Opinion: Henry Benning was 'a virulent white supremacist,' a historian says. Braxton Bragg 'may have been the worst commanding general in the Confederacy.' So, he says, it's 'mystifying' that two military bases are named after 'a racist and a screw-up.'
Why are there U.S. military bases named for Confederate officers who took up arms against the United States?
I've covered stories at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where the XVIII Airborne Corps is headquartered, and Fort Benning, Georgia, known as the Home of the Infantry. Those bases were not founded in the wake of the Civil War, when President Lincoln encouraged national conciliation. Fort Benning and Fort Bragg were opened in 1918, as the U.S. army expanded to fight World War I. Harold Holzer, the civil war historian and author at Hunter College, told us that the army essentially gave what we'd now call"naming rights" to states, to help the federal government acquire the land.Brigadier General Henry L.
Harold Holzer says Braxton Bragg,"may have been the worst commanding general in the Confederacy. He was a bad strategist, an inept tactician whose usual order was to charge straight ahead...He did absolutely nothing to establish a claim to a place in national or even Southern memory... "I just find it mystifying," he says,"that two iconic American army installations should have been named in honor of a racist and a screw-up." Braxton Bragg, we'll add, may have qualified as both.
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