But, strangely, from the very beginning of the Civil War Maury’s name was singled out for special condemnation, and many false statements were made about him and his work. He was accused of carrying on treasonable correspondence with the enemy before he resigned from the service, and of having the buoys removed from the Kettle Bottom Shoals and of taking away with him from the Observatory the maps of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. His astronomical and meteorological work was ridiculously depreciated, and toward the close of the war the National Academy of Sciences went so far as to pass on January 9, 1864 this resolution: “Resolved by the National Academy of Sciences, That in the opinion of this Academy the volumes entitled ‘Sailing Directions’, heretofore issued to navigators from the Naval Observatory, and the wind and current charts which they are designed to illustrate and explain, embrace much which is unsound in philosophy and little that is practically useful, and that therefore these publications ought no longer to be issued in their present form”. Among all the injuries which Maury suffered from casting his fortunes with Virginia and the South, these hostile condemnations by former fellow officers and scientists, made in the midst of the animosities of civil strife, were perhaps the most damaging, for they cast a cloud upon his good name and the fame which he had won in the field of oceanography,—a cloud of misrepresentation which after more than half a century has not been entirely removed. Upon Maury’s arrival at Richmond, he lost no time in offering his services to Governor Letcher, who granted him a commission as commander in the Navy of Virginia, dated April 23, 1861. At about the same time he appointed him a member of his Executive Council, only just authorized by an ordinance of April 20. Its other members were: Honorable John J. Allen, President of the Court of Appeals; Colonel Francis H. Smith, Superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute; R. L. Montague; and Thomas S. Haymond. This council, ordered to devise plans for the arming and protecting of the state in the shortest time possible, continued to function until June 19 of the same year, when its manuscript minutes come abruptly to a close. On April 25, Virginia had joined the Confederate States and adopted their provisional government; and on April 29 Richmond had become the Capital of the Confederacy. The Virginia State Navy was then incorporated with that of the Confederacy, and on June 10 Maury received his commission in the Confederate States Navy.