Civil War

Should U.S. Forts Be Named After Confederate Traitors?

I don’t think anything should be named after Confederates, especially when the same people who lionize the Confederacy also refused to allow a Muslim community center to be built near Ground Zero.

Author Jamie Malanowski, one of the NYT’s Disunion Civil War bloggers thinks it’s time for legislation to rename forts carrying the names of Confederate commanders (Fort Bragg, Fort Lee, etc).

Changing the names of these bases would not mean that we can’t still respect the service of those Confederate leaders; nor would it mean that we are imposing our notions of morality on people of a long-distant era. What it would mean is that we’re upholding our own convictions. It’s time to rename these bases. Surely we can find, in the 150 years since the Civil War, 10 soldiers whose exemplary service not only upheld our most important values, but was actually performed in the defense of the United States.

Exactly.