The Letters She Learned in Secret: How Susie King Taylor Turned Hidden Knowledge Into History

In Savannah, Georgia, in the 1850s, a little girl was learning to read. That sentence sounds ordinary. It wasn't. For Susie King Taylor, born enslaved in 1848 on a coastal Georgia plantation, the act of learning to read was a crime. Not a minor infraction. A criminal offense under Georgia state law, punishable by fine, imprisonment, or worse — designed specifically to keep enslaved people locked out of the one tool that could make freedom thinkable.

She learned anyway.

And what she did with that stolen knowledge — across a Civil War, a lifetime of teaching, and a memoir nobody thought to ask her to write — turned out to be one of the most quietly remarkable stories in American history.

The Backyard Classroom

Susie was sent to live with her grandmother in Savannah as a young child, a common arrangement that gave her slightly more freedom of movement than life on the plantation allowed. Her grandmother, a free Black woman with connections in the city's small but determined free Black community, found ways to get Susie educated.

The lessons happened in secret. A free Black woman named Mrs. Woodhouse ran what amounted to an underground school in her home, taking in Black children — free and enslaved alike — and teaching them to read and write while the law looked the other way, or didn't look at all. Students arrived with their books hidden inside paper wrapping to avoid detection. The whole operation depended on discretion, on a community that understood the stakes and kept quiet about them.

Susie absorbed everything. By the time she was in her early teens, she was literate in a city and a time when that fact alone made her dangerous to the system that owned her.

What the War Opened

The Civil War reached the Georgia coast in 1862. Union forces captured Fort Pulaski, near Savannah, and the surrounding Sea Islands became a zone of contested territory where enslaved people began slipping away from plantations and toward the Union lines in significant numbers. Susie, fourteen years old, escaped with her uncle's family and made her way to St. Simons Island, where a regiment of Black Union soldiers — the First South Carolina Volunteers, later reorganized as the 33rd United States Colored Infantry — was forming.

The Union officers quickly discovered something valuable: this teenage girl could read and write fluently. In a regiment where many of the soldiers had been denied literacy their entire lives, that was not a small thing.

She was asked to run a school for the soldiers. She said yes.

Teaching in the Open for the First Time

What Susie King Taylor did on St. Simons Island and later at Beaufort, South Carolina, was historically unprecedented. She taught openly. Not in a backyard with books wrapped in paper. Not in a neighbor's house with one eye on the door. In daylight, with the knowledge and support of the Union Army, she taught Black men — soldiers, free people, men who had survived the same system of enforced ignorance she had — to read and write.

She was, by most historical accounts, the first Black woman to teach openly in the South. She was also, at this point, still a teenager.

But teaching wasn't the only thing she was doing. Susie also served as a nurse, working alongside Clara Barton — the founder of the American Red Cross — tending to wounded soldiers, cleaning and dressing injuries, providing the kind of care that the formal medical system of the Union Army was often too stretched or too indifferent to provide. She did this without pay. She received no pension for her service. The government she served never formally acknowledged her contribution.

She kept records of all of it.

The Memoir Nobody Asked For

After the war, Susie King Taylor settled in Boston, married twice, and continued teaching. She organized a branch of the Women's Relief Corps, an auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic, and spent decades advocating for Black veterans who, like her, had served a country that had not adequately served them back.

In 1902, she published Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers. It is the only memoir published by an African American woman about her service in the Civil War. Nobody commissioned it. Nobody told her the story was worth telling. She told it herself, in clear and careful prose, because she had been keeping track all along.

The memoir is not angry, exactly. It is precise. It documents what she saw and what she did with the same methodical attention she must have brought to those first hidden reading lessons in Savannah — the understanding that knowledge, once acquired, must be recorded, must be kept, must be made available to whoever comes next.

She wrote about the soldiers she cared for. About the conditions in the camps. About the indignity of returning Black veterans being denied the rights they had bled for. About watching, in her later years, the country slide backward toward a new architecture of racial oppression even as it congratulated itself on having ended slavery.

"I may not live to see it," she wrote near the end of her memoir, "but the time is approaching when the whole country will realize that the treatment of the Black man in this country is a disgrace to its civilization."

She died in 1912, before she could see whether she was right.

What the Hidden Lessons Were Really For

Susie King Taylor's story is often told as an education story, or a Civil War story, or a story about a remarkable woman in a remarkable time. All of those framings are accurate.

But there's another way to understand it — as a story about what happens when a system tries to keep knowledge from a person and fails.

The Georgia law that made it illegal to teach enslaved people to read was not arbitrary cruelty. It was strategic. The people who wrote that law understood that literacy was not just a skill. It was a form of power. It was the ability to read contracts, to write letters, to document abuses, to record history, to argue in one's own voice rather than being spoken for or about.

Susie King Taylor understood that too. She had learned it in a backyard in Savannah, with her book hidden inside a paper wrapper, sitting next to other children who knew that what they were doing was dangerous and did it anyway.

She spent the rest of her life doing exactly what the law had been designed to prevent. She taught. She recorded. She remembered. She wrote it all down.

From nowhere great — a plantation, a stolen lesson, a backyard in a city that wanted her to stay ignorant — she built something the system had specifically tried to make impossible: a permanent record, in her own words, of what she had seen and done and survived.

The letters she learned in secret turned out to be the most powerful things she ever owned.