CINCINNATI (AP) -
As much as President Donald Trump enjoys talking about winning and winners,
the Confederate generals he vows will not have their names removed from U.S.
military bases were not only on the losing side of rebellion against the
United States, some weren’t even considered good generals.
The 10 generals
include some who made costly battlefield blunders; others mistreated
captured Union soldiers, some were slaveholders and one was linked to the Ku
Klux Klan after the war.
Trump has dug in
his heels on renaming, saying the bases that trained and deployed heroes for
two World Wars “have become part of a Great American Heritage, a history of
Winning, Victory, and Freedom.”
However, there is
growing support in the GOP- led Senate to remove the Confederate names and
from former U.S. military leaders such as retired 4-star general David
Petraeus, who wrote last week that the bases are named “for those who took
up arms against the United States, and for the right to enslave others.”
Long revered in
much of the South, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee has often been a
flashpoint for opponents of honoring Confed-erates who triggered a war that
killed hundreds of thousands of Americans on U.S. soil, some of whom were
literally waving the Stars and Stripes.
Trump paid tribute
to Lee as “a great general” in an impromptu Civil War history lesson during
a 2018 rally in Lebanon, Ohio, saying Abraham Lincoln developed “a phobia”
about trying to defeat Lee before turning to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant of nearby
Point Pleasant, Ohio, for success.
While Lee’s early
victories prolonged the war, his failure at the battle of Gettysburg in
1863, capped by the disastrous Pickett’s Charge into Union fire, was the
turning point of the war.
Lee was a
slaveholder in his native Virginia and at least one of his former slaves
testified that Lee had him whipped brutally. During his incursion into free
state Pennsylvania Lee’s troops kidnapped freed blacks and drove them into
slavery.
Gen. Braxton Bragg,
namesake for the North Carolina Army base, was also a slaveholder and a
general who resigned his command after defeat in 1863 at Chattanooga. He
also lost at Perryville and Stones River in 1862. He was hated by his own
men for his harsh discipline, first in the U.S. Army and later in the
Confederate Army of the Tennessee.
On ABC’s “This
Week” Sunday, George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma,
if it’s time to stop having military bases named after Confederate generals
like Bragg.
Lankford indicated
agreement, comparing it to names of schools and saying that children should
be able to have their school’s namesake as a role model. “You would have
that on a military base as well,” Lankford said. “So, if you have a military
base that is named after someone that actually rebelled against the United
States government, then you would want to be able to go back and look at
that name. That should be a pretty basic principle.”
Gen. John Bell
Hood, namesake of the Texas base, lost the key city of Atlanta in 1864 after
a series of disastrous attacks. Later he and his other commanders slept at
Spring Hill, Tennessee allowing Union soldiers to get away on a road so
close to the sleeping Confederates that some reportedly used the rebels’
campfires to light their pipes. He followed with catastrophic defeats at
Franklin, and Nashville. The late historian Shelby Foote wrote in “The Civil
War: A Narrative” that “Hood had wrecked his army, top to bottom.”
Gen. A.P. Hill,
namesake of a base in Virginia, is remembered for leading costly frontal
assaults early in the the war followed by a mysterious illness that left him
unable to function effectively at Gettysburg. He is also remembered for
actions after the Battle of the Crater in 1864, where some rebel troops were
enraged by the North’s use of black units. Some soldiers wrote letters
describing rebels executing defenseless black soldiers. Historians say Hill
ordered white Union prisoners to be mixed with black soldiers to be paraded
through the city of Petersburg to hear racist jeers from the townspeople.
Virginia base
namesake Gen. George Pickett, one of the big losers at Gettysburg, had 22
Union soldiers executed and later fled to Canada. Gen. John Brown Gordon
became governor of Georgia after the war but was suspected of being a Klan
leader in the state.
Some scholars of
the South, such as history professor Ted Ownby, say it’s not clear how
renaming the bases would play politically. He said people in the communities
around the bases might take offense, but that in today’s South, there’s not
as much fascination or identification with Confederate leaders as in older
generations.
“What Southern
means and who Southerners are has expanded to be much more ... that being
Southern isn’t rooted in support or respect for the Confederacy,” said Ownby,
of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, at the University of
Mississippi.