President Donald Trump traveled to a military base in North Carolina this week to announce that he’s changing the names of seven military bases that had been changed not long ago by then-President Joe Biden.
Besides Fort Bragg, “we are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill and Fort Robert E. Lee,” Trump said.
Not quite.
Fort Lee, just south of Petersburg, was, indeed, originally named after the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, but never bore his full name. It was always simply Fort Lee.
Here’s how my brethren in the national news media reported this:
“Trump Says Army Bases Will Revert to Confederate Names” — The New York Times
“US military bases to restore names changed after racial justice protests, Trump says” — Reuters
“Trump reverses Army base names in latest DEI purge” — Politico
This isn’t quite so, either, for other reasons. At the risk of being a nitpicker, but in the interest of historical accuracy, allow me to point out a key difference that some might miss. Yes, Fort A.P. Hill is Fort A.P. Hill again, Fort Lee is Fort Lee again, Fort Pickett goes back to being Fort Pickett, and so on.
However, they’re all being renamed after a different Hill, a different Lee and a different Pickett.
The National Defense Authorization Act, which Trump vetoed in 2020 and which Congress overrode, includes a provision that bans using the names of Confederate figures for military bases. To get around that, Trump (more realistically, some appointee in the Defense Department) simply found other military figures with the same last names — so while it appears he “restored” the historic names of these bases, in reality he simply renamed them after other, non-Confederate figures who had the same surnames.
Some may find this a clever way to work around the name changes they objected to. Others may find this a silly sleight of hand that tricks people into thinking he restored historic Southern names when he really didn’t. Feel free to debate all that on your own time.
Instead, let’s look at who some of these new honorees are.
We begin with this: To find names that fit Fort A.P. Hill, the Pentagon had to find three people: one whose last name started with an “A,” another whose last name started with a “P,” and then a soldier named Hill. All are undoubtedly worthy of being honored; they’re all Medal of Honor winners, our highest military decoration. They also all served in the Union Army during the Civil War — so in the course of less than two years, we’ve gone from a base named after a Confederate general to a base named after three Union heroes.
I haven’t seen this headline anywhere, but it would be equally accurate: “New York-born president renames Southern military base, once named for Confederate general, after Union soldiers.” Who knew Trump was so woke?
Let’s look at the three renamed bases that are in Virginia.
Fort A.P. Hill (Caroline County)
Ambrose Powell Hill was a Confederate general from Culpeper County who commanded the Third Corps under Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg and was later killed in action in Petersburg just seven days before Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Encyclopedia Virginia says that Hill was “Lee’s most trusted lieutenant.” Here’s a fun fact about Hill they didn’t teach us in school but would have made history class more interesting: While a cadet at West Point, Hill contracted gonorrhea and missed so many classes he had to repeat a year.
Under Biden, the installation was renamed Fort Walker after Mary Walker, who was one of the few women to earn a medical degree in the 19th century. When the Civil War broke out, the New York doctor became the Union Army’s first female surgeon — serving at the First Battle of Bull Run (we Southerners called it Manassas), Fredericksburg and Chickamauga. She had a habit of crossing the lines to treat civilians. In 1864 in Tennessee, she wound up helping a Confederate surgeon perform an amputation — and then was arrested as a spy. She was sent to a prison camp in Richmond before being exchanged for a captured Confederate doctor. She became the first — so far only — woman to be awarded the Medal of Honor. She sounds like someone who ought to be honored somewhere, but it won’t be here anymore.
Instead, Fort A.P. Hill now honors:
Bruce Anderson: He was born in Mexico but wound up as a farmer in New York before the Civil War. He was one of the few Black soldiers to serve in a white unit. In January 1865, outside Wilmington, North Carolina, officers called for volunteers to advance ahead of the unit and remove a barrier that Confederates had erected. Anderson was one of 13 men who volunteered. They tore down the obstacle under fire, allowing the Union army to advance. All 13 were recommended for the Medal of Honor. The paperwork was misplaced, and it took 49 years before Anderson finally got his medal.
Robert Alexander Pinn: His father was born a slave in Fauquier County who ran away when he was 18 and became a blacksmith in Ohio. He married a white woman, which suggests that society in that era was more complex than we realize. The Pinn being honored here originally signed up with an Ohio unit during the Civil War as a civilian worker because the Army wasn’t supposed to enlist Black soldiers (although, as we saw above, that sometimes happened). Eventually, he was allowed to enlist in an all-Black unit. He arrived in Norfolk and saw action “breaking up a band of guerrillas that infested the swamps of South Virginia and eastern North Carolina.” By early 1864, he was involved in the siege of Petersburg. According to his Medal of Honor citation, Pinn “took command of his company after all the officers had been killed or wounded and gallantly led it into battle.” After the war, he returned home to Ohio, read for the law and became the first Black attorney in his county.
Edward Hill: He was born in New York but served as captain of a Michigan company during the Civil War. At the 1864 battle of Cold Harbor (near modern-day Mechanicsville north of Richmond), Hill “led [a] brigade skirmish line in a desperate charge on the enemy’s masked batteries to the muzzles of the guns, where he was severely wounded.” For that, he was awarded the Medal of Honor, although the honor didn’t arrive for decades. At the time, he recovered and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. After the war, he apparently wound up living in Virginia, because he’s buried in Fredericksburg.
Fort Lee (Prince George County)
Not Fort Robert E. Lee, just plain Fort Lee, although it was originally named for the Confederate general. In 2023, the installation was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams.
Arthur Gregg, who was born in South Carolina but grew up in Newport News, was the Army’s first Black lieutenant general. He joined the Army in 1946 and was sent to Germany. He asked to join a trucking company and did so well that he soon found himself a sergeant; logistics became his specialty. By 1977, President Jimmy Carter made him a three-star general and appointed him as director of logistics for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He retired in 1981; he died in Richmond last summer at the age of 96. Now he will be honored no more.
If you saw the Tyler Perry movie “The Six Triple Eight” (and you should), you already know about Charity Adams, later Charity Adams Earley. She enlisted in a segregated Army during World War II and became the first Black woman to become an officer in the U.S. Army’s Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Her battalion wound up being the only unit of Black WACs to serve overseas. They were sent to England for what was considered a tedious and perhaps impossible assignment: sorting out a backlog of mail to soldiers that was depressing morale. Adams and her unit soon had the mail moving. By war’s end, she was a lieutenant colonel and the highest-ranking Black woman in the military. She won’t be honored anymore, either, unless you count the film — and a statue to her that was erected at Fort Lee in 2018.
The new Lee is Fitz Lee, a “Buffalo Soldier” (as Black soldiers were called then) from Dinwiddie County who served in the Spanish-American War. Two American steamships, accompanied by a gunboat, were dispatched to deliver troops and supplies to the Cuban coast. A party of Americans and Cuban allies (along with one Danish doctor) rowed ashore to inspect the proposed landing site. The Spanish discovered them and opened fire. The landing party retreated to the beach, only to find the two steamships had been sunk — meaning they had no way to escape. They fled into a swamp. The Danish doctor stripped naked and swam out to the surviving gunboat, the U.S.S. Peoria, to notify the sailors about what was going on.
The lieutenant on board the Peoria sent four rescue parties. All four were repulsed by Spanish fire. The fifth — four men from the all-Black 10th Cavalry — made it through and rescued the survivors. All four were awarded the Medal of Honor, but only Lee gets his name on the fort because it happens to match that of Robert E. Lee. His comrades in arms — Dennis Bell, William Thompkins, George Wanton — are not honored beyond the medal they were awarded during their lifetime.
Fort Pickett (Nottoway County)
Yes, this was the Pickett whose name is immortalized in the doomed Pickett’s Charge during the Battle of Gettysburg — Confederate Gen. George Pickett. In his defense, the charge wasn’t his idea; it was Lee’s. Pickett finished last in his class at West Point, but many historians believe even he thought running up a hill headlong into Union guns wasn’t the best strategy. But no documentation detailing his alleged objections has been found, so we really don’t know. Southerners turned the Richmond-born Pickett into a folk hero despite the military disaster that bears his name.
In 2023, the Pickett name for the fort was retired in favor of Van Thomas Barfoot, who won a Medal of Honor for service in Italy during World War II. When Germans attacked an American position, Barfoot used a bazooka to blast the lead German tank, then machine-gunned the crew. That stopped the Germans, but Barfoot wasn’t done. He advanced into German-held territory and blew up an artillery piece before returning to rescue wounded Americans. His name is now out.
Instead, Fort Pickett is now named after Vernon Pickett. During World War II, this Louisiana soldier was in charge of laying some communication wires in France. Two German machine gunners forced the Americans to stop. Pickett waited out the night, then at daybreak “crawled to each of the enemy machine guns and destroyed them with hand grenades,” according to the official military report. On his way back to American lines, an artillery shell exploded nearby and knocked him out. The Germans scooped him up as a prisoner. “While en route to a prisoner of war camp, he escaped by cutting his way out of a box car, and with the aid of French civilians made his way back to enemy lines,” the military said. For this, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. About a month and a half later, he was killed in action.
If you’re keeping track of military honors, yes, Fort Pickett was once named after someone who won our highest military award (the Medal of Honor), but now is named after someone with a lesser (although still important) decoration.
This soldier, though, did have the right last name to get a military base named after him.
Early voting trends, plus a story about how a Salem official once convinced Sly Stone he wasn’t really in Virginia
In this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter, I’ll look at the latest early voting trends before Tuesday’s primary. We’ll also have the latest endorsements, a look at the best campaign ad of the primary season and an update on how President Trump is ditching a prominent Virginia Republican. If that’s not enough, we have a story about Sly Stone, who died this week.
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