More Civil War Renaming

[David Lockmiller]

Stripping Confederate Ties, the U.S. Navy Renames Two Vessels
NYTimes March 12, 2023

The Naming Commission, a committee created by Congress in response to a public backlash against Confederate memorials in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd, identified two ships to be rechristened in the Navy’s fleet.

One, a warship deployed in the waters off Japan, called the U.S.S. Chancellorsville after the Confederate Civil War victory in Virginia, will be renamed the U.S.S. Robert Smalls.

Robert Smalls was an enslaved person and pilot of Planter, an ammunitions transport ship of the Confederate Army. In the early morning of May 13, 1862, he commandeered the ship out of Charleston Harbor, S.C., and delivered it to the Union forces. (Credit...U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command)

The other, a Pathfinder-class oceanographic survey ship called the U.S.N.S. Maury, was named after Matthew Fontaine Maury, a U.S. Navy commander who resigned in 1861 to join the Confederate Navy during the Civil War and who is known as “Pathfinder of the Seas” for his work charting the global paths of ocean currents. It will be rechristened the U.S.N.S. Marie Tharp, after the ocean cartographer, who helped document the phenomenon of continental drift.