Reminiscences of My Life in Camp

Susie King Taylor was born into slavery in Georgia in 1848. By 1862, she had escaped to freedom and found herself tending wounded soldiers with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, becoming the first African American woman to publish a memoir of her wartime experiences. This is not a grand military history. It is something rarer and more precious: a Black woman's firsthand account of the Civil War from inside the ranks, written with quiet dignity and fierce memory. She recalls the terror of flight, the strange dignity of wearing a Union uniform, the horrors of disease and battle, and the impossible question of what freedom would actually mean. Beyond the war, Taylor taught formerly enslaved children, worked with the Women's Relief Corps, and lived long enough to see Jim Crow settle over the South. Her 1902 memoir ends with a question that still aches: what did this war cost, and was it enough? Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Civil War as lived experience rather than abstraction.