Seems to have been a fairly low key affair. Part of the DoD-wide renaming crusade:
“This renaming honors Robert Smalls, a skilled sailor and statesman born into slavery in South Carolina.”
“The decision arrived after a congressionally mandated Naming Commission outlined several military assets across all branches of service that required renaming due to confederate ties. In September 2022, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin accepted all recommendations from the naming commission and gave each service until the end of 2023 to rename their assets.”
CG-62 was commissioned in 1989 and named USS Chancellorsville (CG 62) to honor the Battle of Chancellorsville, a Confederate victory during the Civil War. CG-62 is currently assigned to Carrier Strike Group Five and is forward-deployed to Yokosuka, Japan.
If it was commissioned in 1989, then with 34 years in service I imagine it will be retired any day now. Great chance for virtue signaling with no real impact.
There were no “Victories” in the Civil War, just piles of dead misguded youths laying on battlefield after battlefield.
I remember reading about some Yankee’s taking a Confederate Soldier captive, he had 8 acorns in his pocket to eat and half a canteen of dirty creek water. The Union Soldiers were lost to the fact that this guy had nothing, no land, no slaves but he fought them tooth and nail.
When asked why he fought so hard, he replied “Because your here.”.
So no winners, no losers and we haven’t learned anything yet.
I’ve heard stories passed down through relatives about the war. Yankees would slaughter horses and livestock of women and elderly where the younger men had went off to war. After the war was over, a woman was found living off on her own with a couple of kids and they had almost starved to death. She hadn’t had a way to go get supplies or grow anything so they had been living off weeds, grass, and pond water for no telling how long.
That was all part of the U.S.’s total war against the South. Teach them a lesson, take them down a few notches and make them dependent upon the government teat.