U.S. base namesakes include slaveholders, failed generals

CINCINNATI — 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 GOPled Senate to remove the Confederate names and from former U.S. military leaders such as retired four-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 Confederates who triggered a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans on U.S. soil in some of the bloodiest fighting ever seen.

While Lee’s early victories put the Union Army on the defensive, his failure at the decisive battle of Gettysburg in 1863, capped by the disastrous Pickett’s Charge into Union fire, was the turning point of the war.

Lee has been portrayed in the South as a gentlemanly hero, but he had been a slaveholder in his native Virginia and at least one of his former slaves testified that Lee had him whipped brutally.

Gen. Braxton Bragg, namesake for the famed North Carolina Army base, was also a slaveholder and an unpopular general who resigned his command after defeat in 1863 at Chattanooga.

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 University of Mississippi.