author
Hilary A. (Hilary Abner) Herbert
1834–1919
A lawyer, congressman, and U.S. Secretary of the Navy, he also wrote from firsthand experience about the American South, war, and public life. His work carries the perspective of a man who moved between the battlefield, Washington politics, and the page.
1 Audiobook
The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences: Four Periods of American History
by Hilary A. (Hilary Abner) Herbert
About the author
Born in South Carolina in 1834 and raised in Alabama, Hilary Abner Herbert studied at the University of Alabama and the University of Virginia before becoming a lawyer. During the Civil War he served in the Confederate army, and after the war he built a long public career in Alabama and national politics.
Herbert represented Alabama in the U.S. House of Representatives for many years and later served as Secretary of the Navy under President Grover Cleveland. That mix of military service, law, and government gave his writing a strong historical and political point of view.
He is remembered not only as a public official but also as an author whose books drew on major events he had lived through. Herbert died in 1919, leaving behind a body of work closely tied to the history of the nineteenth-century United States.