by Ty Seidule
Polk fought in the western theater for the Confederacy. While the soldiers in the Army of Tennessee loved him, historians have not been kind to his legacy. The historian Steven Woodworth wrote, “Besides being a basically incompetent general, Polk had the added fault of hating to take orders.” Those orders often came from his commander, Braxton Bragg. Polk tried his best to persuade his friend the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, to fire Bragg. Not necessarily a bad thing except Polk might have had even worse fighting skills than Bragg. Bragg would later call Polk “utterly worthless.”22
Polk’s Confederate career ended in 1864 when a U.S. cannonball nearly cleaved him in two. In class, I would tell the old joke. “What was Polk’s greatest contribution to the Confederate cause? Dying a glorious battlefield death.” Historians today consider Polk among the worst generals on either side. Yet Fort Polk, Louisiana, near Leesville (named for Robert E. Lee), is home to the Joint Readiness Training Center, one of the premier training sites for the army.
Camp Beauregard, near Pineville in central Louisiana, honors the Confederate general Pierre G. T. Beauregard, West Point class of 1838. Beauregard came from a prominent slave-owning family in Louisiana. He then married into one of the state’s wealthiest families. His wife’s family, the Villerés, benefited from the 95 enslaved workers on forced-labor sugar farms. In 1850, his wife died in childbirth. Beauregard then married Caroline Deslonde, whose family owned 160 enslaved workers.23
The slaveholding Beauregard was an ardent secessionist. In an outlandish move even for the vainglorious officer dubbed Little Napoleon, Beauregard sought the prestigious assignment as West Point’s superintendent even as he discussed leaving the U.S. Army to fight for the Confederacy. After Lincoln’s 1860 election, the lame-duck president, James Buchanan, ranked by historians as the worst president ever, appointed Beauregard with the approval of the outgoing secretary of war, John B. Floyd.24 Floyd had already decided where his loyalties lay. As Ulysses S. Grant would later write, Floyd “distributed the cannon and small arms from the Northern arsenals throughout the South so as to be on hand when treason wanted them.”25
As Beauregard made his way to West Point on the eve of Louisiana’s secession, he brought two enslaved servants, Eugene and Mary, in complete contravention of New York’s antislavery laws. We know for certain because Beauregard submitted his army pay vouchers for the month with their names, describing them as “slaves.”26
Beauregard brought Eugene and Mary with him to New York, but he probably left Sally Hardin, another enslaved servant, back in Louisiana. Hardin had recently given birth to Beauregard’s daughter, Susan. Enslaved women had no legal right to refuse sex with a slave owner—ever. We have a word for sex without consent: rape. Yet Beauregard ensured that his daughter learned to read and write, helping the otherwise anonymous section of the Beauregard family tree to eventually thrive.27
I know it thrived because Beauregard and Sally’s great-great-great-grandson Nolan Melson graduated from West Point 173 years after his ancestor. Melson’s mother, the University of Iowa law professor Adrien Katherine Wing, described visiting Beauregard’s New Orleans mansion and asking a series of penetrating questions. The docents asked Wing if she had a particular interest in “General Beauregard.”
“Not exactly,” she said. “It’s the general who has an interest in me—a property interest.” Wing went on to say, “Those pictures of his children on the wall, those were only his white children. The general had black children as well, including my maternal great-grandmother Susan.” Wing described the docents’ reaction. “Well we’d heard rumors that the general was like the other Southern gentlemen of his time. But we’re not allowed to discuss it.” A culture of sexual violence among the “gentlemen” of the era? Yes. That was slavery.28
We don’t know if Beauregard raped the enslaved woman he did bring to West Point. We do know that he actively counseled sedition while he led the Military Academy. One cadet asked him if he should leave immediately for the southern cause. Beauregard advised the young man, “Watch me; and when I jump, you jump. What’s the use of jumping too soon?” Even the southern cadet who asked him found Beauregard’s answer inappropriate.29
Beauregard wanted the superintendent’s position to help him gain higher rank in the Confederacy. The War Department realized it made a mistake appointing the ardent secessionist to a school filled with impressionable young men thinking about treason. After only five days, the chief of engineers and Beauregard’s boss fired him. Showing the poor judgment and inflated self-regard that marked him, Beauregard argued that he should stay in the job because he promised to remain loyal until he left the country. Even after he left the U.S. Army, he had the cheek to ask the War Department to pay his $165 travel expenses and those of the two enslaved servants on the trip back to Louisiana to fight against his country.30
If that episode at West Point wasn’t enough to disqualify the U.S. Army from naming a camp after him, there’s more. Beauregard became the first general in the Confederate army and led the force in Charleston that fired on the U.S. Army at Fort Sumter, starting the Civil War.31
To the west of Louisiana, Fort Hood, Texas, is the second-largest army post by population. My son served at Fort Hood in the 1st Cavalry Division. Fort Hood remains the home of III Corps, the army’s premier armored force. The post honors John Bell Hood, West Point class of 1853. A native of Kentucky, Hood wanted the neutral state to act boldly and join the other slave states. When it hesitated after the secessionist attack on Fort Sumter, Hood renounced his ties to the Bluegrass State and adopted Texas as his home. During the war, he served the Confederacy as an aggressive and effective brigade and division commander, despite severe battlefield wounds including losing the use of his arm at Gettysburg and a leg at Chickamauga.
In 1864, Davis appointed him an army commander, replacing Joseph Johnston. At thirty-three years old, Hood was the youngest man on either side to assume independent command, a task that proved beyond his capabilities. After a series of frontal assaults in defense of Atlanta, Hood lost nearly twenty thousand Confederate soldiers, and Sherman still forced him to abandon the city. His worst performance came during the Franklin-Nashville campaign. Against the U.S. general George Thomas, a Virginian who maintained his oath, Hood squandered his army in another series of disastrous frontal assaults against an entrenched enemy. Two weeks after Hood’s forces had impaled themselves on the U.S. defenses, Thomas counterattacked and drove Hood’s defenders as far as Tupelo, Mississippi, two hundred miles south, an “irretrievable disaster” for the Confederacy.32
The poet Stephen Vincent Benét captured Hood perfectly in his 1928 Pulitzer Prize–winning epic poem, John Brown’s Body:
Yellow-haired Hood with his wounds and his empty sleeve,
Leading his Texans, a Viking shape of a man,
With the thrust and lack of craft of a berserk sword,
All lion, none of the fox.33
* * *
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 s
tringent 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. Of course, his Confederate bona fides didn’t hurt either. The final post in the South, Camp Benning, received its name after much local input, one of the few times the army took the local preferences into account during World War I. The army listened to recommendations of the Columbus chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Rotary Club to name the camp after the local hero Henry Benning.38
After the army announced the first group of post names, the Richmond Times-Dispatch crowed on its front page, “The American War Department, for the first time since the War Between the States, officially paid tribute to the military genius of noted Confederate war chiefs.” Yet several southern posts received U.S. Civil War generals’ names because they hosted northern units. Fort McClellan, named for George McClellan, in Alabama survives to this day.39
The War Department chose the names, but unless we know the context in 1917, we can’t hope to understand why the country would feel fine naming army posts after enemies of the United States. One way to understand the period leading up to the post naming is to look at the most famous army-run installation: Arlington National Cemetery. The Veterans Administration maintains 141 cemeteries, and the National Park Service administers 14 cemeteries. The army funds only two, and Arlington is one of them. Arlington National Cemetery is the largest, most famous, and most prestigious cemetery in the country.40
Arlington National Cemetery’s origin story is a Civil War story. George Washington Parke Custis, George Washington’s step-grandson and adopted son, owned the eleven hundred acres and built a huge Greek Revival mansion on a bluff with a commanding view of the capital. Custis meant for the mansion to memorialize George Washington and showcase the former president’s relics that Custis inherited. When Custis died in 1857, the property with its two hundred enslaved workers went to his daughter Mary Custis Lee and her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, who managed the property.41
On April 20, 1861, Lee cast his lot with the Confederacy. General Winfield Scott, devastated by his protégé’s choice, understood that if controlled by the Confederates, Lee’s property would allow the enemy to shell and destroy the Capitol, in effect forcing the U.S. government to abandon Washington. To prevent that calamity, on May 24, Scott ordered U.S. forces to seize the land and hold it, and the army has owned it ever since.42
In 1864, the government bought the land after the Lee family couldn’t pay the taxes in person. Mary Custis Lee owed only $92 and she tried to cover it, but the government was in no mood to make it easy, forcing her to pay in person, which she could not do. Arlington became federal property when the government bought the land at auction for just under $27,000 to ensure the Lee family could never own the property again.43
Starting soon after the army seized the property, the remains of African Americans, Confederate prisoners, and U.S. soldiers were interred haphazardly across the property. In June 1864, Grant’s Overland Campaign created thousands of casualties. With the other cemeteries in the area, including the one in Alexandria, nearly full, the quartermaster of the army, Montgomery Meigs, requested that the Arlington land be designated a national cemetery.
An apocryphal story holds that Meigs ordered the federal dead buried close to the mansion as justice for the treasonous Lee. I don’t think there’s any proof, but it makes for a good story. With congressional approval, civilian burials ceased, and the army began interring thousands of soldiers, including more than four hundred African American soldiers and over three thousand “contrabands,” or formerly enslaved workers who fled their enslaved labor farms for the promise of freedom. Arlington led the nation in integration.44
Arlington National Cemetery became sacred territory for the army that maintained the grounds. As originally conceived, Arlington was a U.S. cemetery for federal troops only. It maintained its status as a unionist stronghold for decades. The Grand Army of the Republic, the northern veterans’ organization, campaigned, successfully, throughout the nineteenth century to prevent any Confederates from occupying the sacred national cemeteries, especially Arlington.
James Garfield, a major general in the U.S. Volunteers during the war and an Ohio congressman (and future president), gave a speech at Arlington on Decoration Day in 1868 that explained the sacred nature of the cemetery and the feelings toward the Confederates and especially Lee:
Seven years ago, this was the home of one who lifted his sword against the life of his country, and who became the great imperator of the rebellion. The soil beneath our feet was watered by the tears of slaves … But, thanks be to God, this arena of rebellion and slavery is a scene of violence and crime no longer. This will be forever the sacred mountain of our capital. Here is our temple.45
U.S. veterans’ righteous anger lasted throughout their lives, but the war against Spain in 1898 did bring much of the nation together. Fighting against a common external enemy helped unite North and South, at least if their skin color was white. President William McKinley, a U.S. Army Civil War veteran, worked on sectional reconciliation throughout his time in office. After the U.S. Army had defeated the Spaniards in a “splendid little war,” McKinley went on an extended victory lap to sell the peace treaty and persuade the white South to support his vision of territorial expansion, an empire in the Caribbean and the Philippines. During a speech in Atlanta, he highlighted the war’s “magic healing, which has closed ancient wounds and effaced their scars … Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we feel for each other.”46
At the same time, McKinley tried to reassure African Americans that he supported them, portraying the trip through the South as promoting racial harmony. African Americans had reason to worry. In August, a white terrorist militia called the Red Shirts led a coup d’état of the biracial “Fusion” government elected in Wilmington, North Carolina. The Democratic candidate for mayor said that to win the next election, white men would “choke the current of the Cape Fear with [black] carcasses.” The white supremacists killed at least a dozen African Americans, destroyed the Black newspaper, and ran African Americans out of town. McKinley did nothing, ensuring white supremacy in the South for decades to come. His tour of the
South after the Wilmington violence was meant to promote racial harmony and show African Americans he still supported them, at least notionally.47
However, McKinley put far more effort into his appeal to white southerners. During an Atlanta peace jubilee, he offered to have the federal government care for Confederate graves. Until this point, the government maintained only U.S. graves. McKinley had seen the poor state of Confederate cemeteries on his train trip to Atlanta and saw an opportunity to win points with white southerners. And they reacted just as he hoped. Congress soon passed legislation to support Confederate cemeteries. Starting in 1901, Confederate dead were reinterred into their own section of Arlington in concentric circles on the westernmost edge of the cemetery on a road named after Stonewall Jackson.48
Even the Confederate headstones were unique, with a pointed top rather than a rounded one. Another story, probably untrue, held that the tops of the graves were pointed to prevent U.S. soldiers from sitting on the headstones and desecrating them. Each headstone featured a simplified Southern Cross of Honor, originally a medal for all Confederate veterans designed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1899. The Southern Cross looks like the German Iron Cross of four equal arms with a wreath in the center. The front side features the Confederate Battle Flag and the words “United,” “Daughters,” and “Confederacy” on the top three arms. The bottom arm says, “To the U.C.V.” (United Confederate Veteran). The reverse of the medal has the motto “Deo Vindice 1861–1865,” meaning “With God as Our Vindicator,” in the center and the words “Southern,” “Cross,” “of,” and “Honor” on each of the four arms.49