Civil War Bluejackets: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the United States Navy, 1861-1865
USS Juanita looking aft from Forecastle. Boston, 1873.
DGS and the Delaware African American Historical and Genealogical Society (DEAAHGS) partnered recently with the Bluejacket Project to research Civil War sailor records. The project is managed by historians associated with Northumbria University and the University of Sheffield and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK. The US Naval Academy is also participating in the research.
The primary goal of the Bluejacket project is to transcribe and produce publicly available data on 118,000 currently digitized Civil War sailor records. The project seeks to link this primary digitized data to other records such as enlistment, pension, and other wartime data to create a Civil War Sailor Internet Resource. This new resource will enable further research on the experience of both African American and immigrant sailors and their interactions with native-born white servicemen.
As happens during many projects, insights beyond the original scope of the project have been discovered. While conducting the genealogical research about Civil War sailors from Delaware, the researchers, Ken Finlayson, Mark Weinberg, and Rosalyn Green, uncovered data about the pattern of punishment of black and white crew on the USS Juniata. Not surprisingly, the initial analysis confirms that black sailors were punished more than white sailors. However, the details on the underlying type and trends of offenses provide interesting insights and surprises into racial differences on one vessel during the Civil War.
The standalone report, Punishment on the USS Juniata – June 22, 1864, to December 31, 1864, in PDF format, with a list of the 307 sailors, is available here. Two searchable data tables have been created of these sailors: Juniata Muster Roll data table on 16 July 1864, and Juniata Punishment data table, which has data from 22 July 1864, the post-repair commissioning, to 31 December 1864, just after the Battle of Ft. Fisher.
Work on the broader Bluejackets research is scheduled to be completed sometime in 2024. DGS and DAAHGS have focused on genealogical research of African American sailors who enlisted as native-born Delawareans.
