Bluejackets: The Men Who Made The US Navy

Over 30 per cent of the men who served in the Union Navy during the Civil War had been born in the United Kingdom. Their story is less well-known than those who fought in the army as their duty did not provide many opportunities for glorious bravery. Serving on a blockading ship off the Confederate coast just did not have the cachet of a charge on a battlefield. Yet, the US Navy has very extensive digitized records for the Civil War Era. including all its muster rolls, listing the service of its c.118,000 sailors. Through the new Civil War Bluejackets Project, of which Gleeson is the principal investigator, a transcription and linking of these records can help us tell the full story of the common sailor in the Union Navy, both at the micro and macro levels. This talk focuses on the stories of British and Irish sailors who served in the Union Navy and their contribution to war effort at sea, and on America's rivers. These sailors' lives in the War also tell us a lot about immigrant life in the nineteenth-century United States.

Those interested in finding out more about the project can visit the www.civilwarbluejackets.com  website which the ACWRT(UK) is pleased to sponsor.

About the Speaker

David T. Gleeson is Professor of American History at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America and the co-editor of The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War.  A native of Ireland he taught in universities in the United States for twelve years before coming to Northumbria in 2009.

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