Carney, William Harvey
1840-1908 · Contribution: 1863-1900
Became, for an 1863 act of valor, the first African American whose military service merited the Medal of Honor — though due to a 37-year delay in his award, he was not literally the first Black recipient to receive the medal
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Impact on the world
During the Union assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, on July 18, 1863 — the battle dramatized in the film Glory — Carney, a sergeant in the famed 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, caught the regimental colors as the color-bearer fell, carried the flag to the fort's parapet under heavy fire, and, after the Union assault was repelled, crawled and staggered back to friendly lines still holding the flag despite being wounded four times, reportedly declaring “Boys, the old flag never touched the ground.” His actions, among the first to demonstrate the courage and capability of Black Union troops, helped persuade skeptical Northern public opinion to support Black enlistment and were eventually recognized with the Medal of Honor on May 23, 1900 — awarded chronologically after roughly twenty other Black Medal of Honor recipients, but for an act of valor that preceded all of theirs.
Life & background
Born into slavery on February 29, 1840, in Norfolk, Virginia, Carney was secretly taught to read by a local minister as a child; his father escaped to freedom via the Underground Railroad and worked to purchase the rest of the family, who settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the late 1850s. Intending to enter the ministry, Carney instead enlisted in the Union Army's 54th Massachusetts — the first official Black regiment recruited in the North — in March 1863, following the Emancipation Proclamation, explaining “I could best serve my God serving my country and my oppressed brothers.” Discharged in 1864 due to his Fort Wagner wounds, he returned to New Bedford, married Susannah Williams, and became the city's first Black postal mail carrier and the first documented Black mail carrier in U.S. Postal Service history, serving over 30 years before working as a Massachusetts State House messenger. He died December 9, 1908, in Boston from injuries sustained in an elevator accident at his workplace, and Massachusetts lowered its flags to half-mast in his honor — the first time the state had done so for an African American.
Sources
- National Museum of the United States Army; Congressional Medal of Honor Society; U.S. Army
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