(This article first appeared on the site of The Washington Monthly on May 26, 2013.)

As it happens, I have an article today in the Times’ review section wondering why we continue to have US Army bases named after Confederate generals. There are at least ten: Forts Lee, Pickett and Hill in Virginia; Fort Bragg in North Carolina; Forts Gordon and Benning in Georgia; Fort Polk and Camp Beauregard in Louisiana; Fort Hood in Texas and Fort Rucker in Alabama. Some of these men were good generals, but most were mediocre at best. Most were ardent secessionists, some were slaveholders (Polk had several hundred), one was an accused war criminal, one became a leader of the KKK. But whoever may want to honor them, whatever they may want to honor them for, it does seem singularly preposterous to name US Army bases after men who led troops in battle against US Army soldiers.

As the writers among you know, the material one gathers in researching a piece often overwhelms the amount of space one gets to write, and that was the case here. For example, I learned that nine states—Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—officially observe a separate Confederate Memorial Day. They fall on several different days, often consistent with when the flowers bloom, although in Texas it is commemorated in January, where the day is called Confederate Heroes Day. In Mississippi and Alabama, the birthdays of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert E. Lee are celebrated together. Several states mark Jefferson Davis’s birthday in June, including Kentucky. Davis was born in Kentucky, but Kentucky never seceded from the union. Lincoln was born in Kentucky, too, but there is no separate holiday to mark that occasion.

What do the people in those states think they’re honoring? And in the case of the war dead, why do they need a separate day to do so? What does the separateness indicate?

If President Obama maintains tradition—and so far during his presidency, he has—tomorrow he will send a wreath to the portion of Arlington cemetery allocated for confederate soldiers. This confederate section was originally the result of some magnanimity on the part of President McKinley, a former US Army sergeant who fought at Antietam, who proposed that he federal government take over the care of confederate gravesites in the north. One result of this was the disinterment of bodies from several sites around Washington, including Arlington, and reinterment in this section at Arlington. Along the way, the Daughters of the Confederacy got involved and arranged for Moses Ezekiel, the most respected American sculptor of his day, to built a 32 foot statue on the site.

It’s an amazing statue, featuring one larger-than-life and 32 life-size figures, showing people in postures of pride, grief, sadness and courage. Among them is Minerva, the Roman goddess of war. She holds a spear in her right hand, and in her left arm is an obviously wounded woman. In the wounded woman’s left hand is a shield prominently labeled “U.S. Constitution,” a fairly direct statement of the view that the forces who wounded the woman were warring against the Constitution. The statue also bears a Latin inscription, which translated reads “The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause pleased Cato.” This is a reference to the Roman civil war, in which the dictator Julius Caesar defeated the Pompey, and to Cato, respected as the most honest Roman of them all. In short, it says the wrong side won. But when that statue was finished, President Wilson, a native of Virginia, came to the dedication and placed a wreath at its foot, a Memorial Day custom that every president has followed.

I don’t know why so many people in so many southern states feel obliged to keep one foot in the past, to compartmentalize defenses and excuses for beliefs and behavior that should have been buried and forgotten long ago. But it is more amazing that those of us who not not share in those beliefs so mindlessly acquiesce in their preservation. We should not have US Army bases named after confederate generals. The US president should not send a wreath to sit under a statue that argues in a sneaky Latin fuck you that the United States was wrong to preserve the union, and to force an end to the slaveholders’ rebellion.

This article was original published in The New York Times on May 26, 2013.

IN the complex and not entirely complete process of reconciliation after the Civil War, honoring the dead with markers, tributes and ceremonies has played a crucial role. Some of these gestures, like Memorial Day, have been very successful. The practice of decorating the graves arose in many towns, north and south, some even before the war had ended. This humble idea quickly spread throughout the country, and the recognition of common loss helped reconcile North and South.

But other gestures had a more a political edge. Equivalence of experience was stretched to impute an equivalence of legitimacy. The idea that “now, we are all Americans” served to whitewash the actions of the rebels. The most egregious example of this was the naming of United States Army bases after Confederate generals.

Today there are at least 10 of them. Yes — the United States Army maintains bases named after generals who led soldiers who fought and killed United States Army soldiers; indeed, who may have killed such soldiers themselves.

Only a couple of the officers are famous. Fort Lee, in Virginia, is of course named for Robert E. Lee, a man widely respected for his integrity and his military skills. Yet, as the documentarian Ken Burns has noted, he was responsible for the deaths of more Army soldiers than Hitler and Tojo. John Bell Hood, for whom Fort Hood, Tex., is named, led a hard-fighting brigade known for ferocious straight-on assaults. During these attacks, Hood lost the use of an arm at Gettysburg and a leg at Chickamauga, but he delivered victories, at least for a while. Later, when the gallant but tactically inflexible Hood launched such assaults at Nashville and Franklin, Tenn., his armies were smashed.

Fort Benning in Georgia is named for Henry Benning, a State Supreme Court associate justice who became one of Lee’s more effective subordinates. Before the war, this ardent secessionist inflamed fears of abolition, which he predicted would inevitably lead to black governors, juries, legislatures and more. “Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that?” Benning wrote. “We will be overpowered and our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth, and as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination.”

Another installation in Georgia, Fort Gordon, is named for John B. Gordon, one of Lee’s most dependable commanders in the latter part of the war. Before Fort Sumter, Gordon, a lawyer, defended slavery as “the hand-maid of civil liberty.” After the war, he became a United States senator, fought Reconstruction, and is generally thought to have headed the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia. He “may not have condoned the violence employed by Klan members,” says his biographer, Ralph Lowell Eckert, “but he did not question or oppose it when he felt it was justified.”

Not all the honorees were even good generals; many were mediocrities or worse. Braxton Bragg, for whom Fort Bragg in North Carolina is named, was irascible, ineffective, argumentative with subordinates and superiors alike, and probably would have been replaced before inflicting half the damage that he caused had he and President Jefferson Davis not been close friends. Fort Polk in Louisiana is named after Rev. Leonidas Polk, who abandoned his military career after West Point for the clergy. He became an Episcopal bishop, owned a large plantation and several hundred slaves, and joined the Confederate Army when the war began. His frequently disastrous service ended when he was split open by a cannonball. Fort Pickett in Virginia is named after the flamboyant George Pickett, whose division was famously decimated at Gettysburg. Pickett was accused of war crimes for ordering the execution of 22 Union prisoners; his defense was that they had all deserted from the Confederate Army, and he was not tried.

Other Confederate namesakes include Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia, Fort Rucker in Alabama and Camp Beauregard in Louisiana. All these installations date from the buildups during the world wars, and naming them in honor of a local military figure was a simple choice. But that was a time when the Army was segregated and our views about race more ignorant. Now African-Americans make up about a fifth of the military. The idea that today we ask any of these soldiers to serve at a place named for a defender of a racist slavocracy is deplorable; the thought that today we ask any American soldier to serve at a base named for someone who killed United States Army troops is beyond absurd. Would we have a Fort Rommel? A Camp Cornwallis?

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.

With a lovely party at the handsome Greenwich Village apartment of Times editor rish Hall, editors George Kalogerakis and Clay Risen of the Opinionator section, a number of their colleagues, and a bunch of us who contributed to the paper’s Disunion series, celebrated the publication of Disunion, a collection of articles from the series, published by Black Dog and Leventhal. Two of my pieces appear, and George mentioned me in the acknowledgements. In the words of Van Morrison, that’s all I want, that’s all I need, I’m satisfied.

Written by Juli Weiner, encouraged by Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair plugged my book this week with an article called “The Book of Levon Celebrates the Man in the Band.” Very nice indeed. Thanks to one and all. Here’s how it reads:

“Nearly a year after the death of Levon Helm, the Band’s twangy and tender-hearted polymath, Spy alumnus Jamie Malanowski has published an e-single about, among other things, Helm’s combative relationship with Band guitarist Robbie Robertson, his dislike of Martin Scorsese’s (otherwise generally beloved) Band documentary The Last Waltz, and the singer and drummer’s magnetic, generous, and unpretentious character.

“The Book of Levon also includes a rather wrenching portrait of Helm’s fearsome, fearless counter-attack against a decade-long sentence of throat cancer. The disease took his singing voice, but Helm took it right back. Malanowski writes:

“[I]ittle by little, Levon Helm’s singing voice returned. Gone was his strong tenor, replaced by something raspy and ornery, different but still authentic, still compelling. At first he sang only a little, harmonizing mostly; “He was thrilled that his voice was coming back,” says [daughter] Amy Helm, “but at the same time, he had doubts. Once you’ve done your time on the oncology floor for head and neck, when you’ve done your radiation, and you’ve walked through those hallways and met other people who’ve gone through the same treatment as you, you don’t take anything for granted. He was happy it was back, but he knew it could be gone again.

“But it is not gone again: in recordings and in books and even in the film he so despised, Helm’s voice will long outlive its malignant adversary.”

For those of you who may have lain awake at night wondering “Geez, were there six men who could have prevented the Civil war from becoming a murderous army vs. army conflagration, please avail yourself of the opportunity to pick up the April issue of The Civil War Times, and read my article “Six Men Who Could Have Stopped the Civil War.” Yes, I’m talking about John Floyd, John McGowan and Isiah Greene, among others. This grew out of a talk I gave two years ago at Civil War Forum of Metropolitan New York, and I’m pretty pleased with the results. Thanks to Dana Shoaf for a nice edit.

This year that is fast disappearing will not be remembered in these quarters with very much warmth. It was a fairly hideous, sickening year, the year that I felt I got old. But like all good things, the bad ones come to an end as well, and thanks to some much appreciated end of the year action by Richard Plepler, Steve Koepp, David McCormick and others, we begin 2013 on an upswing, and with hopes for better times to come. In the meanwhile, here are some jewels, personally chosen and wholly idiosyncratic, recovered from 2012:
1.) Love for Levon. Without a doubt, everything about the tribute concert to Levon Helm–reporting the story, meeting the people involved, attending the event, the reception to the article, what may happen yet–turned this into the best thing that I was involved with this year.
2.) Searching for Sugarman. This modest documentary about a real-life Cinderella made my heart leap with joy. A very inspirational story.
3.) Call Me Maybe. Carly Rae Jepson‘s unassuming, sweet, girlish, flirty hit was attractive enough, but the way it went viral and enveloped everyone from the US Olympic Swim Team to Colin Powell was delightful. The song never failed to bring a smile to my lips, especially in Jepson’s collaboration with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots.
4.) The dauntless, rain-drenched performance of the young people of Royal College of Music Chamber Choir during the flotilla of the Queen’s Jubilee was simply stirring, especially when they sang “Land of Hope and Glory.”
5.) The presidential campaign as a whole this year was a fairly tedious affair, but the rousing Democratic convention, driven by one splendid speech after another culminating in Bill Clinton‘s masterful dissection/deconstruction/destruction of the GOP position was fairly brilliant, just as the Republicans’ ceaseless rhetorical self-destruction–“Oops”, “Nine, nine, nine”, “I like to fire people”, “legitimate rape”, “the 47 percent”–was the best long-running comedy series on TV.
6.) The Giants Win the Super Bowl. Just as in 2009, the inconsistent Giants managed to win four–or in this case, six–games that they could win but were not likely to, and managed, one play at a time, to walk off with the hardware.
7.) The Hour. A splendid, sophisticated, intelligent BBC series about a ground-breaking TV news magazine being produced in the early fifties. I love the way they can combine news judgment, inside baseball, and messy personal situations. Dominic West, Ben Whislaw and Romola Garai are just terrific. We also liked the posh Downton Abbey and the relentlessly vulgar The In-Betweeners. (I must say, I haven’t seen Homeland yet.
8.) Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel. Having loved Wolf Hall, I feared its sequel would suffer by comparison. I shouldn’t have worried. Other enjoyable books this year: Watergate, by Thomas Mallon; Passage of Power, by Robert Caro; The Long Road to Antietam, by Richard Slotkin.
9.) I went to Lincoln fearing a Spielbergian historical romance, full of longing gazes and quivering lips and swirling strings. But while there was some of that, it wasn’t enough to sicken the whole deal. I give total credit to screenwriter Tony Kushner for his decision to hang this pageant on a moment that has been largely overlooked by historians, the passage by the House of Representatives of a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery. Historians undercut the importance of that moment because there were other ways to accomplish Lincoln’s end, but that’s not the point: whether or not the vote had significant is irrelevant, it is a perfectly splendid motor for an historical drama.
10. Superstorm Sandy. “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result,” Winston Churchill once said. I have no reason to dispute him, but I can tell you this: it’s a humbling thing to realize that the killer hurricane has come and gone and that you’ve been missed.

On this, the 150th anniversary of the battle of Antietam, which, thank God, has not yet been replaced as the bloodiest day in American history, please allow me to recommend a new history of the battle, Richard Slotkin‘s The Long Road to Antietam. As the title suggests, the book is about much more than the battle, but about how the war changed in 1862, after both sides woke up to the fact that this would not be a short rumble but a prolonged and challenging struggle. In the south, this meant evolving a victory strategy of invasion; in the north, more dramatically, it involved a prolonged struggle between Lincoln and his generals, principally George McClellan, as well as the lengthy decision to win the war by emancipating the slaves. Slotkin does a wonderful job of showing how emancipation grew not from a moral conviction, but from a growing understanding of Lincoln’s presidential power as commander-in-chief. Where Slotkin really shines, however, is in his portrayal of McClellan, a man as opposed to abolition as he is to secession, and who conducted a mild war designed to promote a stalemate that would see his elevation as a Julius Caesar-type dictator who would save the nation. It’s hard enough, in writing history, to capture what really happened, but it’s sheer brilliant to be able to bring out what people were really thinking while it happened. We forget what a young country America was in 1862; we forget that the Constitution was untested and that everything was up for grabs. Many previous civil wars had ended up with the country entrusted to a military dictator–Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon. That was always the shadow play behind his relationship with Lincoln, and Slotkin does an amazing job of showing all these threads came together and ultimately reached their bloody resolution in western Maryland 150 years ago today.

Many thanks to Miguel Hernandez (above, holding the top hat) and my new friends at the Ossining Historical Society for inviting me to participate in their Civil War Days event yesterday at the Campwoods Meeting Ground. I had a terrific afternoon talking about Civil War history, discussing my book, and learning about Ossining history. I met some terrifically smart and friendly people. Until yesterday, I did not know that Ossining was called Sing Sing until the 20th century, when merchants sought to distinguish their businesses from prison factory-made goods; or that the Sing Sing Tigers was a unit in the Union Army; or that one of the prized possessions of the Historical Society is the bell (above) that was on that train that President-elect Lincoln took out of Illinois, and eventually through Peekskill and Sing Sing and New York City and onto Harrisburg, where he transferred to a train that accomplish the final, clandestine leg of his trip to Washington. I had a blast.

In an amazing story in The Huffington Post the other day, Laura Hibbard reported that fourth graders at the James A. Jackson Elementary School in Jonesboro GA were assigned a math problem referencing slavery. “A plantation owner had 100 slaves,” the question read, according to the station. “If three-fifths of them are counted for representation, how many slaves will be counted?” Reports Hibbard, “A school spokesperson said the question was meant to educate students on both social studies and math, and that the teacher would not be punished.”

What’s astonishing is that in January, students at Beaver Ridge Elementary School in Norcross GA were assigned word problems referencing slavery.

“Each tree had 56 oranges,” one question read. “If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?”

A second question read “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?”

Georgia’s Schools: Preparing today’s youth for the challenges of tomorrow.

Many thanks to The Group, who invited me to come speak about And the War Came at their monthly meeting last Friday at the Mt. Pleasant library in Pleasantville. The very attentive audience asked a lot of good questions, and I am very grateful for the chance to come and talk about the origins of the Civil War. As usual, the anecdote about Lt. Greene stabbing John Brown with too small a sword got the biggest laugh, (If you don’t know this anecdote, you need to invite me to come speak about the origins of the Civil War before your group!) Many thanks to Peter Eschweiler, the Group’s program chairman, for inviting me.