From the Washington Post.
The bases, all in former Confederate states, were named with input from locals in the Jim Crow era. The Army courted their buy-in because it needed large swaths of land to build sprawling bases in the early 20th century up through World War II.
Three of the biggest bases in the United States are named after Confederate leaders, including some who were famously inept.
Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the headquarters of the Special Forces, bears the name of Gen. Braxton Bragg, a commander often
assailed as one of the most bumbling commanders in the war. Bragg was relieved of command after losing the battle for Chattanooga in 1863, then served as a military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
Fort Benning in Georgia, the home of Army infantry and airborne training, is named after Brig. Gen. Henry Benning, who led troops at Antietam and Gettysburg. In remarks in 1861 laying out slavery as the reason for secession, Benning warned that abolition would lead to “black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that?”
Fort Hood in Texas is named after John Bell Hood, who resigned his commission in the U.S. Army to fight against it. His “reckless” command hastened the fall of Atlanta, one historian
wrote, and his losses at the Battle of Franklin were so disastrous that they have been called the “Pickett’s Charge of the West,” in reference to a bloody and failed assault named for Maj. Gen. George Pickett, one of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s top commanders at Gettysburg.
