For most of a century the U.S. Navy could not say how many Black men had crewed its Civil War fleet. Officers who had served in it told the secretary of the navy that roughly a quarter of the enlisted force had been Black, and the secretary’s office produced a number by taking the 118,044 recorded enlistments and dividing by four. A dissertation in 1973 cut the estimate to fewer than ten thousand. Neither figure rested on a count of actual men.
The count came out of a partnership among Howard University, the Department of the Navy and the National Park Service. Its researchers worked through the surviving weekly enlistment returns and quarterly muster rolls in Record Group 24 at the National Archives. They identified nearly eighteen thousand men of African descent, and eleven women, by name. That was 20 percent of the Navy’s enlisted force, almost double the Black share of the wartime Army.
Joseph P. Reidy, the Howard University historian who directed the project, published the findings in the National Archives quarterly Prologue in 2001. Set against the wealth of material on soldiers, he wrote, the poverty of knowledge about Civil War sailors “borders on the astonishing.”
The roster is also a map of the coastline. Nearly six thousand of the sailors whose birthplace is recorded, about 35 percent, came from the Chesapeake Bay region, with more than 2,300 born in Maryland and more than 2,800 in Virginia. No other stretch of coast produced anything close.
The Chesapeake Sent Men Who Already Knew the Water
Those numbers describe a working shoreline rather than a recruiting accident. Reidy found that men raised in the villages along Chesapeake and Delaware Bays arrived already familiar with the small craft used for oystering, crabbing and fishing the local waters. Some had shipped out on commercial vessels. Others, near the naval yard at Norfolk, had served on a warship. Baltimore and its tributaries ran on water, and Black men held those trades in numbers.
Maritime work carried an unusual proposition for them. Shipboard roles were standardized, crews were rated by the job performed, and labor was frequently scarce, which made seafaring one of the few trades where a free Black man’s pay tracked what he could do. The wage was neither equal nor reliable. It was still closer to open than most work ashore.
Naval service came bundled with more than pay. Food, shelter and weapons training attached to the enlistment, along with movement between ports and, after the war, eligibility for a federal pension. Reidy’s own accounting complicates the pension piece. He estimated that no more than half of eligible Black naval veterans ever applied, against roughly 64 percent of eligible Black soldiers. Some had left service without formal discharge and were carried on the books as deserters. For others the mobility of maritime work stretched the ties to the communities and advisers a pension claim needed to succeed.
Many of these men were already professionals. Of the nearly three hundred Black recruits who enlisted in the first ninety days after Fort Sumter, fifty-nine were veterans averaging five years of prior naval service.
Broad Entry Sat Under a Ceiling That Held Without Exception
The same records document where the work stopped. Of roughly 17,600 men whose base rating survives, more than 14,400, or 82 percent, were rated boy or landsman, the two lowest classifications. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had directed in September 1861 that formerly enslaved enlistees be classified as boys, a rung traditionally reserved for men under eighteen. The rating then followed men who had spent decades at sea. James Forten Dunbar, nephew of the Philadelphia sailmaker and abolitionist James Forten, was rated landsman rather than seaman on several enlistments despite thirty years of naval service.
Command was closed outright. Barely one hundred Black enlistees, 0.6 percent, ever held a petty-officer rating of the line, and no Black man held a regular commission or warrant as a naval officer during the war. Reidy attributed that to more than wartime prejudice, writing that the traditions of the officer corps “simply could not accommodate black men in the fraternity.”
Reidy noted that before the war dozens of African American seafarers had served as captains and mates of merchant vessels, sometimes owning the vessels outright, and that the Department of the Navy chose not to draw on that pool. Black command experience existed. The service that needed officers went elsewhere for them.
Baltimore’s Black Caulkers Were Pushed Off the Docks and Bought a Shipyard
Black maritime labor filled the ports and the yards as well as the crews, and Baltimore held the densest concentration of it. Caulking, the trade of driving fiber and pitch into a hull’s seams to keep it watertight, had been worked by free Black men and enslaved men on that waterfront for generations.
The arrangement broke in October 1865, when white caulkers struck and demanded that Black workers be barred from waterfront jobs, and roughly 1,000 Black dock workers lost their positions. Isaac Myers, a Baltimore caulker born free in 1835, proposed that the displaced men buy a yard of their own rather than wait to be hired back. Black Baltimoreans subscribed $10,000 in stock, Frederick Douglass among them. Myers took a $30,000 mortgage on a lot at Philpot Street. The group could obtain it only through a white intermediary, because the local owners would not lease to them directly.
The Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company opened on February 12, 1866, employed about 300 workers at roughly three dollars a day, and operated until 1884, according to the Maryland State Archives. Myers went on to found the Colored Caulkers Trade Union Society and to organize Black workers nationally.
The U.S.-Flag Fleet Lost More Than Half Its Ships in Three Decades
The ships went before the jobs did. The Government Accountability Office, the federal agency that audits government programs and spending, found that the internationally trading U.S.-flag fleet fell from 199 vessels in 1990 to 84 in 2021, most of that loss arriving during the 1990s.
Ann C. Phillips, then the Maritime Administrator, laid out the mechanism for the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation in May 2023. Requirements for sealift-qualified mariners follow the size of the U.S.-flagged fleet, she testified, “which also determines the number and type of job opportunities available to mariners.” Fewer American ships meant fewer American berths. Fewer berths meant less of the sea time a mariner needs to hold a credential and qualify for the next one.
A study released by the Maritime Administration in 2017 found the country needed 13,607 mariners with unlimited tonnage credentials to run the commercial fleet and sustained military sealift at once. The actively sailing pool came to 11,768. That left a deficit of 1,839, and only if every qualified mariner proved willing to sail.
Black Workers Held the Deck Jobs and Lost Ground on the Bridge
Black Americans did not leave maritime work. In 2024 they held 17.3 percent of the combined jobs of sailors, marine oilers and ship engineers, according to Census Bureau microdata compiled by Data USA, a share above the Black portion of the overall U.S. workforce.
The distribution changes at the top of the ladder. In the same data, Black workers held 6.76 percent of positions as ship and boat captains and operators, against 77.1 percent held by white workers.
The sea service the federal government runs directly shows a similar gradient. In 2023, Black sailors were 20.4 percent of Navy enlisted personnel and 8.2 percent of Navy officers, according to the Department of Defense. Naval commissioning and merchant marine licensing run on separate requirements, so the military numbers corroborate the shape of the civilian gap without accounting for it.
The occupational counts record who holds which job in a given year. They do not record who sought advancement and did not get it. Nothing in the record isolates a cause, either. Industry contraction, credential costs, training access, educational pipelines and institutional history are each documented as plausible contributors, and none has been separated from the others.
The License Is Where the Money Is
The Bureau of Labor Statistics put 2025 mean annual pay at $56,830 for sailors and marine oilers and $103,720 for captains, mates and pilots of water vessels. Ship engineers averaged $111,790. Water transportation as a whole averaged $84,390.
The spread widens where the industry concentrates. Sailor and marine oiler employment in Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodaux, Louisiana runs more than a hundred times the national concentration. Sailors there averaged $54,800 in 2025. Captains, mates and pilots averaged $111,870, and ship engineers $113,090. Mobile, Alabama runs the same ladder at a smaller scale, with sailors near $55,710, captains and mates at $82,090, and engineers at $98,300.
Moving up one rung is worth roughly $55,000 a year in mean pay.
Getting the Credential Costs Tens of Thousands and Time Ashore
Training institutions told the GAO that upgrading from able seafarer to mate runs $30,000 to $40,000 across one or more years of coursework. A mariner union put the cost of reaching officer through work experience and non-academy training at about $45,000. Neither figure counts the wages given up while ashore. Coast Guard officials told the auditors that some upgrades require close to 300 hours of coursework, and that advancing across two officer ranks can take ten or more courses and over 400 hours.
The financing available to that path fits it badly. As of August 2025, fewer than 20 percent of the 197 non-academy institutions offering Coast Guard-approved mariner courses were cleared to accept aid from the Departments of Education, Veterans Affairs or Labor, the GAO reported. Many of those courses run days or weeks. Conventional federal aid rules require far longer programs.
The four-year route is financed on different terms. Most students in credential-track programs at the six state maritime academies use Department of Education aid, which makes the academy the better-funded entrance to licensed work.
Enrollment there has stayed narrow. Across the seven U.S. maritime academies, Black students accounted for 2 percent of license-program enrollment over the 2015 through 2022 cohorts, 139 students out of 8,324, according to an evaluation prepared for the Maritime Administration by the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center. The share stood at 1 percent in 2015 and 2 percent in 2022. At the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, which MARAD operates at Kings Point and which graduates just over 200 licensed officers a year, Black students were 2.36 percent of total enrollment in 2024.
Phillips put the workforce problem and the fairness problem together in her 2023 testimony. Every mariner must be able to succeed and advance on skill and professionalism, she told the subcommittee, and the merchant marine must be made to “reflect the values and diversity of the nation it serves.” A 2026 National Academies report notes that federal diversity initiatives at the Merchant Marine Academy were disbanded after the January 2025 executive order ending federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Federal Policy Is Rebuilding the Fleet and the Training Pipeline Together
President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14269 on April 9, 2025, making the revival of domestic maritime industries and the maritime workforce official U.S. policy. The order directs expanded mariner training and a review of credential requirements it calls burdensome. It also orders an inventory of available scholarships and an assessment of routes from military service into the merchant marine.
The Maritime Action Plan released in February 2026 attaches programs to that order. It proposes a Mariner Incentive Program carrying aid for education, recruitment, training and retention, some of it tied to a service obligation. Beyond the academies, it reaches for community colleges, registered apprenticeships and accelerated trades programs, among them a 16-week defense-manufacturing course covering welding, computer-controlled machining and metrology, all of them shipyard skills. It puts dedicated shipbuilding investment secured to date at $150 billion, a figure it presents as an administration claim rather than as appropriated spending.
The plan describes a Navy talent pipeline connecting trade schools and suppliers with nearly 500 participating employers, and proposes Maritime Prosperity Zones to draw private capital into waterfront communities. Most of these measures remain proposals, dependent on authorization, funding and execution, and none of them specifies who gets trained.
Where the Mariner Training Money Is Documented
The GAO recommended in May 2026 that MARAD publish clearer information about financial aid and maritime careers. Auditors found that prospective mariners struggled to work out which training programs qualified for which funds. MARAD runs the Student Incentive Payment program for students at the state maritime academies, which carries a service obligation after graduation. It has also designated Centers of Excellence for Domestic Maritime Workforce Training, among them community colleges, technical colleges and a shipyard apprenticeship program.
A Workforce Pell Grant framework created in 2025 takes effect in award year 2026 through 2027 for shorter workforce programs that meet the statutory conditions. Whether a given maritime course qualifies turns on the program and the school. The Coast Guard maintains the list of approved courses that decides whether a class counts toward a credential at all. Registered apprenticeships in the shipbuilding trades run through the Department of Labor and pay wages during training, which removes the forgone-income problem the auditors identified in the upgrade path.
Isaac Myers raised his $10,000 from men who had been put off the docks eight months earlier, and the yard they built outlasted him. The money headed for American shipyards now is coming out of Washington in amounts no group of caulkers could subscribe, and none of the documents describing it says who will hold the licenses when it lands.
Sources: National Archives and Records Administration; National Park Service; Howard University; Maryland State Archives; U.S. Government Accountability Office; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; U.S. Maritime Administration; Volpe National Transportation Systems Center; U.S. Department of Defense; U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey microdata compiled by Data USA; The White House; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
