“After the War,” Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers (1902)

Summary

Susie King Taylor was born “under the slave law” in Liberty County, Georgia, on August 8, 1848. She learned, surreptitiously, to read and write from a white playmate, and fled with her uncle to the safety of Union occupation forces in South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound after the Federal Navy seized the islands and surrounding region of Port Royal in November, 1861. In 1862, she married Sergeant Edward King of Co. E., 1st South Carolina Volunteers, one of the first black volunteer regiments to be formed for the Union army (and afterwards re-designated as the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops). She served variously as a laundress, nurse, and schoolteacher, “teaching many of the comrades in Company E to read and write.” After the death of her husband in September, 1866, she moved to Boston, where she married Russell Taylor and worked for the Women’s Relief Corps, the women’s auxiliary to Grand Army of the Republic. In 1902, she published her memoirs of her service in the Civil War and thereafter, reflecting eloquently but bitterly on the promise and failures of Reconstruction.

Selected by

Allen C. Guelzo

Director, Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship, James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University

Darrell A.H. Miller

Melvin G. Shimm Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law

Document Excerpt

I wonder if our white fellow men realize the true sense or 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 freed from bondage, and that the two races could live in unity with each other, but when we read almost every day of what is being done to my race by some whites in the South, I sometimes ask, “Was the war in vain? Has it brought freedom, in the full sense of the word, or has it not made our condition more hopeless?”

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. There is no redress for us from a government which promised to protect all under its flag. It seems a mystery to me. They say, “One flag, one nation, one country indivisible.” Is this true? Can we say this truth fully, when one race is allowed to burn, hang, and inflict the most horrible torture weekly, monthly, on another? No, we cannot sing, “My country, ‘tis of thee, Sweet land of Liberty”! It is hollow mockery. The Southland laws are all on the side of the white, and they do just as they like to the negro, whether in the right or not….

All we ask for is “equal justice,” the same that is accorded to all other races who come to this country, of their free will (not forced to, as we were), and are allowed to enjoy every privilege, unrestricted, while we are denied what is rightfully our own in a country which the labor of our forefathers helped to make what it is.

…I read an article, which said the ex-Confederate Daughters had sent a petition to the managers of the local theatres in Tennessee to prohibit the performance of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” claiming it was exaggerated (that is, the treatment of the slaves), and would have a very bad effect on the children who might see the drama. [Taylor is referring to a protest by the United Daughters of the Confederacy against the Lexington (KY) Opera House’s production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in January, 1902.] 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? Which of these two, the drama or the present state of affairs, makes a degrading impression upon the minds of our young generation? In my opinion it is not “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” but it should be the one that has caused the world to cry “Shame!” It does not seem as if our land is yet civilized.

…I know I shall not live to see the day, but it will come – the South will be like the North, and when it comes it will be prized higher than we prize the North to-day. God is just; when he created man he made him in his image, and never intended one should misuse the other. All men are born free and equal in his sight.