The U.S. Navy announced this week that it would be renaming a ship named for oceanographic pioneer Matthew Fontaine Maury because of Maury’s ties to the Confederacy during the later years of his life. 

Maury, known as the “Pathfinder of the Seas,” was a Navy officer and accomplished oceanographer who helped come up with the idea for a transatlantic cable. The USNS Maury will be renamed after Marie Tharp, an oceanographer cartographer and geologist who lived in the 20th century. 

“As the history of our great nation evolves, we must put forth the effort to recognize figures who positively influenced our society,” Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro stated. “This renaming honors just one of the many historic women who have made a significant impact on not only our Navy, but our nation.”

The oceanographic survey ship was renamed as part of a congressionally mandated commission that recommended purging any names or entities associated with the Confederacy from military property, including the historic Confederate Memorial which sits surrounded by the graves of Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. 

Maury was born in Virginia in 1806 before his family moved to Tennessee and he joined the U.S. Navy in 1825. During his time in the Navy, he was aboard the first Navy ship to circumnavigate the globe and released a book on navigation at the age of 30. 

After an injury rendered him unable to sail, Maury became heavily involved in charting the ocean for the Navy. He was placed in charge of the Navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments before rising to lead the U.S. Naval Observatory from 1844-1861. 

He was an effective navigator and sailors were able to cut almost 50 days off of travel time for ships going from New York to San Francisco. His influential books on the ocean included “The Physical Geography of the Sea,” and “Sailing Directions,” both originally published in 1855. 

When the Civil War broke out, he chose to side with the Confederacy as he was from Virginia. During the war, he tried to create an electric torpedo and went to England as a Confederate agent. After the war, he worked for a short time with Mexico’s emperor to see if they could establish a Confederate colony before he became a meteorology professor at Virginia Military Institute. 

A monument of Maury, who died in 1873, was also removed from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, in 2020. 

Another Navy ship, a missile-guided cruiser named after the Civil War battle of Chancellorsville, was recently renamed. The Navy chose to the ship to be named in honor of Robert Smalls, a former slave who commandeered a Confederate ship during the war.

A Virginia judge ruled last month that frozen embryos can be considered property, a decision based in-part on a 19th century slavery law, according to a new report. 

The ruling was part of a dispute between a divorced couple who both hope to gain control over two frozen embryos, which were created by Honeyhline Heidemann and Jason Heidemann during their marriage, the Associated Press reported this week. 

“Upon independent research, this court was unable to find any Virginia law prohibiting the purchase or sale of human embryo, nor has either party cited a federal law prohibiting the activity,” Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Richard Gardiner wrote in a ruling related to the battle over the embryos. “As there is no prohibition on the sale of human embryos, they may [be] valued and sold, and thus may be considered ‘goods or chattels’ within the meaning of Code § 8.01-93.”

Since the couple split, Honeyhline has hoped to move forward with using the embryos, but Jason has sought to block her saying that implanting the embryos “would force Mr. Heidemann to procreate against his wishes and therefore violate his constitutional right to procreational autonomy.”

According to a 2015 contract that the couple had drawn up, they “own any stored embryos jointly.”

While Gardiner has not made a decision on Jason’s procreational autonomy claim, he did rule that the embryos could be viewed as property. His ruling in part relied on a Virginia law from the 1800s that regulated “goods and chattel,” which included slaves at the time the law was written. 

“I would like to think that the bench and the bar would be seeking more modern precedent,” said Solomon Ashby, president of the Old Dominion Bar Association. 

A human embryo is typically frozen very soon after fertilization before the unborn child has been able to develop much. 

In recent months, some conservatives have considered or voiced support for increasing protection for embryos and prohibiting the disposal of embryos as pro-life organizations have often raised concerns about what happens to embryos that do not end up being implanted. 

Gardiner’s ruling to treat embryos as property could draw the attention of pro-lifers, who have often compared slavery and abortion over their callous treatment of human life.