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Valuable men for certain kinds of duty: African Americans in the Civil War Navy
Abstract
Faced with daunting wartime responsibilities, the Union Navy accepted large numbers of African American sailors into its ranks during the Civil War. Like their African American counterparts in the Union Army, black sailors provided much needed manpower to the Federal military and, after the Emancipation Proclamation, became a force of liberation as much as Union preservation. Blacks in the Union Navy, however, had a markedly different experience than African American soldiers. Far from the segregated, lower paid, and occasionally abusive existence in the Union Army, African American sailors found a Union Navy willing to integrate their crews, offer equal wages and benefits, and promote African Americans on an equal standing with whites. Moreover, the traditionally formidable Navy criminal justice system offered African American sailors legal rights and privileges not readily available even in the Northern states, while fairly applying its justice to every defendant, regardless of race. African American defendants consistently received lower mean prison sentences than whites for equivalent crimes. African American sailors were also demographically different from any other group of Civil War combatant, including African American soldiers. Whereas black troops were overwhelmingly rural, unskilled southern slaves, the ranks of the Union Navy featured urban, Northern free blacks with a high degree of prewar professional skill. Within these broad parameters, the time, place, and reason African American sailors enlisted changed notably as the war progressed, with African Americans enlisting mostly in the later years of the war, from Northeastern or Border states, only after the Lincoln administration forced their acceptance upon an unwilling Northern society after the Emancipation Proclamation. In an effort to win the war, the Navy amassed, for a nineteenth century institution, a credible record of equivalent racial treatment. After the war, the United States Navy reverted to many of its race-based policies, but during the Civil War the Navy offered, promoted, and protected expanded rights for African Americans.
Subject Area
American history|Black history|African American Studies
Recommended Citation
Ramold, Steven John, "Valuable men for certain kinds of duty: African Americans in the Civil War Navy" (1999). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9929223.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9929223