When people make the argument that we should keep those Army forts named for Confederate generals, here’s your response: Why should our nation’s best be trained at bases named for our worst? Because most of them were terrible generals. Not only did they lose the war, they also lost multiple battles. Each.
Of course, the best reason for renaming the 10 military bases that bear the names of military leaders who attacked America is that they were traitors who killed American soldiers. We don’t have a statue to General Benedict Arnold, Nazi Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, nor Feldmarschall Franz Xaver Josef Graf Conrad von Hötzendorf of the Austro-Hungarian Army even though they were actually great generals. (And even though von Hötzendorf has one of the best mustaches I’ve ever seen.) To honor Confederate military leaders is an insult to African-American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, and to Northern whites, whose ancestors the Confederacy slaughtered.
But even taking treason out of it, these guys do not deserve the honor they’ve gotten. For example, let’s take Major General George Pickett, for whom Fort Pickett near Blackstone, Va., is named. His contemporaries loathed him as a swashbuckling glamor boy with little to recommend him but friends in high places, like General James Longstreet. At the charge on Cemetery Hill in Pennsylvania — forever known as Pickett’s Charge — Pickett’s troops suffered huge casualties, and every single one of Pickett’s brigade or regimental commanders was killed. A veritable massacre. I won’t go into the rest of Pickett’s Confederate career except that he failed at all of his ensuing battles, too.
But he wasn’t just a terrible general. In addition, Pickett, like Longstreet and General Robert E. Lee, used their march through a free state to capture as many African-Americans as possible — whether freedmen or runaway slaves, “even the men, women & children,” according to one letter home — to ship them south and into slavery. In a July 1, 1863, letter from First Corps Assistant Adjutant Gilbert Moxley Sorrel to Pickett, these humans were referred to as “captured contrabands” [sic] that were being readied “for further disposition.” Lastly, Pickett was also a war criminal, killing 21 Union captives. He died at age 50 from what was euphemistically called “an abscess of the liver.” Sounds like cirrhosis to me.
What about General Braxton Bragg, for whom the base at Fort Bragg, N.C., is named? The short answer is that there’s a book called Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy — and the author, Earl J. Hess, wasn’t talking about the Union hating him. As Michael P. Irvin wrote in a review published by the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Bragg was your basic martinet:
“Braxton Bragg could very well be the most vilified and denounced general of the Civil War. Surely, he was a staunch defender of the Southern cause and a loyal lieutenant to Jefferson Davis, but his uncompromising demeanor and unyielding obsession with discipline induced many of his officers and soldiers to resist his orders while detesting him as their commander. [A man] rebuked for indiscriminate executions of his own men and criticized for mismanaging the Army of Tennessee.”
A Louisiana slaveholder, Bragg was second-in-command when the Confederacy lost the Battle of Shiloh. (In the interest of full disclosure, my husband’s great-grandfather died there, fighting for the Union.) He went on to lose the Battle of Perryville, Ky., the Battles of Chattanooga — really, just about all his battles except for the Battle of Chickamauga. Why would that be? Hess is good enough to tell us: Bragg’s “corp commanders were willful, unreliable subordinates who could not be counted on to obey orders or to cooperate with their commander” (p. 168). Can’t imagine why they didn’t trust Bragg. When President Jefferson Davis asked Bragg’s subordinates about him in a meeting on Oct. 10, 1863, Hess writes, “not a single voice was raised on Bragg’s behalf in this unusual moment in Civil War history” (p. 180). Those who knew him best hated him most. But sure! Let’s keep his name on the home of the Army’s Airborne Rangers!
We can keep exploring the other eight bases named for Confederate traitors, but you get the picture. That Jefferson Davis insisted on keeping Bragg even after this glaring show of his incompetence and failure to lead shows you what you need to know about Confederate generals. For the most part, it was whom they knew, not what they knew, that got them their position. It’s what you’d expect from a breakaway nation that valued aristocracy and a feudal way of life. That’s not America — or at least, despite Donald Trump, it shouldn’t be.
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