Navy during the Civil War and have been identified by name.Įven before 1861, the Navy – unlike the U.S. Lawson was one of nearly eighteen thousand men (and eleven women) of African descent who served in the U.S. Later in life, he supported his family as a small-scale retailer and was active in the Grand Army of the Republic, the North’s Civil War veterans’ organization.

His extended family was large and had strong regional roots. We do not know what motivated his enlistment two years into the war. LawsonĪ free black man from Philadelphia, Lawson was in his mid-twenties when he enlisted in the Navy at New York in 1863. Other medals worn by the sitter are the Navy Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) Medal and a GAR membership badge.Ĭourtesy of National Museum of American History, Kenneth E.

Lawson, serve to personalize the fight for freedom and opportunity that African Americans undertook in the Civil War Union Navy.

The stories of two such sailors on Boston-built ships, William B. The presence of these sailors has its roots in the long history of African American participation in the Atlantic maritime world, while it also bears witness to the struggle of enslaved men to escape their bondage during the chaos that war brought to the slave states. In 1863, roughly 20% of naval enlistees were African American, many of whom shipped aboard the vessels launched at the Charlestown Navy Yard. On the expanding naval enlistment rolls of men called to duty to crew those ships, we find the names of many African Americans. The federal Navy was charged with the vital strategic goal of blockading the Confederate coastline. Throughout the four years of the American Civil War, Boston’s Navy Yard at Charlestown built over a dozen ships, converted more than forty, and outfitted an additional twenty-three commercially-built warships in its effort to bring the navy’s fleet to wartime strength.

Civil war union navy medal