Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule

Author:Ty Seidule
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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WHY WOULD THE U.S. Army name its forts for enemy combatants and after such a mishmash of Confederate leaders? The War Department named the posts after Confederates at the beginning of the two world wars, marking a change from earlier practice. Until 1878, local commanders could name forts. At West Point, we have Fort Putnam, named for the commander of the unit that built the fort. After the victory in Saratoga in 1777, another West Point fort was called Fort Arnold after Benedict Arnold, the hero of that battle. Of course, after he committed his treason, trying to sell out West Point to the British, the commander at West Point changed Fort Arnold’s name to Fort Clinton.34

In 1878, the War Department changed its policy, issuing General Orders No. 79 to “secure uniformity” by giving regional commanders naming rights to posts, not the local commanders. The War Department differentiated forts, which were permanent, from camps, which were temporary. That policy worked during the Indian Wars and the Spanish-American War, but the size of the mobilization for World War I meant that the War Department needed more stringent rules because it would create so many posts. During the Great War, the U.S. Army would increase in size from just over one hundred thousand to four million soldiers in twenty months, requiring posts across the country.35

Army planners during this period set out the informal policy on naming. The first criterion was to name a camp after someone, but not anyone too important—like Washington or Lincoln—because the army reasoned that the camps were temporary. Next, the army wanted to name camps after someone from the home state of the unit stationed there, with a preference for Civil War generals. Finally, the War Department wanted to ensure no camp name would offend local sensibilities. While the memo doesn’t mention any examples, I’m sure the War Department wanted to make sure no camp in Georgia bore the name Sherman, who famously marched through the state.36

While the War Department recommended a policy, the army’s acting chief of staff, Tasker Bliss, rejected four Confederate names, instead selecting U.S. Civil War or pre–Civil War generals. Bliss, a Pennsylvanian, wrote when approving the naming slate that the army honored men “who contributed during their lives to the development of the United States and the acquisition by American citizenship of its present status.” Bliss’s statement is hard to square with the Confederates’ armed rebellion, but by World War I many white Americans found the Confederate states’ veterans more American than treasonous. Of the nineteen original training camps in the South created during World War I, five bearing the names of Confederate generals survive today: Lee, Beauregard, Benning, Bragg, and Gordon. Although Camp Gordon was closed in the 1920s, it reappeared during World War II.37

The last two camps named during World War I are the two I know well—Bragg and Benning. Major General William J. Snow, the chief of artillery in 1918, honored Braxton Bragg because he was a native North Carolinian who fought in the Mexican-American War as an artillerist.

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