Navy selects name for new submarine, renames cruiser

A new submarine will bear the name of a former Secretary of the Navy, and a guided-missile cruiser was renamed after a former slave.

The sub will be named after John H. Dalton, who served asthe 70th secretary of the Navy from 1993-98. The cruiser Chancellorsville, based in San Diego for several years, is now known as the USS Robert Smalls. He was a Civil War-era maritime pilot who commandeered a Confederate ship in 1862 and turned it over to the Union forces.

Smalls was born a slave and became a mariner, a businessman, a publisher and a congressman who represented South Carolina, where he was born.

The Navy changed the cruiser’s moniker because it was named after the Battle of Chancellorsville, a Confederate Civil War victory.

“The renaming of these assets is not about rewriting history, but to remove the focus on the parts of our history that don’t align with the tenets of this country, and instead allows us to highlight the events and people in history who may have been overlooked,” Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro said in a statement.

The Robert Smalls is deployed in Japan.

The USS John H. Dalton will be a Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine.

Dalton “served as a proud submariner and as Secretary of the Navy. He took strong and principled stands against sexual assault and harassment and oversaw the integration of female Sailors onto combat ships,” Del Toro said. “The changes he drove almost 30 years ago are evident in all corners of our Navy today, with women serving on, above, and below the sea.”

President Bill Clinton nominated Dalton, who served on two submarines before leaving active duty, to be secretary of the Navy in 1993. After leaving that post, Dalton returned to the private sector and was involved in several charitable organizations, including the White House Historical Association, Washington National Cathedral, Habitat for Humanity and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.