Renaming Army Forts

Stop Worshiping Treason

The American Civil War began over 159 years ago. The secession of the slave states was quickly followed by armed conflict. While the first clash at Bull Run has been described as more like two armed mobs colliding, it heralded almost four long years of death and mayhem that cost 750,000 lives on both sides. It must never be forgotten that the invocation of disunion and rejection of the Constitution was driven by the Confederacy’s wish to be a slave-holding nation, with whites as the supreme race. It also must be remembered that the many officers of the U.S. Army who “went South” were performing an act of treason in doing so, turning their backs on their oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They became enemies of that very Constitution by this choice.

The outcome of the Civil War from a military standpoint was clear. The Confederacy lost. While Lincoln had stated his intent to provide pardon and amnesty after the war was over, it was Andrew Johnson who pardoned all Confederate soldiers on Christmas Day 1868. Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction was designed to give whites in the South a free hand in defining the political structure; opposed by the Republicans in Congress, Johnson was impeached but not convicted and removed. While Ulysses Grant attempted an approach to Reconstruction that gave more power to freed blacks, Reconstruction collapsed by 1877 and the era of Jim Crow (slavery by another name) began.

And then arose the “Lost Cause.” That phrase was first used in 1866 by Virginian Edward Pollard and was amplified over time through groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Dunning School, named for Columbia University historian William Archibald Dunning. The net effect was to cast the Civil War as caused by divisions over states’ rights rather than slavery and to make the military of the Confederacy into a chivalrous, patriotic force. In large part because Dunning and his students wrote many books, the history taught to American students became one of this “Lost Cause”. Novelist Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan stimulated the popular media to enshrine this mythology in American history, especially when his book was made into The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith. The net effect was that over most of the 20th century, Americans were fed a diet of how wonderful the Confederacy really was. The truth, of course, is exactly the opposite. There was nothing just or heroic about the Confederacy. Nothing. It was simply white supremacy writ large. Thankfully modern scholars, such as Eric Foner and others, have firmly torpedoed the fantasy that was “The Lost Cause.”

Which brings us to today. Calls have been made to finally rename numerous Army forts, currently bearing the names of Confederate generals, to the names of soldiers who adhered to their Constitutional oaths. Predictably, Donald Trump says no way. Alex Horton notes why the bases bear these names: input years ago from Jim Crow Southerners. The time for renaming all of them after traitors and slaveholders is long overdue. Rename them now. It will be another step in burying the miserable legacy of slavery and white supremacy and moving toward a just and equitable society for all Americans.