Aaron Anderson or Sanderson (c. 1811 – January 9, 1886) was a Union Navy sailor during the American Civil War and the first African-American to be a recipient of America's highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor.

[1] On March 17, 1865, less than one month before the end of the war, he participated in a mission to attack Confederate forces in Mattox Creek, a tributary of the Potomac in Virginia.

A boat equipped with a howitzer was launched from another ship of the Potomac Flotilla, the USS Don, and a group of seventy men was sent to follow along the river bank on foot.

Anderson and a number of other black landsmen worked the oars on the boat, while Boatswain's Mate Patrick Mullen manned the howitzer and Ensign Summers acted as commander.

Without a supporting land force, the boat was vulnerable to attack from Confederate soldiers on the river banks, and the deeper waters of the left fork meant that they might encounter a larger craft than their own.

As Anderson and the other men who still had oars continued to row downstream, the rest of the oarsmen bailed water while Mullen fired the howitzer at the soldiers on shore.

Aaron Sanderson, described as a black male widower, born Virginia, aged seventy, who worked as a "calsiminer" calciminer—another term for whitewasher—and resided at 1357 Kater Street in South Philadelphia, died on January 9, 1886, of heart disease and was buried four days later at the former Lebanon Cemetery.