Exploring the similarities and differences in the experiences of black and white enlisted men must avoid viewing the racial groups in strictly monolithic terms that do not allow for internal complexity and diversity and shifting, if not altogether porous, borders. 1īecause the navy, unlike the army, was racially integrated, understanding the history of black sailors requires some effort but even more interpretive caution to unravel it from that of all Civil War sailors. Wiley’s classic portraits of “Billy Yank” and “Johnny Reb” fills the popular imagination or the works of Civil War historians. No image of “Jack Tar” comparable to Bell I. Second, existing accounts of the naval Civil War have focused on the strategic role of naval forces in the contest, the governmental architects of naval policy, the naval officers who masterminded operations, and the innovations in technology and weaponry to the near exclusion of the enlisted sailors’ war. First, the broad narrative of presidential leadership and the clash of armies in Virginia that Ken Burns’s The Civil War told so powerfully all but excludes naval forces from the tale.

Two explanations account for this imbalance.

Given the wealth of available information about Civil War soldiers, the comparative poverty of such knowledge about Civil War sailors borders on the astonishing. The Civil War experiences of black sailors overlapped with and diverged from those of white sailors.

American civil war union navy