North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, one of the largest military installations in the world, was renamed Fort Liberty in 2023. But this past February, the Army base became Fort Bragg once again. Now, the fort is no longer named for the Confederate general Braxton Bragg but for a decorated private in World War II, Roland X. Bragg.

This series of name changes reflects a congeries of politics, ideology, national and regional pride, and even, you might say, a play on words.

In addition to Fort Bragg, eight southern forts that had been named for Confederate generals were renamed due to a law enacted by Congress in 2021. The goal was to get rid of “names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America,” said Department of Defense press release.

I have not generally been in favor of renaming buildings or knocking down statues on the grounds that the people thus memorialized were on the wrong side of history. We need to understand that history.

But here’s a little information about Bragg. He was “one of the most controversial figures of the Confederate Army,” says the American Battlefield Trust, a nonprofit organization that protects historic battlefields and writes authoritatively about them.

Born in North Carolina in 1817, Bragg attended West Point and did well. During the Mexican-American War he became somewhat famous because his troops brought much-needed artillery to Americans fighting the battle of Battle of Buena Vista. He became a friend of Jefferson Davis, later president of the Confederacy.

But as a commander during the Civil War, he had an increasingly difficult time. A series of only “partial victories,” says the Battlefield Trust, “infuriated his subordinates, who were already frustrated with Bragg’s poor temper and combative personality.” Braxton resigned as army commander after losing the Battle of Chattanooga in 1863, but he remained as an advisor and corps commander during the rest of the war.

So why was a fort named after him? Sam Staley, a political scientist and director of the DeVoe L. Moore Center at Florida State University, has argued that all the forts were named after Southern military figures to support Jim Crow repression and white dominance in the South. Five of the forts were created before or during the First World War — Fort Bragg started in 1918 — a time of painfully divided race relations. The rest were created at the beginning of the Second World War, when the South was still largely segregated.

“Naming prominent military bases after heroes of the Lost Cause was likely a calculated way to reinforce the hegemony of white supremacy,“ wrote Staley.

Staley goes on to evaluate the namesake generals’ military abilities. Two — Robert E. Lee and John Brown Gordon — were of high stature, but the rest, says Staley, were “unexceptional” at best. Braxton Bragg he rates as “exceptionally poor.”

The fort’s new namesake, Roland L. Bragg, was a young private first class paratrooper in World War II who received a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. He saved the life of a comrade at the Battle of the Bulge by capturing a German ambulance and driving four soldiers to safety. If you were in his family, you would rightly consider him a hero. On the national stage, however, one must conclude that the name was chosen somewhat desperately to get the name Fort Bragg back.

David Beito, a libertarian historian, says that the government could have chosen a different Bragg: Edward S. Bragg (1827– 1912). He served four terms in Congress and was a high-level envoy to Mexico, Cuba, and Hong Kong. But he also served in the Union Army, as head of what became known as the “Iron Brigade.” A good Union Army record is probably not what the latest re-namers were seeking.

Politics, honor, and regional pride led to the serial naming of Confederate sites, including Fort Bragg. And especially politics.