Reminiscences of My Life in Camp
So when I was down in Savannah recently, the History Museum in the old train station reminded me of a memoir I'd been meaning to read: Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops, Late 1st South Carolina Volunteers, by Susie King Taylor. Taylor was a washerwoman with the regiment, the same regiment that Thomas Wentworth Higginson was colonel of, and which he famously described in his own memoir, Army Life in a Black Regiment.
The edition (Patricia W. Romero & Willie Lee Rose, eds.) I found in one of the National Park bookstores down there is entitled A Black Woman's Civil War Memoirs, for marketing purposes, but they have the old cover page inside. This edition has some useful footnotes, though one or two of them are a bit shaky. Still, it's good that it's in print, and this is a serviceable version.
Taylor was born in 1848, and was therefore quite young in the Civil War. She must have been 14 when she fled to a Union-held coastal island, and perhaps 15 when she married a soldier. She didn't write this memoir until around 1902, ten years before her death.
It isn't a lengthy book, and it is very episodic. Which is not surprising, having been written nearly 40 years after the fact. It's still a wonderful piece of history. Notable are all the efforts being made by Savannah's slaves to circumvent the rules against educating blacks. There were tutors and secret schools, which she tells about. Later, when she served as washerwoman and nurse for the regiment, she spent her spare time teaching the soldiers, and anyone else who wanted, how to read and write. This brought her to the attention of the officers, and she was introduced to the many tourists who came down from the North to see how the experiments in teaching freed slaves, and the experiment of teaching ex-slaves to be soldiers, were going. She worked with Clara Barton, for example.
She survived a number of shipwrecks in her day, which is a bit remarkable. She also has comments on the Jim Crow laws of the post-war era, and other observations that illuminate the time. She moved to Boston for many years, and describes how uncomfortable she was traveling South to Louisiana for a sick son, who died. The colored-only train cars, and the Civil War veterans who wouldn't wear their Union regalia, were a shock and surprise.
This doesn't quite count as a slave narrative, but it belongs on the shelf with Fredrick Douglass and the others.
CBsIP: student thesis novels
The edition (Patricia W. Romero & Willie Lee Rose, eds.) I found in one of the National Park bookstores down there is entitled A Black Woman's Civil War Memoirs, for marketing purposes, but they have the old cover page inside. This edition has some useful footnotes, though one or two of them are a bit shaky. Still, it's good that it's in print, and this is a serviceable version.
Taylor was born in 1848, and was therefore quite young in the Civil War. She must have been 14 when she fled to a Union-held coastal island, and perhaps 15 when she married a soldier. She didn't write this memoir until around 1902, ten years before her death.
It isn't a lengthy book, and it is very episodic. Which is not surprising, having been written nearly 40 years after the fact. It's still a wonderful piece of history. Notable are all the efforts being made by Savannah's slaves to circumvent the rules against educating blacks. There were tutors and secret schools, which she tells about. Later, when she served as washerwoman and nurse for the regiment, she spent her spare time teaching the soldiers, and anyone else who wanted, how to read and write. This brought her to the attention of the officers, and she was introduced to the many tourists who came down from the North to see how the experiments in teaching freed slaves, and the experiment of teaching ex-slaves to be soldiers, were going. She worked with Clara Barton, for example.
She survived a number of shipwrecks in her day, which is a bit remarkable. She also has comments on the Jim Crow laws of the post-war era, and other observations that illuminate the time. She moved to Boston for many years, and describes how uncomfortable she was traveling South to Louisiana for a sick son, who died. The colored-only train cars, and the Civil War veterans who wouldn't wear their Union regalia, were a shock and surprise.
This doesn't quite count as a slave narrative, but it belongs on the shelf with Fredrick Douglass and the others.
CBsIP: student thesis novels