US Politics

How Army Bases in the South Were Named for Defeated Confederates

December 2, 2022
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WASHINGTON — Nine southern Army bases are named for treasonous Confederate generals who fought against the United States to preserve slavery and white supremacy. All nine will soon have new names.

A commission established by Congress recommended a list of distinguished Army heroes for the new base names, and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III recently ordered the changes by the end of 2023. The bases were originally named as part of a movement to glorify the Confederacy and advance the Lost Cause myth that the Civil War was fought over “states’ rights” and not slavery.

Hundreds of symbols of the Confederacy have been removed across the country since the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.

By 1917, Army policy specifically said bases that housed Southerners should be named for Confederate commanders, according to documents provided by Army historians.

These are the Confederates whose names will be replaced.

Leonidas Polk was an Episcopal bishop and slave owner in Louisiana who had graduated from West Point. Although he had little combat experience, his connections to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, landed him an appointment as a major general in the rebel army at the start of the Civil War, according to the National Park Service.

Polk was popular with his soldiers, but historians generally say he was a poor military commander. He also made a major blunder early in the war by ordering the occupation of a town in Kentucky. The state was neutral at the time, but it sided with the Union after the invasion.

Ambrose Powell Hill was an Army officer from Virginia who served in the Mexican-American War and the Third Seminole War. He defected to the Confederacy in 1861.

Hill was regarded as one of General-in-Chief Robert E. Lee’s most trusted lieutenants and commanded the famed “Light Division.” Separated from Lee’s main force during the Battle of Antietam in 1862, Hill led his men on a 17-mile march to reinforce the Army of Northern Virginia, ultimately saving the Confederates from a decisive defeat.

“A.P. Hill was a pivotal figure in every major Civil War battle in the eastern theater from 1862 to 1865,” the historian James I. Robertson Jr. wrote in his biography of Hill, whom he described as “the hard-hitting embodiment of the Confederacy’s military might.”

Robert E. Lee was a Virginian slave owner and colonel in the U.S. Army who defected to the Confederacy in April 1861. He would become one of the most prominent generals in the rebel army and was eventually promoted to be the commander of the entire Confederate force.

Graduating second in his class at West Point in 1829, Lee served three decades in the Army, according to the National Park Service. He led the U.S. force that crushed John Brown’s attempted slave revolt at Harpers Ferry less than two years before the beginning of the Civil War.

Lee was one of the most successful commanders of the war, defeating larger Union armies at the battles of Seven Days, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Even after his defeat at Gettysburg in July 1863, he was able to retreat with his army — allowing him to continue fighting until his surrender in April 1865.

After the war, Lee in part sought reconciliation between the North and South, but at times remained defiant for his role in the rebellion. In an interview with a reporter days after surrendering in Virginia, Lee outlined one of the main tenets of what would become the pro-Confederate Lost Cause movement: falsely claiming that the war was a righteous fight over states’ rights, and not about slavery.

John Bell Hood was a Kentucky-born West Point graduate who defected from the Army and joined the Confederacy in April 1861. Having previously served as a cavalry officer, Hood was initially made a cavalry captain in the Confederate army but was quickly promoted to colonel and then to brigadier general, according to the National Park Service.

Hood distinguished himself as an aggressive commander. Brian Craig Miller, a Civil War historian, said that Hood led offenses that resulted in “horrific numbers of casualties, but did in some ways bring about success or blunt a Union advancement.”

In 1864, Hood, temporarily promoted to full general status, launched his Tennessee Campaign to slow General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea. The opposing generals wrote to each other at the time, and in one letter Hood declared he would rather “die a thousand deaths than submit to live under you or your Government and your Negro allies.”

Hood suffered disastrous defeats at Franklin and Nashville and surrendered less than a year later, according to the Texas State Historical Association.

Fort Hood was established in central Texas in 1942 as a training facility for tank destroyers. An attempt to rename the base in 1944 for an American general killed in France during World War II was quashed by the Army, partially to avoid “undesirable popular and political repercussions in the State of Texas.”

John Brown Gordon was a lawyer and slave owner from Georgia who was commissioned as a captain in the Confederate army in 1861, despite having no military training or experience before the war.

Gordon became one of the most successful commanders in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, according to the National Park Service. He led fierce defensive stands during the Union’s attempt to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond during the Peninsular Campaign, at great cost to himself and his men.

He was shot five times during the Battle of Antietam but participated in the Gettysburg campaign the following year. He later accompanied Jubal Early on a failed Confederate attempt to raid Washington, D.C.

After the war, Gordon was elected to the U.S. Senate and became governor of Georgia in 1886. He opposed federal policies giving basic rights to Black people during the Reconstruction era and became a symbol of white supremacy to his Georgian constituents, according to Britannica. He is widely believed to have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Army War College’s Historical Section in 1941 recommended three names for a new Army installation in Georgia, all of them Confederate generals. The Army chose Fort Gordon, describing its pick as a “distinguished and popular native-born soldier and statesman of Georgia.”

Army historians describe Edmund W. Rucker as “an obscure Confederate cavalry officer from Tennessee.” He enlisted in the Confederate army as a private in 1861 and was given the rank of acting brigadier general by the time of his surrender on May 9, 1865.

With his engineering experience, Rucker was promoted quickly and helped build and man Confederate forts along the Mississippi River, according to the author Michael P. Rucker, his distant relative. Rucker also helped enforce martial law during the occupation of eastern Tennessee.

He later joined Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry force as a brigade commander, fought at the Battle of Brices Cross Roads that resulted in a decisive Confederate victory, and lost his left arm from an injury at the disastrous Confederate defeat at the Battle of Nashville — where he was captured by Union soldiers. After the war, Rucker became a railroad industrialist. He died in 1924, more than 60 years after he joined the Confederacy.

The naming of Fort Rucker appears to have been an unlikely quirk of history. There was significant debate over the naming of the base in 1942, and several more prominent candidates were rejected. But after some prodding from Senator Lister Hill, Democrat from Alabama, General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the Army, selected Rucker over the objections of other officers.

George E. Pickett was a Virginian captain in the U.S. Army who defected to the Confederacy in September 1861. Graduating last in his class at West Point in 1846, he later served in the Mexican-American War and led an occupation force during a dispute over the Canadian border near Seattle at the outbreak of the Civil War.

The disastrous “Pickett’s charge” at the Battle of Gettysburg has passed into legend — though Pickett himself could hardly be blamed for most of it. More than 10,000 Confederate soldiers marched over open fields toward Cemetery Ridge, only to be decimated by Union artillery and gunfire. Pickett wept in the aftermath: “I am ruined. My division is gone; it is destroyed.”

“Failure and disappointment distinguished George Pickett’s military career more than victory,” Lesley Gordon, a military historian, wrote in her biography of Pickett, calling the charge at Gettysburg “the most famous failed frontal assault in American military history.”

Pickett gained further infamy for the unlawful execution of Union soldiers after the Battle of New Bern. He fled to Canada after the war to avoid war crimes charges, according to the National Park Service, but returned to the United States after Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who led the Union army to victory, intervened on his behalf.

The Army War College’s Historical Section recommended that a base be named for Pickett for his role in the Canadian border dispute as well as the catastrophic charge at Gettysburg that by then was “known to every American.” Fort Pickett was established near Blackstone, Va., in 1941.

Braxton Bragg, a former U.S. Army officer who owned enslaved people on a sugar plantation in Louisiana, was appointed as a Confederate brigadier general in 1861. An 1837 graduate of West Point, Bragg had served in the Seminole War and the Mexican-American War, and participated in the Indian Removal before resigning from the Army in 1856, according to the National Park Service.

Promoted to major general in September 1861, Bragg led a corps unit at the Battle of Shiloh, before being promoted again to command the Confederate Army of Tennessee. His army had limited success in Kentucky and Tennessee before being decisively defeated at the Battle of Chattanooga. Bragg then resigned his command and served as an adviser for the rest of the war.

Bragg was considered by his fellow Confederates and many historians to have been a poor commander — some say one of the worst of the Civil War. Earl J. Hess, a historian and author of a Bragg biography titled “The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy,” has described the general as “the Confederacy’s chief whipping boy.”

“Nearly everyone has a negative view of Bragg,” Mr. Hess wrote, adding that many have painted the general as “a fool, a bloodthirsty disciplinarian, and an old-fashioned scapegoat.”

And yet, the Army chose Bragg in 1918 as the name for an artillery base in the general’s native North Carolina. The official order establishing the base cites Bragg’s service as an artillery captain during the Mexican-American War as reason enough for the honor.

Henry L. Benning was a lawyer and associate justice of Georgia’s Supreme Court who became a leader of the state’s secessionist movement, according to Phillip Linn, an Army historian.

In a speech inviting Virginia to join the Confederacy, Benning said Georgia had chosen to secede because “a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery,” warning that if slavery was abolished, “then we will have Black governors, Black legislatures, Black juries, Black everything.”

Benning was appointed as a colonel in the Confederate Georgian militia in August 1861 and spent most of the war in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Benning and his men held “Burnside’s Bridge” against a much larger Union force before retreating during the Battle of Antietam and took part in ferocious combat at Gettysburg and Chickamauga.

The naming of Fort Benning was an unusual event. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that played a central role in promoting the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War and installed monuments to defeated Confederates during the Jim Crow era, petitioned the Army to name a base for Benning.

The Army agreed, and Fort Benning was established in October 1918.



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