Since Donald Trump returned to office this year, his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has ripped the new names off a series of US army bases and brought back their old traitorous Confederate names.
His actions have angered Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress, prompting a rare rebuke of the Trump administration by the Republican-controlled Congress last Tuesday. The GOP-led House of Representatives Armed Services Committee voted on 15 July to block Hegseth from renaming the bases after Confederates. Two Republicans voted with the Democrats on the committee to pass the measure, which was an amendment to the Pentagon’s budget bill.
“What this administration is doing, particularly this secretary of defense, is sticking his finger in the eye of Congress,” said Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican representative who voted to stop Hegseth.
Hegseth’s move elicited bipartisan anger because it flouted the law; Congress passed legislation in January 2021 to create a commission to choose new names for the bases named for Confederates and mandated that its recommendations be implemented by the Pentagon. That law was passed over a veto by Trump in the final days of his first term, and the name changes were later implemented by the Pentagon during the Biden administration.
The law is still on the books, and so in order to return to the old Confederate names, Hegseth has openly played games with their namesakes.
The secretary claims he has renamed the bases after American soldiers from throughout US history who were not Confederates. But they all conveniently have the same last names as the original Confederate namesakes of the bases. For example, Fort Bragg is now supposedly named for Roland Bragg, who was an army paratrooper in the second world war; Fort Benning is now supposedly named for Fred Benning, a soldier who served in the army in the first world war.
Before the House vote, Hegseth’s efforts to skirt the law were also challenged in the Senate. In a hearing in June, Angus King, a senator from Maine, told Hegseth that he was returning the bases to the names of “people who took up arms against their country on behalf of slavery”. Hegseth insisted that the Pentagon had found non-Confederates with the same names to stay within “the limits of what Congress allowed us to do”. But during the same hearing, Hegseth briefly dropped the pretense that he wasn’t returning to the original Confederate names. He argued that “there is a legacy, a connection” for veterans with the old names.
King replied that Hegseth’s actions were “an insult to the people of the United States”.
Above all, Hegseth’s actions show a troubling ignorance of the lives of the original Confederate namesakes; their easily-researched backgrounds reveal what terrible role models they make for modern American military personnel.
Braxton Bragg was one of the most incompetent Confederate generals of the civil war. His subordinates repeatedly and clandestinely tried to get him fired, with one writing to the Confederate secretary of war that “nothing but the hand of God can save us or help us as long as we have our present commander”. Bragg finally lost his command after he was out-generaled by Union General Ulysses S Grant and his army was routed at the Battle of Chattanooga in 1863. One of the few biographies written about him is entitled Braxton Bragg, the Most Hated Man in the Confederacy.
And yet Bragg lives on today as the namesake of the largest and most important military base in the United States Army.
Fort Bragg, in Fayetteville, North Carolina was originally built in 1918, as part of a rushed effort by the army to construct new bases after the United States entered the first world war. The site offered the army cheap and abundant land, and it quickly built a base and surrounding military reservation totaling 251 sq miles.
Eager to win local white support, the army agreed to name the new base after a Confederate; Bragg was chosen because he was originally from North Carolina. By the time the base was built, the civil war had been over for more than 50 years, yet the south was still in the grips of the “the Lost Cause” theory of the war, which romanticized the civil war and held that the south had fought for state’s rights, not slavery, and that the Confederacy had fielded better officers and men and had only lost because of the overwhelming resources of the north. By 1918, when Bragg’s name was attached to the base, the generation of Confederate officers who hated him were gone, along with the memory of his military blunders.
That pattern held for a series of major bases built throughout the south during the first and second world wars. Fort Benning was also built in 1918 near Columbus, Georgia. At the request of the Columbus Rotary Club, the army named it for Henry Lewis Benning, who was best known as a pro-slavery political firebrand from Columbus who helped draft Georgia’s ordinance of secession.
Benning was one of the pre-eminent white supremacists of his day, and he openly admitted that his state seceded because of slavery, not states rights. In one speech, he said that his state seceded because of a “deep conviction on the part of Georgia that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery … If things are allowed to go on as they are … we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it supposed that the white race will stand for that?” Benning served in the Confederate army, but it was his political role as a proponent of a southern slavocracy that first brought him fame and prominence.
By the 21st century, there were still 10 army bases that were named for Confederates, and the Pentagon repeatedly resisted efforts to change their names, arguing that tradition outweighed the fact that the bases were named for traitors who had fought to preserve slavery. The Confederate base names were finally changed after the 2020 George Floyd protests; Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty, while Fort Benning became Fort Moore, named for Vietnam War hero Hal Moore and his wife, Julia Moore. (Mel Gibson played Hal Moore and Madeleine Stowe played Julia Moore in the 2002 movie We Were Soldiers.)
But those new names didn’t survive Trump’s return to office.
Hegseth hasn’t stopped with army bases. The Pentagon has announced it will strip the name off the US navy ship Harvey Milk, which was named for the gay rights pioneer who was assassinated in 1978, and rename it for Oscar V Peterson, a sailor who won the Congressional Medal of Honor during the second world war.
But one thing is certain: Braxton Bragg’s civil war contemporaries would be shocked to discover that a man so widely derided as a loser and a martinet during his lifetime is still at the center of a national debate 160 years after the war ended. During the war, one Confederate newspaper editor described him as a man with “an iron hand and a wooden head”.
Grant, the man who so badly beat Bragg during the war, took great pleasure in making fun of Bragg and his ridiculous behavior when he later wrote his memoirs. Grant recounted one infamous episode involving Bragg from the time before the civil war when both men served in the small, pre-war US army.
“On one occasion, when stationed at a post … (Bragg) was commanding one of the companies and at the same time acting as post quartermaster … As commander of the company he made a requisition upon the quartermaster – himself – for something he wanted. As quartermaster he declined to fill the requisition and endorsed on the back of it his reasons for so doing. As company commander he responded to this, urging that his requisition called for nothing but what he was entitled to, and that it was the duty of the quartermaster to fill it. As quartermaster he still persisted that he was right … Bragg referred the whole matter to the commanding officer of the post. The latter exclaimed: “My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarrelling with yourself!”
In his memoirs, Grant wrote that Bragg was “naturally disputatious”.
So maybe Braxton Bragg would fit in perfectly with Donald Trump after all.
