A Black Woman's Civil War Memiors by Susie King Taylor

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Included here are excellent, illuminating footnotes by Romero, a research fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

In her reflections on the condition of blacks in 1902, the year the memoirs were originally privately published, Taylor's writing is at its strongest and most vivid as she decries the betrayal of the freedom and equality blacks and whites had fought for in the Civil War. Of such a momentous occasion as the first time she heard the Emancipation Proclamation, her most significant comment is: ``It was a glorious day for us all, and we enjoyed every minute of it.'' She also makes little mention of her personal life, including her two marriages and the death of a son. The author does not demonstrate a capacity for observation and reflection or the descriptive skills necessary to bring her experiences to life for the reader. Her disappointing, fairly random recollections cover her flight to freedom in 1862, her regiment's expeditions along the Southeastern coast, the end of the war and, briefly, Reconstruction. Taylor was born a slave, gained her freedom early in the Civil War, and served as a nurse for the first black regiment of the Union Army.

A Black Woman's Civil War Memiors by Susie King Taylor