During the Civil War, thousands of former slaves joined with the U.S. Army as they were liberated from the homes and plantations where they were enslaved. Although many of these freed men and women would be relocated, there were men among them who joined the Army, and women among them who chose to continue traveling with the Army, giving aid to the soldiers who fought to ensure their freedom.

One of these former slaves was Susie King Taylor, a black woman whose uncommon education made her valuable on many fronts to the U.S. Army, and the only black woman to publish her memoirs of her time with the Army during the Civil War.

Born a slave in Liberty County, Georgia, Susie was allowed by her master to go to Savannah, to live with her grandmother, when she was around seven years old. In Savannah, Susie had the good fortune to be able to attend covert schools for African-Americans at a time when Georgia had and enforced strict laws against the education of African-Americans. Susie was also assisted in her studies by two white youths who taught her, despite knowing that they were in violation of the law.

Susie became a freedwoman almost by proxy in 1862, at the age of 14. Susie had become “contraband of war” when Union soldiers occupied the area; however, her uncle, following the lead of other slaves in the area and throughout the South, sought freedom by going behind Union lines, taking as many of the members of his extended family with him as he could, Susie included. Susie and her family boarded a Federal gunboat and were taken to St. Simon’s Island, occupied by the Union Army and a haven for freedmen.

Early on in her tenure at St. Simon’s Island, Susie’s education proved to be valuable both for her and the other freed men and women on the island. When army officers realized that Susie could read and write, skills that most slaves had been forbidden to learn, they asked her to organize a school. Armed with the books the officers obtained for her, Susie became the first black teacher in the first school for free African-Americans in the South. By day she taught forty young pupils, and at night, she taught a number of adults who came to her, “all of them so eager to learn to read, to read above all else,” she later wrote.

While at St. Simon’s Island, Susie married Edward King, a black noncommissioned officer in the Union forces. When St. Simon’s Island was evacuated, Susie followed the newly formed 1st South Carolina Infantry Volunteers – later renamed the 33d Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops – which was organized by Major General David Hunter of the Unions Department of the South and commanded by Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson of Massachusetts, and operated as one of the first organized regiments of freedmen during the war.

For three years, Susie followed her husband’s regiment. Although employed as the regiment’s laundress, this far from the only job Susie mastered during her time with the regiment. Not only did she wash for the men, and cook for them, but she also served as a nurse, and used both medical and folk treatments while tending to the sick and wounded. She would later write that she avoided a deadly smallpox outbreak by drinking “sassafras tea constantly, which kept my blood purged and prevented me from contracting this dread scourge.”

Susie also resumed her teaching duties while following the regiment. She taught soldiers how to read and write. She also allowed them to teach her; while following the regiment, Susie learned to break apart and reassemble a musket, and became talented at target shooting.

When the war concluded, Susie and her husband Edward moved back to Georgia, where she opened one of a succession of schools for former slaves. Edward died in 1866, and in the 1870s, Susie moved to Boston, where she met and married Russell Taylor.

While in New Orleans to nurse an ailing son in the late 1890s, Susie began work on her memoirs. Published in 1902, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers stands as the only wartime memoir penned by and African-American woman. It tells the remarkable story of Susie King Taylor, a most remarkable woman.