Susie King Taylor
Civil War

Susie King Taylor
Civil War

The first Black Army nurse, Susie King Taylor served for the Union during the Civil War, tending to an all-Black Army regiment. Like many African American nurses during the war, Taylor was never compensated for her work. She worked as a laundress and a nurse, and after the war’s end in 1865, she became the first Black woman to publish a memoir about her experiences during the war. After the war, Taylor opened a school for former enslaved people and also taught black soldiers to read and write. Additionally, Taylor served as president of the Women’s Relief Corps in which she furnished and packed boxes for soldiers in the Spanish-American War (1898). Taylor described her wartime service, writing, “all this time, my interest in the boys in blue has not abated.” She claimed she was “still loyal and true, whether they were black or white,” and that her “hands have never left undone anything they could do towards [wounded men’s] aid and comfort.”