A Confederate Colonel was Secretary of the United States Navy
In March of 1893 President Grover Cleveland appointed Hilary Herbert as Secretary of the Navy. Herbert was a proponent of Alfred Mahan’s naval theory and did much to enlarge and upgrade the United States Navy before the Spanish American War. He was an effective secretary.
Colonel Herbert was a lawyer by training and studied at the University of Alabama (1853) and the University of Virginia (1854). During the Civil War he first served as a captain in the Greenville Guards and ended his service the Colonel of the 8th Alabama Infantry Regiment. His entry in the Biographical Record of Congress says he was “disabled” at the Battle of the Wilderness.
After the war he went back to Greenville, Alabama to practice law. He moved to Montgomery in 1872 and was elected to Congress as a Democrat. He rose to chair the Committee on Naval Affairs in the House of Representatives. There he developed the expertise required for his appointment to Secretary of the Navy by President Cleveland in 1893 until 1897.
I became acquainted with Colonel Herbert while studying the history of the Confederate Monument in Arlington National Cemetery. He was Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Arlington Confederate Monument Association. Without his leadership and political connections, the memorial might not exist today. He wrote History of The Arlington Confederate Monument which was published in 1914. He died five years later.
Like Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman he was a racist by today’s standards. As a member of the House of Representatives he opposed many of the Reconstruction Acts. His concise history of the United States contained in his history of the Arlington Monument is characterized as Lost Cause nonsense by academics today. They twist his words and associate things with his writing with no evidence.
The truth is that he was a man of his times and a great American. He was force for reunion and goodwill. A Confederate colonel was Secretary of the Navy. What a country!
