Several U.S. Army bases will officially get their new names as the military seeks to redesignate bases that currently honor Confederate leaders.
“The U.S. Army has set dates to rename six bases named after Confederate heroes, following through on last year’s recommendation that its properties be purged of all ‘names, symbols, displays, monuments and paraphernalia’ honoring those who fought for the South during the U.S. Civil War.
Fort Pickett, an Army National Guard base in rural Virginia, was the first of the nine to be renamed, becoming Fort Barfoot on Friday. Dropping its original namesake Confederate Maj. Gen. George Pickett, the base now venerates Col. Van Barfoot, a Native American World War II Medal of Honor recipient who also fought in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Fort Hood in central Texas will be next, becoming Fort Cavazos on April 9th, the base announced on Friday. Taking its name from Gen. Richard Cavazos, the Army’s first Hispanic four-star general and a hero of the Korean and Vietnam wars, the troubled base will shed its association with Gen. John Bell Hood, who resigned his commission with the Union Army to join the Confederates.
On April 10th, Alabama’s Fort Rucker will become Fort Novosel, in honor of Michael Novosel, an Army chief warrant officer and Medal of Honor recipient who fought in the Vietnam War. It was previously named for Confederate Gen. Edmund Rucker.
Fort Lee, a Virginia base named after Confederate leader Robert E. Lee, is due to be renamed Fort Gregg-Adams on April 27th, after black three-star General Arthur Gregg and Charity Adams, the first black woman to become an officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.
Georgia’s Fort Benning, named after Confederate Brig. Gen. Henry Benning, is set to become Fort Moore on May 11th in honor of Hal Moore, who led the US in its first large-scale battle of the Vietnam War, and his wife Julia Moore, an Army Community Service advocate. Fort Bragg, the sprawling North Carolina base named after Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, will be renamed Fort Liberty on June 2nd.
The bases were the first objects to be targeted for reconstruction by the Naming Commission, a body empaneled by Congress in 2021 to purge anything that could be perceived as venerating the Confederacy from U.S. government property in the wake of the previous year’s Black Lives Matter protests, several of which targeted Confederate monuments for destruction.
Three more bases - Fort Gordon, Fort AP Hill, and Fort Polk - have no dates set for their renaming, according to Military Times”. -RT
Without a doubt, the supposed justification for the renaming of the U.S. Army bases is that the South presumably fought the Civil War to perpetuate slavery, and the North entered and fought to end it.
While conventional historians denounce Confederate heroes as traitors, the Southern states were rightfully exercising their legal and Constitutional sovereignty to leave the Union, demonstrated by the fact that there weren’t any trials for treason.
Yet most Americans remain unconvinced that sovereignty rather than slavery was the main purpose for the War of Southern Succession.
Abraham Lincoln himself stated on the House floor in regard to the conflict between Texas and Mexico, “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right—a right which, we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit”.
Students are often taught that the firing on Fort Sumter marked the official beginning of the Civil War. However, it does not.
“On April 8th, four days before the famous shots fired at Fort Sumter, Lincoln sent a fleet of warships led by USRC/USS Harriet Lane to reinforce Fort Sumter which was in Charleston harbor to collect the new tax. USS Harriet Lane was a revenue cutter that became a warship. Revenue cutters previously called Revenue-Marines were armed ships for the Treasury Department meant to enforce tax collection. They were used as military units in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, and Spanish American war.
Between 1790 and 1798, cutters were the only armed ships in service as the U.S. did not maintain a standing Navy. USS Harriet Lane was 177.5 feet long, 30.5 feet wide one four-inch rifled Parrott gun to the forecastle, one nine-inch Dahlgren gun before the first mast, two eight-inch Dahlgren Columbiads and two twenty-four-pound brass howitzers. Her crew of ninety-five was also issued small arms.
It arrived on April 11th, a full day before the famous ‘shots fired’ when Capt. George S. James fired a single 10-inch mortar round above Ft. Sumter. The Yankee tax collection ship that had invaded Charleston Harbor fired a 32-pound shot across the bow of a civilian steamship the Nashville. The union had sent its tax collection ships as well as other warships to South Carolina to collect the tax and they fired first.
It was the following day that the South fired on the import-export tax collection fort. The Yankee ship would continue to fight in many naval battles until it wrecked off of Hatteras, North Carolina, trying to enter the Pamlico Sound. It was repaired and re-entered the war. However at the battle of Galveston, after sinking a tug boat, the ship was boarded and taken over. Union Commander Edward Lea was wounded as the re-occupied confederate forts opened fire and ground troops boarded the anchored ships. Lea’s father Confederate Major Albert M. Lea, boarded the Harriet to find his son was nearly dead. He died in his father’s arms.
A 10-year-old boy, the young son of Captain Wainwright continued to fire two revolvers until both were out of ammo, from the boat cabin after his father had been killed.
The boy did survive. The Confederates captured the ship that started the war as well as a United States signal service code book that had been left in her cabin. They would use the ship as a blockaded runner and send cotton to Cuba. It was then entered into the British naval registry and named Lavinia, and not recovered by the U.S. until after the war.
The war really was brother against brother and father against son. Slavery was already being phased out and that was going to happen anyway. Wage slavery is cheaper, which is why it had already been phased out of many other nations, free markets increase autonomy. But Lincoln needed his revenue. He personally invested in the railroad business. He could not allow the division of the Union as they would lose 80% of their revenue.
Apparently reversing the protective tariff instead of going to war was never an option. But when they started the war, they thought it was going to be a quick war over and done in months. It wasn’t, but the deeper they got into it the more he fell into the sunk-in-fallacy. There was no point in murdering hundreds of thousands of people.
Sharecropping replaced slavery after the 13th amendment and millions of whites and blacks tilled the land in slave conditions while expendable Chinamen were building the railroad from West to East and American Indians were murdered or driven away from all the land in between. After that, script pay and then offshore wage slavery was instituted which eventually morphed into offshore slavery and sweatshops. Wall Street and giant Northern industry still enjoy government subsidies and exploitation of labor from illegal immigrants and offshore penny pay factories”. -Ryan Dawson, How the Civil War Really Started
The USS Harriet Lane firing its guns into Charleston Harbor has managed to escape the history books as Northern aggression sparking the Civil War runs contrary to the accepted historical narrative.
In the same vein, people conveniently ignore that Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri were all slave states and members of the Federal Union. West Virginia remained a slave state after breaking with Virginia to stay in the Union, and slavery continued in the District of Columbia itself until 1862.
Abraham Lincoln stated in his first inaugural on March 4th, 1861, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so”.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that a central government would resist any dissolution of its power.
Even still, the notion that the Civil War has conclusively settled the question of secession and that the removal of everything perceived as venerating the Confederacy will ensure the stability and preservation of the American imperial state completely discounts the strong likelihood that this profound suppression of Southern heritage and Southron pride, along with the ruination of what was a strictly limited and small central government subject to state and individual sovereignty, has had consequences that have destroyed the Union far more thoroughly than the Confederacy ever had.