When the youthful John Robert Bond, a native of Liverpool, England and of African and Irish ancestry, volunteered to serve in the United States Navy in May 1863, he could not have predicted the brevity of his military career. Bond, having gained skills while working on fishing boats, enlisted in the navy both to serve his adopted country and to join the struggle against slavery. Less than a year later, in February 1864, he suffered a serious wound to his shoulder in a skirmish with the crew of a grounded blockade-runner. After a lengthy rehabilitation, he was discharged and granted a pension. Bond married and settled in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, a community well populated by African American veterans.

In 1999 James Robert Bond's great-granddaughter Adele Logan Alexander published the family's remarkable history Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846 - 1926. The book recalls Bond's story, just one of the thousands of stories played out on the many vessels and battlefields of the Civil War.

Over the course of the conflict 18,000 men (and more than a dozen women) of African descent served in the U.S. Navy, some 15 percent of the total enlisted force. They served on almost every one of the nearly 700 navy vessels including those of the Mississippi Squadron. Eight of these sailors earned the Medal of Honor for their heroism in battle.

More than 130 years after the end of the Civil War, the story of black sailors remains largely untold. Details of the lives of these men and women lie undiscovered in military records and family memories. This database serves as a starting point for relatives and researchers as they begin to piece together individual experiences of participants in this watershed event in American history. It documents the service and the lives of people of African descent who served in the U.S. Navy.

The Civil War Sailors Database as it appears today is the product of a partnership formed in 1993 among Howard University, the Department of the Navy, and the National Park Service. A team of researchers from Howard University, Department of History, headed by Joseph P. Reidy, Professor of History and Associate Dean of the Graduate School, examined hundreds of thousands of pages of naval records housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. for evidence about the black sailors.

Advised by a committee of experts in Civil War naval history from the Naval Historical Center at the Washington Navy Yard, the National Park Service, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution, the researchers have systematically pieced together the history of the black sailors in the Civil War navy. The work continues today as the partners examine pension files in order to supplement this list of names with a more complete record of information about the experience of the naval enlistees and their families throughout the Civil War era.