohibit performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, claiming it exaggerated southern treatment of the enslaved. The article prompted memories of scenes in the real world of southern bigotry she experienced as a young girl in Savannah, where she saw “thirty or forty men, handcuffed, and as many women and children, come every first Tuesday of each month. . .to the auction blocks. . .Only a block from where I resided.” She asks rhetorically, “Do these Confederate Daughters ever send petitions to prohibit the atrocious lynchings and wholesale murdering and torture of the negro? Do you ever hear of them fearing this would have a bad effect on the children?*

Late in her life, residing in Boston, she made a trip to Shreveport, Louisiana, to care for her son, who was seriously ill. While taking the train to Shreveport, she experienced fear and indignity at the hands of two anonymous men in an event that can be characterized as the 19th century version of racial profiling and intimidation. During a train transfer in Cincinnati, she was directed to sit in the filthy smoking car where Blacks were required to travel. Soon after the train departed, she was accosted by two anonymous white men, who grill her, asking “Where are those men who came with you?” Of course, there were no men. The frightened Taylor replied she had not seen any men. The two thugs continued to question her, asking her where she was from, and where she was going, before they walked out of the car and left her alone.

When the conductor made his rounds, she asked him who the men were--men who were permitted to enter the train and insult and threaten its passengers? He smiled but didn’t answer. Later a porter told her they were local constables, in search of a black man said to have eloped with, presumably, a white man’s wife: a frequent southern trope used to justify lynching. Arriving in Shreveport the horrors continued. She learned of a white clerk in a store who murdered a Black porter over a misplaced umbrella, shooting him for answering a question in a manner he thought “very saucy.” In the town of Clarksdale she witnessed the unspeakable horror of a lynching.

Despite these outrages, she remained hopeful. She was encouraged by a visit to a black ex-Senator in Louisiana who had “a fine residence” and owed substantial real estate. She saw large numbers of Black families whom she observed “owned their homes, and were industrious, refined people; and if they were only allowed justice, the South would be the only place for our people to live.”

She compares the plight of her people to that of the Jews, “who, after many weary years of bondage, were led into the land of promise, free to thrive and be forever free from persecution, and I don’t despair, for the Book which is our guide through life declares, ‘Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hand.’”

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*The year of the publication of her memoir, 1902, saw 85 Blacks lynched, according to statistics of the Tuskegee Institute.

Ron Roth is former director and CEO of the Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, and director of the Nebraska Museum of Art of the University of Nebraska. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including an exhibition on the history of the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery for the Historic Beaufort Foundation in Beaufort, South Carolina, and an exhibit on the Underground Railroad for the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum. He was a featured speaker at the 2017 Civil War Symposium of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History and is a speaker for the State Humanities Council of South Carolina. Roth was a seasonal historian and a licensed battlefield guide for the Gettysburg National Military Park. In addition he was a site interpreter and researcher at the National Park Service’s Custis-Lee Mansion at Arlington Cemetery. He is past president of the Lowcountry Civil War Roundtable in Bluffton, South Carolina. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio and a Masters-At-Teaching degree in Museum Education from George Washington University, Washington D.C.

Read a review of Roth’s new book The Civil War in the South Carolina Lowcountry here.

Read an interview with Ron Roth here.

Suggested Reading

Taylor, Susie King. A Black Woman’s Civil War Memories. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1988.

Foner, Eric. Forever Free—The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Vintage Books, 2006.

McPherson, James M. The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the Civil War Period. Vintage Books, 1993.

Litwack, Leon. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979

Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment. New York: Penguin Classics, 1997.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Blog Posts

Black Woman Rising: Susie King Taylor—A Righteous Voice of the Civil War Era

Civil Discourse