Confederate shell grievously wounded landsman John H. Lawson and killed or wounded five men around him. Undeterred, Lawson kept at his post throughout the battle, ignoring calls that he seek immediate medical attention. As one of the US Navy’s 17,000 African American sailors, the war between the states was intensely personal to him, and his bravery that day earned him the Medal of Honor. After the war’s conclusion, Hartford enjoyed a period as one of the nation’s most celebrated ships. As iron replaced wood in
library of congress
national museum of american history, kenneth e. behring center
John H. Lawson (1837–1919)
Battle of Mobile Bay by Louis Prang shipbuilding, however, she faced obsolescence as a commissioned warship. Hartford was used for squadron and training duties until 1916, when she was tied up to the dock for the next ten years in Charleston, South Carolina, to serve both as a receiving ship for newly recruited sailors and as office space for the Navy. On 6 April 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany, Charlestonians Belle V. Dunn and
Helen O’Shaughnessy boarded the Hartford to enlist in the Navy as Yeoman (F)s, a new classification created to allow women to serve performing clerical tasks. They were the first women to enlist and serve aboard a non-combat US Navy ship. A year later, a skinny twenty-three-year-old Navy artist named Norman Rockwell made his studio aboard the Hartford, from where he drew cartoons for Charleston’s navy magazine.
national archives and records administration
USS Hartford, Sail & Spar Plan, 1858, held in the Department of the Navy–Bureau of Construction and Repair.
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