Susie King Taylor, Civil War Teacher and Nurse

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. There are so many first person accounts of the U. S. Civil War. I don't know if you've heard. Maybe you're aware. There's just a ton of them. What. Yeah, there's letters and diaries and all kinds of other records, and a lot of memoirs and other accounts that people actually published, not just their personal papers. One in particular, though, is unique. It is Susie King Taylor's Reminiscences of my Life in Camp with the thirty third United States Colored Troops late first South Carolina Volunteers. So she wrote this book later on when she was in her fifties, but during the war, in the parts that she was writing about, she was still in her teens. This memoir is one of a very very few published works by black women about their lives during the Civil War, and it is the only one knowns who have been written by a black woman who was actively involved in the military. Susie King Taylor was born Susannah Baker on August sixty eight to a Guichi family. Living in a small island known as Isle of White in Liberty County, Georgia. The Gola Gichi are descended from people who belong to multiple different ethnic groups in West Africa who were enslaved and transported to the Sea Islands and other isolated coastal areas of the southern United States. Because these areas tended to be interconnected with one another but also isolated from further inland, enslaved people living there retained many elements of their cultures and also developed a Creole language known as Gola Gichi or Gola Gichi. There are some regional variations in these names. Susie's parents were hagar And and Raymond Baker, and she was the oldest of their nine children, six of whom survived infancy. Because Susie's mother was enslaved by Valentine and Frederica Cottman Gressed, Susie was also enslaved from birth. In her early childhood, she lived with her parents and younger siblings on the greats Rice Plantation. There were some key differences between the experiences of the Baker family and that of many other enslaved families in the United States. Enslavers often intentionally tried to break down family and community ties by separating people things like splitting up couples or selling children away from their parents. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Slave states also made it illegal to teach enslaved people or any people of color to read or write, so after being physically separated, people often had no straightforward way to keep in touch. Even though families intentionally taught one another about their connections and their ancestry and tried to find one another by whatever means they had, often this knowledge was lost due to the systemic effort to destroy it. Susie, though, could trace her ancestry back through multiple generations to two women who had an almost mythic presence in her family. There was a great great grandmother in Virginia who had both African and Indigenous ancestry and who lived to be a hundred and twenty had five sons who fought in the Revolutionary War. This woman also had two daughters, One of them was Susannah, Susie's great great grandmother, who was a respected midwife who had twenty four children of her own, twenty three girls and a boy. And Susannah also lived to be more than a hundred. Susie's maternal grandparents were Dolly and Fortune Lambert Reid, who lived nearby, and Dolly played a huge role in Susie's upbringing. The lives of Susie and her blings also seemed to have been a little bit less restrictive than the lives of many other enslaved children, who were often forced to work from a very young age. Susie and two of her younger siblings were allowed to go live with their grandmother instead. Some sources described Dolly Reid as free at this point, and others say that she was enslaved by the Great Family but had been hired out to work in Savannah. We do know that Dolly Reid was earning money of her own, so if she was enslaved at this point, that was in addition to her other work. She took in laundry and cleaned rooms being rented out by single men. She also turned her four times a year visits to see her family on Isle of Wight into a trade opportunity, so in Savannah she would get things like bacon, tobacco, flour, molasses, and sugar and then take them to the Sea islands where she would trade them for chicken and eggs and take that back with her to sell in Savannah. Savannah was about thirty five miles from Isle of Wight, and there wasn't a rail connection in between them, so this would have been an arduous journey at the time. Susie went to live with her grandmother around eighteen fifty five when she was seven, and her grandmother immediately saw to it that she be taught how to read. As we said earlier, this was illegal. Under George's antiliteracy law passed in eighteen twenty nine, both the person teaching and the person being taught could be fined and whipped, although if the teacher was white, they could be jailed rather than whipped. So all of this happened in secret. Susie described first going to a secret school belonging to a Mrs. Woodhouse that was a free black woman who was friends with her grandmother. She wrote about this quote. We went every day about nine o'clock with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them. We went in one at a time through the gate into the yard to the l kitchen, which was a schoolroom. She had twenty five or thirty children whom she taught, assisted by her daughter Mary Jane. The neighbors would see us going in sometimes, but they supposed we were there learning trades, as it was the custom to give children a trade of some kind. After school, we left the same way we entered, one by one. Then we would go to a square about a block from the school and wait for each other. After studying with Mrs Woodhouse for about two years, Susie started studying with a woman named Mary Beasley. This continued until May of eighteen sixty, at which point Beasley told Susie's grandmother that she had taught her everything she knew. Susie and her grandmother then turned to white people for help. First, a girl named Katie O'Connor, who Susie described as a playmate. Katie went to a convent school and tutored Susie for about four months, something that Katie's mother knew about but had to be kept secret from her father, and this did when Katie entered the convent permanently. Susie's next and apparently final tutor was the son of her grandmother's landlord, who was in high school. Their lessons didn't last long, though. The Civil War began on April twelfth, eighteen sixty one, and soon he was sentenced a combat. He initially fought for the Confederacy, but deserted and instead fought for the United States after his brother was killed in action. Georgia already had numerous laws in place restricting the movements of both enslaved and free people of color, something that escalated after the start of the war, but Susie's literacy made it possible for her grandmother to go places she would not have been able to otherwise. In her words, quote, I often wrote passes for my grandmother for all colored persons, free or slaves were compelled to have a pass. Free colored people having a guardian in place of a master. These passes were good until ten or ten thirty pm for night, or every night for one month. The past read as follows. Savannah, Georgia, March first, eighteen sixty passed the bearer from nine to thirty p m. Valentine dressed Dolly Reid used these passes to meet with other members of Savannah's black community, and she was arrested at one of those meetings in early eighteen sixty two. The meeting was being held at a church, and she and other people there were singing a hymn that had a refrain of yes, we shall all be free when the Lord shall appear. So local authorities believed that black people were using this song as a code that the Lord really meant the Union, or, in Susie's words, Yankees. The police broke up this meeting and arrested everyone there, and afterwards Susie and her siblings were sent back to Isle of Light. She did not stay there long, though, we'll talk more about that after a sponsor break. On April tenth and eleventh, eighteen sixty two, the U. S. Army lay siege to Fort Pulaski on the coast of Georgia between Savannah and Tybee Island. Although she and her family were miles away, Susie Baker could hear this attack. About two days after the Confederate army surrendered the fort, Susie and her uncle made their way to the Union Army by boat, along with the rest of her uncle's family. She didn't go into detail about this and her writing, but they were doing what a lot of enslaved people did. As the U. S. Army retook control of parts of the South, and that was using the chaos of the war as protection while liberating themselves from bondage. Prior to this point, the U. S. Army classified people who had either escaped to areas of Union control or had been in areas that the army recaptured as contraband we am a whole episode on this that we recently ran as a Saturday Classic for a little bit more context. But for a time these people existed in kind of a gray area. The U. S. Army had the right to seize anything the Confederacy was using to support its rebellion, including the enslaved people, but at first the law didn't specify whether they were at that point free. But soon after the end of the siege at Fort Pulaski, Major General David Hunter, commander of the Department of the South, issued General Order Number eleven, which set in part quote, slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible. The persons in these three states Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, heretofore held as slaves, are therefore declared forever free. Then he started recruiting black soldiers to fight for the United States. This was deeply controversial within the military command all the way up to President Abraham Lincoln. At this point, Lincoln's focus with the war was primarily on trying to reunite the country, not specifically to end slavery. He was concerned that Hunter's actions and the recruitment of black troops would antagonize border states and encourage them to join the Confederacy as well. The regiment was disbanded and Lincoln rescinded Hunter's order freeing people in those three states. But word about both the Declaration of Freedom and the regiment was already spreading among the black population of the Sea Islands and other coastal areas. Yeah, so, Susie and her family by far not the only people making their way out to the Sea Islands at this point, and Susie and her family were in transit as all of this was happening. They arrived at St. Catherine Island about two weeks after the siege at Fort Pulaski. They stayed there for about another two weeks before being taken to St. Simon's Island aboard the U S. S. Potomska. St. Simon's was being used as a contraband camp. It's population grew as more and more people escaped from farther inland. From about April to August of eighteen sixty two, the camp at St. Simon's Island was home to roughly six hundred people. At this point, the U. S Government, the Army, and Northern Reformers were carrying out a project known as the Port Royal Experiment. It started in the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina after the United States regained control of those islands in eighteen sixty one. The white landowners in this area had mostly fled, leaving their enslaved workforces and their crops behind. A major crop in this area was cotton, which was needed for the war effort, so this experiment was an attempt to keep the agricultural system running with the same labor as before, but with those people now free. Land was redistributed to the black families who were working it, and white volunteers helped establish things like schools and hospitals. We talked about this it more in our two parter on Harriet's Hubman, which we ran as a Saturday classic in June of and in case folks are wondering we unfortunately do not know if she and Susie King Taylor ever met one another while they were in the same general geographic area. And also, if you're wondering, didn't Harriet Tubman also write an autobiography about her time in the Civil War. Harriet Tubman's biographies were written by a white woman she worked with, named Sarah Hopkins Bradford, So while they are notable in their own right, they're not autobiographies and they're definitely filtered through Bradford's lens. Although St. Simon's Island was farther south than the area considered part of the Port Royal Experiment Commissions, they were very similar. It was home to large cotton plantations and farms that needed to be kept going, and to a similarly growing refugee population, including children. While heading there aboard the Potomskas, Susie had a conversation with the officer in charge of the boat, a Captain Whitmore. Whitmore asked if she could read right and so, and was surprised when she told him that she could. He said he did not know that there were black people who could read and write, and that quote you seem to be so different from the other colored people who came from the same place you did, She replied, quote no, the only differences they were reared in the country and I in the city, as was a man from darry And Georgia named Edward King. Soon Whitmore decided to put Susie in charge of a school. So just a couple of weeks after arriving at St. Simon's Island, and after getting a shipment of books and bibles that she had requested, Susie Baker was teaching. She was a few months away from her fourteenth birthday. She taught about forty children during the day and adults at night. She also did laundry and learned how to clean and fire a musket. Edward King, who she had mentioned when talking to the cap Dion, became a soldier and, as an educated person himself, taught adults to read as well, and at some point, it is not clear exactly when, but probably sometime in eighteen sixty two or early eighteen sixty three, Edward and Susie got married. In the book that she wrote much later, Susie King Taylor used pretty straightforward, simple language, but the thing she describes happening at the camp make it clear that this was a traumatic, uncertain, and dangerous time. For example, in June of eighteen sixty two, they were notified of a settlement being proposed to end the war, one in which enslaved people would be required to keep working for their enslavers three days a week and free people would be sent to Liberia. Proposals to resettle people of African descent in Liberia had started well before the start of the war, and shortly before this the legislation that ended slavery in Washington, d c. Also Provided compensation for free people who chose to emigrate to another country like Haiti or Liberia. People on St. Simon's Island tried to prepare themselves for the possibility of moving to another continent. Susie described it as quote a gloomy time for us all. But of course nothing came of this, and afterward nobody was really sure if it had just been some kind of a rumor. Although the camp was in an area controlled by the U. S. Army, there were also ongoing raids and skirmishes by Confederates and their supporters. People were afraid to go out at night out of fear of being abducted. Something that continued after guards were posted all around the island. At one point two Confederate soldiers chased some men from the camp down the beach, leading the camp to rally an armed group of about ninety men to try to hunt them down. This led to a confrontation in which two men were killed and others were wounded. Captain C. T. Trowbridge heard about this and came to the camp to try to a recruitment for the first South Carolina Volunteer Infantry. This was essentially a reformation of the unit that Major General David Hunter had previously organized and then been ordered to disband. This unit was officially recognized in November of eighteen sixty two, under the command of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Susie King operated her school on St. Simon's Island until the fall of eighteen sixty two, at which point the U. S. Army decided it was impossible to keep the island secure. Refugees were moved to Hilton Head, South Carolina into Fernandina, Florida. Recruited troops went to a camp at Beaufort, South Carolina, which they called Camp Saxton after General Rufus Saxton. King went with them and rolled as a laundress with Company E, where her husband was also serving. She also had multiple other male relatives in the infantry, some in Company E and some in other units. Being married may have offered Susie's some protection in this environment. Although she was officially an army laundress, she was in a similar role to a camp follower. Those were civilians, mostly women and children, who followed army units, many of them because they just had no other place to go and no way to support themselves. In North America up through the nineteenth century, camp followers were simultaneously necessary to the functioning of the military and also viewed with a lot of suspicion and even hostility. Camp followers made food, did laundry, and cared for the sick and dying, but they were often seen as a nuisance or a burden. Women in particular, were seen as immoral or suspected of doing sex work. Various military officials who mentioned Susie King's time with the army stressed that she was a decent, responsible married woman. King also wrote about how the army's treatment of the black sold ers made the situation worse for their families. Quote, the first Colored troops did not receive any pay for eighteen months, and the men had to depend wholly on what they received from the commissary established by General Saxton. A great many of these men had large families, and as they had no money to give them, their wives were obliged to support themselves and children by washing for the officers of the gunboats and the soldiers, and making cakes and pies which they sold to the boys in camp. Finally, in eighteen sixty three, the government decided to give them half pay, but the men would not accept this. They wanted full pay or nothing. They preferred rather to give their services to the state, which they did until eighteen sixty four, when the government granted them full pay with all the back paid due. Susie King was a volunteer as well. Quote. I gave my services willingly for four years and three months without receiving a dollar. I was glad, however, to be allowed to go with the regiment to for the sick and afflicted comrades. We're going to talk more about Susie and her time in the army after we paused for a sponsor break. As we said earlier, Susie King and her husband became part of Company E of the first South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, and she was enrolled as a laundress, but in her words, quote, I did very little of it because I was always busy doing other things through camp and was employed all the time doing something for the officers and comrades. Those other things included working as a nurse, including during a smallpox outbreak among the troops, something that she was not afraid to do because, in her words, quote, I had been vaccinated and I drank sassafras tea constantly, which kept my blood purged and prevented me from contracting this dread scourge. And no one need fear of getting it if they will only keep their blood in good condition with this sassafras tea and take it before going where the patient is. I just I love how she equally credits the vaccine. And she also wrote about a gathering to recognize the Emancipation Proclamation going into effect. That, of course, was held on January one, eighteen sixty three, and they celebrated with a barbecue. Quote A number of oxen were roasted whole, and we had a fine feast, although not served as tastily or correctly as it would have been at home. Yet it was enjoyed with keen appetites and relish. The soldiers had a good time. They sang or shouted Hurrah all through the camp and seemed overflowing with fun and frolic until taps were sounded, when many no doubt dreamt of this memorable day. King was with Company E for the duration of the war, including after it was reorganized as the thirty third United States Colored Troops Regiment that happened in February of eighteen sixty four. When a hospital for Black soldiers was opened in Baufort, South Carolina, in April of eighteen sixty three, she was a regular visitor, checking in on soldiers she knew and helping out where she could. During these months, she met Clara Barton, who was also working in Union hospitals in South Carolina. Some of her descriptions from this period are about things she saw on the front lines, things like gunners firing on the city of Charleston, Confederate soldiers jeering at them from the other side of a picket. Colonel Higginson, returning wounded from an expedition up the Edista river. Some of these passages are vivid. Quote, it seems strange how our aversion to seeing suffering is overcome in war. How we are able to see the most sickening sites, such as men with their limbs blown off and mangled by the deadly shells, without a shutter, and instead of turning away, how we hurried to assist in alleviating their pain, bind up their wounds, and press the cool water to their parched lips, with feelings only of sympathy and pity. She also wrote about the more mundane aspects of camp life, like quote, in winter, when it was very cold, I would take a mess pan, put a little earth in the bottom, and go to the cook shed and fill it nearly full of coals, carry it back to my tent and put another pan over it, so when the provost guard went through camp after taps, they would not see the light, as it was against the rules to have a light after taps. In this way I was heated and kept very warm, or what they ate quote we had fresh beef once in a while, and we would have soup, and the vegetables they put in this soup were dried and pressed. They look like hops. Salt beef was our standby. Sometimes the men would have what we called slapjacks. This was flour made into bread and spread thin on the bottom of the mess pans a cook. Each man had one of them with a pint of tea for his supper, or a pint of tea and five or six hard tech. I often got my own meals and would fix some dishes for the non commissioned officers. Also, in June of eighteen sixty four, the troops left the camp and most of the women were left behind. Quote Mary Shaw shared my tent that night and we went to bed, but not to sleep for the fleas nearly eight us alive. We caught a few, but it did seem now that the men were gone, that every flee in camp had located my tent and caused us to vacate. Sleep being out of the question, we sat up the remainder of the night. When injured men started returning from combat the next day, King needed to find a way to feed them, but she didn't have many provisions, so she made a custard from condensed milk and turtle legs. She was not sure how that was going to go because she had never kiked with turtle Legs before, apparently came out okay. In December of eighteen sixty four, King was nearly killed when the boat she was traveling on capsuized. Some of the people aboard either drowned or died of exposure. She was found and rescued on Christmas Day, but she was very ill afterwards. She was not recovered enough to return to the unit until later in January of eighteen sixty five, and she also survived at least two other shipwrecks in addition to this one during her life. General Robert Elie surrendered on April ninth, eighteen sixty five, which started the process of ending the war, although it was not officially over for more than a year. After that, the thirty third United States Colored Troops Regiment was mustered out on February nine, eighteen sixty six. Susie and Edward King returned to Savannah. Although Edward was a skilled carpenter, he was not able to find work because of the ongoing climate of racism there. He got a job as a longshoreman instead. At first, Susie kept their home, but soon she was teach again, charging students a dollar a month. Tragically, though Edward King died in an accident at work on September eighteen sixty six, and at that point Susie was pregnant. Susie continued to teach until she had to stop due to a combination of factors. One was the impending birth of her son, whose name she does not give in her memoir. The other was the opening of a free school for black children in Savannah, and King's memoir she says this was a Beach Institute school. Although the Beach Institute did open a school in Savannah in eighteen sixty seven, it initially also charged the same tuition that King did. Regardless with a free school available, King had trouble attracting enough paying students to keep her own efforts going. After a series of attempts to open a school for either children or adults, none of which worked out, King eventually had to leave her son in the care of her mother, who had also been recently widowed and had opened a grocery store. King started doing domestic work for affluent white families. In eighteen seventy two, she applied for her late husband's army pension and was granted some of a hundred dollars. Unfortunately, though, she lost at least part of it in the collapse of the Freedmen's Savings Bank. For some context on that, the Freedmen's Savings Bank was chartered by Congress in eighteen sixty five to benefit black soldiers, former slaves, their descendants folks like that. It collapsed in eighteen seventy four due to a combination of factors, including the Panic of eighteen seventy three, policy changes, and mismanagement and fraud. This happened after Frederick Douglas had been recruited to try to save the bank. He was not actually aware of how dire the situation was, and lost ten thousand dollars of his own money trying to keep it afloat. This was truly devastating to the tens of thousands of black people who had deposited her money at the bank, especially since for so many of them it was the first money they'd been able to earn after years or decades of unpaid work while enslaved. King's grandmother, Dolly Reid, also lost most of her savings in this collapse as well. Susie King's memoirs describe her having a childhood fascination with Northerners and the North, or, to again use her word, Yankees. While she had met people from the North during her time with the army during the war, her first visit to a northern state was while working for a Mrs Charles Green, whose family took her with them when they went to Rye Beach in New Hampshire for the summer. In eighteen seventy four, she went to Boston again in the company of an employer, and eventually she moved there. That is where she met her second husband, Russell Taylor, who she married in eighteen seventy nine. Her experiences of enslavement and the Civil War and trying to a life for herself in the post war South meant that living in New England was a wildly different experience, and her words quote, I have been in many states and cities, and in each I have looked for liberty and justice equal for the black as for the white. But it was not until I was within the borders of New England and reached Old Massachusetts that I found it. I want to take a moment and say I don't want to question her experience, but I also don't want to leave people with the impression that there was no racism and equal justice in Massachusetts in the nineteenth century, because that's not the case. It's a comparative situation for her, where it probably seemed completely better but not perfect. In eighteen eighty six, Taylor helped establish a chapter of the Women's Relief Corps, which is a women's auxiliary connected to the Grand Army of the Republic, which was a fraternal organization for veterans that fought for the United States during the Civil War. She was active in this organization for most of the rest of her life, including serving as its secretary, treasurer, and president at various points. One of the projects she worked on with the CORE involved helping to create a roster of all the Union veterans who were living in Massachusetts. The CORE also sent relief packages to troops during the Spanish American War. She also wrote about how, in her view, the United States had essentially exported its racism to Cuba during and after that war. Quote, the Cubans are free, but it is a limited freedom. For prejudice deep rooted has been brought to them, and a separation made between the white and black Cubans, a thing that had never existed between them before, but today there is the same intense hatred towards the Negro in Cuba that there is in some parts of this country. Taylor's grandmother, Dolly Reid, died in May of eight nine, and Taylor was able to make one final trip to see her before her death. In two she applied for a pension for her service as an army nurse, but since she had been described as a laundress and not a nurse, this petition was denied. Taylor was by far not the only black person to work as a nurse during the war while being classified as a laundress. This not only denied them all compensation for their work, but it largely erased black women's contributions as nurses during the Civil War. In February of Taylor got word that her son, who was working as an actor, had been ill for some time and that she needed to come to Shreveport, Louisiana to see him. So. This was after the end of Reconstruction and former slave states had started passing oppressive laws against their black population. It was also after the U. S. Supreme Court had ruled in plus e versus Ferguson that segregation was legal. After roughly two decades of living in Assachusetts, where racism was typically less overt and less violent, she was deeply shocked and dismayed by what she experienced while once again traveling in the South. On her way to Shreveport, she was forced to ride in the smoking car, the only place that black passengers were allowed, and after she got there, she discovered that her son was so ill that the only way he could hope to survive a journey was in a berth in a sleeping car, and she tried to buy a ticket and was refused because the sleeping cars were for white passengers only. She wrote, quote, it seemed very hard when his father fought to protect the Union and our flag, and yet this boy was denied under this same flag, a birth to carry him home to die because he was a Negro. She stayed with her son until his death and then reluctantly had him buried in Louisiana. She witnessed a lynching on the way home, which was both terrifying and horrifying. In addition to her descriptions of her upbringing, her wartime service, and her trip to see her dying son, Susie King Taylor included a chapter in her memoir called Thoughts on Present Conditions, in which she reflected on what the nation had gone through during the war and how far it still had to go. This chapter said, in part quote, I wonder if our white fellow men realized the true sense or meaning of brotherhood. For two hundred years we had toiled for him. The War of eighteen sixty one came and was ended, and we thought our race was forever free from bondage, and that the two races could live in unity with each other. But when we read almost every day of what is 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 truthfully? When one race is allowed to burn, hang and inflict the most horrible torture weekly monthly on another. No, we cannot sing my countries as of the sweet land of liberty. It is a hollow mockery. Taylor started writing her memoir in nineteen o one and self published it in nineteen o two. She dedicated it to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who also wrote its introduction. Higginson recognized that it represented a unique perspective. Quote, actual military life is rarely described by a woman, and this is especially true of a woman whose place was in the ranks, as the wife of a soldier, and herself a regimental laundress. No such description has ever been given, I am sure by one thus connected with a colored regiment, so that the nearly two hundred thousand black soldiers of our Civil War have never before been delineated from the woman's point of view. All this gives peculiar interest to this little volume, relating wholly to the career of the very earliest of these regiments, the one described by myself from a wholly different point of view in my volume Army Life and a Black Regiment. Higginson also noted that he had not made any changes to the text beyond correcting some proper names. Taylor also printed a letter from Charles T. Trowbridge, who had been captain of the first South Carolina Volunteer Infantry. He endorsed the memoir as quote a truthful account of your unselfish devotion and service through more than three long years of war. He also said he regretted the technicality of her not being given a pension or named as an army nurse, that technicality again being that she had been listed as a laundress instead. We don't really know how many copies of this book were printed or how many sold, although it still survives today. We also don't know much at all about Taylor's life after she wrote it. She does seem to have kept in touch with Higginson until his death in May of nineteen eleven. Susie King Taylor died in Boston on October six, nineteen twelve, at the age of sixty four. She's believed to have been buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Roslyndale, next to her husband, Russell, who had died in nineteen o one, Although her name was not added to the gravestone in October of one, though, the Sons of Union Veterans and other organizations raised funds for a monument to her in the cemetery, which is there now. The Georgia Historical Society also erected a historical marker honoring her in Midway, Georgia. In and more recently, there's been a push to rename the square in Savannah that was formerly known as John C. Calhoun Square after her. So we'll see if that happens. Yeah, it's as far as I know, had just been proposed not that many months ago. We'll see. Do you have a listener mail to wrap this one up? I do. I have listener mail from Natalia and it is a correction. Italia says Hi, Holly and Tracy. I've been following stuff you missed in history class. It's and I've learned a lot from this series. I was listening to your most recent Unearthed episodes and noticed that in one of the Shipwrecked stories you said that the ship departed from the ports city of Gadanst now Danzig. That was true after the first Partition of Poland, when the region was controlled by the Germans, but today its name has reverted to the original Gdans. I don't I feel like I'm saying that with the exactly right vowel sound um doing my best. The city does have an interesting history post World War One. While the city was under Polish authority as determined by the League of Nations, the majority of its constituents were German, and from ninety and nineteen thirty nine it was known as the Free City of Good Dance or Dancing in German and operated as an independent city state. This northern area of Poland separated the main body of Germany from Prussia, and in the beginning of World War Two, the Nazis targeted the city state to get access to this territory. After World War Two, Gangs officially became part of the country of Poland and many Germans left or were expelled from the city. This mass expulsion of Germans occurred in many occupied territories throughout Eastern and Central Europe after the Potsdam Agreement redefined the borders of Europe. Thanks again for all your educational talks. I just had to point out this error. I do think the history of guys would it be an interesting topic to cover. Regards and Italian, thank you for this email. Italian whenever I discover I've made an error like this, I'd go to I try to figure out what happened in case there is something I can do to prevent such error from happening in the future. And at first I was like, what in the world. I remember going to try to find pronunciations, but like none of the things that I had searched for to find a good pronunciation resource had suggested that we should call the city Danzi. I realized, though, UM, that the write ups of this shipwreck and the article about it that I had read, all for reasons I am had not actually clear on, had put the name of the city at one point as good and then in parentheses Danzig. And in my head I interpreted that as meaning that was the name before, this is the name now. That was wrong. So I am uh, I apologize for my I error on that. Thank you Italia for sending this email UM with not just the correction, but other information about the city. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcasts or a history podcasts that I heart radio dot com. And then we're all over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app or wherever you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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