Biography:

Lawyer, congressman, Secretary of the Navy. Born– March 12, 1834,  Laurensville, S.C. Parents– Thomas E. and Dorothy Teaugue (Young) Herbert. Moved to Alabama in 1846. Married–Ella B. Smith, April 23, 1867.  Children–three. Education– University of Alabama, 1853-1854; University of Virginia, 1854-1856. Admitted to the Alabama bar, 1857. Practiced law in Greenville (Ala.), 1857-1872; in Montgomery, 1872-1876. Served in U.S. House of Representatives, 1877-1892; Secretary of the Navy under Grover Cleveland, 1893-1897; practiced law in Washington as senior partner in law firm Herbert and Micou, 1897-1919. Grand marshal of Confederate Veterans Reunion in Washington, 1917. Member National Geographic Society and American Society of Social and Political Science. Honorary LL.D. degrees from Tulane University and the University of Alabama. Died March 6, 1919.

Sources:

Marquis who’s who online; American National Biography online

Hammett, Hugh B.  Hilary Abner Herbert:  A Southerner Returns to the Union.  Philadelphia:  American Philosophical Society, 1976.

Reminiscences: Grandfather Talks of his Life under Two Flags. Manuscript.  1903.

Publication(s):

The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences. New York; Scribner, 1912.

History of the Arlington Confederate Monument. Washington, D.C.; B.S. Adams, Printer, 1914.

History of the Eighth Alabama Regiment, CSA.  Alabama State Department of Archives and History, 1977.

Editor:

Why the Solid South?; or, Reconstruction and its Results. Baltimore; R. H. Woodward & Co., 1890.

Papers;

The Southern Historical Library at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill holds the papers of Hilary Abner Herbert.