The Army’s Confederate cowardice
August 14, 2015, 04:00 pm
By Matthew Milikowsky
... There are ten United States Army installations named after Confederate officers. These include some of the largest and most important installations in the Army: Fort Hood, Fort Bragg, and Fort Benning, and the home of the Signal Corps, Fort Gordon.
This problem is unique to the Army. There are no Marine Corps, Navy, or Air Force bases named after Confederates. The Navy decades ago decommissioned its four ships that honored the Confederacy and did not re-use the names.
And the Army’s desire to honor these men is explicit. Army Regulation 1-33 states that the purpose of naming an installation is “to provide lasting honor and pay tribute to deceased Army military…personnel with records of outstanding and honorable service.”
So who are the men that the Army considers worthy of “lasting honor” because of their “outstanding and honorable service?” Camp Beauregard is named for P. G. T. Beauregard, an ur-rebel who led the 1861 attack on Fort Sumter that ignited the Civil War. Fort Polk is named after Leonidas Polk, a military mediocrity with the distinction of seeing no contradiction between being an Episcopal bishop and owning over 400 slaves. Fort Benning is named for Henry Benning, a politically connected officer who argued for secession as “the only thing that could prevent the abolition of slavery.” Fort Gordon is named for John Brown Gordon, a Confederate General who after the war, per his leading biographer, “even sanctioned violence when necessary to preserve white-dominated society.” Gordon was also almost certainly the Grand Dragon, the leader, of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan ...
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/251066-the-armys-confederate-cowardice