LAUSR

In 1894, thirty-one years after leading a regiment of Confederates up Little Round Top, Congressman William C. Oates was campaigning for governor in Alabama when he pointed to an experience at the International Naval Review the year before. Oates had been “one of two invited guests” who observed the review aboard the USS Dolphin with President Grover Cleveland and the secretary of the navy. Oates reminded his audience that one of the secretary’s “arms hung disabled by his side in consequence of a wound received at the Wilderness . . . , while trying with many of us, to dissolve the Union.” During the review, “all the great ships of war [that the secretary] passed, American and foreign, saluted him with seventeen guns each, while the admirals, with uncovered heads, extended to him the most deferential salutations.” Oates continued, “As [the secretary] stood with bare head, modestly receiving those great honors, my emotions for a time overcame me.” “The citizen thus honored,” Oates finished, “was an old rebel colonel, who now commands all the great war ships of our navy—Alabama’s own beloved Herbert.”1 In the 1880s and 1890s, the man Oates hoisted as a symbol of sectional reconciliation—Hilary Abner Herbert—had sought to establish himself as a bipartisan and nationalist symbol of a New South. His