Goldsborough was a commodore at the outbreak of the American Civil War in April 1861, commanding the screw steamer USS Union.

Goldsborough was born in Washington, D.C., on 2 July 1809, the son of a chief clerk in the United States Department of the Navy.

He was a cadet-midshipman aboard the frigate USS John Adams, the flagship of Commodore David Porter in the West Indies Squadron, before being appointed as a midshipman on 6[1] or 16[2] November 1824 (sources vary).

Prior to Goldsborough's Coast Survey tour, U.S. Navy Lieutenant George M. Bache, while attached to the Survey in 1838, had suggested standardizing the markings of buoys and navigational markers ashore by painting those on the right when entering a harbor red and those on the left black, and Goldsborough instituted this system in 1847.

On 1 June 1861, Union captured a Confederate blockade runner, the schooner C. W. Johnson with a cargo of railroad iron, off the coast of North Carolina; she also captured the blockade runner Amelia, carrying a cargo of contraband from Liverpool, England, off Charleston, South Carolina, on 18 June 1861.

He left Colorado in November 1863 and took up ordnance duty at Portsmouth Navy Yard in Kittery, Maine, remaining in that position through the end of the war in April 1865.

[3][8] From 1865 to 1868, Goldsborough commanded the screw sloop-of-war USS Shenandoah, voyaging to the Azores and Brazil in late 1865 for service in the South Atlantic Squadron.

[3] The commander-in-chief of the Asiatic Squadron, Rear Admiral Henry H. Bell, drowned along with 11 of the other 14 men aboard when his boat capsized while crossing the bar at Osaka, Japan, while attempting to take him ashore from the squadron's flagship, the sloop-of-war USS Hartford, on the morning of 11 January 1868.