Black in Navy Blue

AT A TIME WHEN the entertainment media is rife with comics and movies about superheroes, the true meaning of the word “hero” has become somewhat obscured, and has perhaps lost some of its cachet. On board USS Hartford, however, during the August 1864 Battle of Mobile Bay, two sailors—wounded and under heavy fire—performed an act of heroism that earned them their shipmates’ gratitude, the nation’s respect, and the Navy’s highest honor. Their names were John Henry Lawson and Wilson Brown, and they were two of the nearly 18,000 African-American seamen who fought for the Union and a better future.

It is a safe assumption that most Americans—and all Civil War buffs—are familiar with the phrase, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” These words were reputedly spoken by Rear Admiral David Glasgow Farragut at Mobile Bay, from the deck of the screw steamer , his flagship. The Union fleet, formed outside the