Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

Seidule began his military career at Fort Bragg, named after Confederate general Braxton Bragg. Decorated for bravery in the Mexican War, Bragg was hated by his troops, one of whom tried to kill him. He was an enslaver, and as a Confederate general he lost far more battles than he won. Bragg thus seems like an unlikely namesake for one of the largest military bases in the world, aside from the fact that he was from North Carolina. Seidule later transferred to Fort Benning in Georgia, named after Henry Benning, who championed secession on the explicit grounds of protecting slavery. He helped convince Virginia to secede, warning their convention that abolition of slavery would lead to the extermination of white people in America. He participated Confederate in several major battles, and rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the Confederate army.

Another base in Georgia, Fort Gordon, is named after a Confederate major general who suffered grievous wounds at the 1862 Battle of Antietam and would go on to serve as both governor of Georgia and national leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Several posts in Seidule’s native Virginia also honor Confederates, including Fort A. P. Hill, Fort Pickett, and of course Fort Lee (following the publication of this book, the Defense Department’s “Naming Commission” changed the name of Fort Pickett to Fort Barfoot, after a World War II Medal of Honor recipient. Seidule is the vice chair of the commission). Fort Lee is the base for logistics, which ironically tends to be the most racially diverse portion of the army. In Louisiana, military bases honor Leonidas Polk, a beloved but unsuccessful Confederate general, as well as Pierre Beauregard, who served as superintended of West Point for five days, long enough to bring along the people he’d enslaved into the free state of New York and encourage students to join the Confederate army. The second largest base in the country, Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, another general with a record of costly defeats and few victories.

Seidule investigates why so many major military installations are named after Confederates. Local commanders originally had the ability to name installations, but in 1878 the army transferred that power to regional commanders. During World War I, when the army swelled in size and construction began on numerous new facilities, the general criteria was to name it after a moderately famous person from that state, whose name would not offend local sensibilities. For installations in the South, local interests such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Rotary Club pushed for Confederate names, and the War Department generally deferred.

To understand why, Seidule shifts focus to Arlington National Cemetery. Originally the home of George Washington’s step-grandson, it then passed to his daughter and her husband, Robert E. Lee. Just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC, US forces occupied Arlington in the opening days of the war, and the federal government later bought the land at auction. It soon doubled as a burial ground for US soldiers—possibly as an act of revenge against Lee, but more likely as a convenient piece of federal land close to the intense campaigns of 1864. Once it formally became a military cemetery, Arlington at first honored only US soldiers and condemned the Confederacy, but after the Spanish American War in 1898, the expansion of American power abroad helped to soothe regional tensions.

Seeking to make Republican inroads in the solidly Democratic South, President William McKinley (who oversaw the war with Spain) offered federal support to the maintenance and memorialization of Confederate graves. By 1914, Arlington had its own Confederate monument, with the phrase (in Latin) “the victorious cause pleased the gods, but the conquered cause pleased Cato,” a reference to Roman history suggesting that the Confederacy fought a losing battle for freedom against an overwhelming and tyrannical force.

With the outbreak of World War I, and the consequent need for a fully mobilized nation, naming bases after Confederates was a concession to Southern wishes on behalf of national reconciliation, which did not extend to the Black Americans in the South suffering under Jim Crow. Between the world wars, one Virginia base even changed its name from that of a US Army general to the name of a nearby plantation (Seidule regularly used the term “slave labor farms”), which President Franklin Roosevelt accepted to secure local Democratic support for his New Deal policies.

World War II again brought about a swelling of ranks and a need for new facilities, many of which deferred to the wishes of the local population since the soldiers themselves came from various backgrounds. One Tennessee post was even named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had been a cruel slave trader before the war, massacred Black soldiers at Fort Pillow during the war, and after the war became the first leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Trying to understand how someone so awful could receive the honor of a base in their name, Seidule concludes that the America of the 1940s was not a true democracy, and the army in particular was segregated with a record of five Black officers in its entire history. Official army policy held that Black men were unable and unwilling to fight as skillfully as white soldiers, even after Black soldiers demonstrated remarkable bravery in the First World War.

In a telling example of the army’s institutional racism, Seidule discovered that in 1949, the National Guard units of Southern states were allowed to display their regimental ‘colors’ in a way that glorified the Confederacy, putting Confederate gray on top of Union blue and using the Confederate names for battles in which their unit engaged, such as “Sharpsburg” instead of “Antietam” and “Manassas” instead of “Bull Run.” The previous year, President Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces, and the Secretary of the Army was a staunch segregationist, leading Seidule to believe that the introduction of colors was meant to rebuke forced integration. Even more modern military units wear insignias commemorating Confederate units. The army has defended the practice of honoring Confederates as non-ideological and intended to avoid divisiveness.

Seidule continues to believe that the US Army has done many noble things throughout its history, but it is stalled by a refusal to take stock of its own racist history. It can begin that process by scrubbing the names of Confederates and replacing them with more authentic American heroes.