What’s in a name? For the U.S. military, a lot. In 2020, Congress created the Naming Commission. Its purpose: to rename nine of the most prominent Army bases and monuments that honored men who took up arms with the ill-fated Confederate States of America — places such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Lee in Virginia. Connor Williams, a historian teaching at Middlebury College, was drafted to be lead historian on the project by his mentor and commission vice chair, Ty Seidule, himself an Army veteran and West Point professor emeritus.
The commission delivered its recommendations to Congress in 2022, and the following year the Department of Defense was directed to put the name changes into effect. But in 2025, President Donald Trump bypassed the law and announced that the bases would revert back to their original names. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described it last June, the move was “important for morale.”
A new book, coauthored by Williams and Seidule, chronicles the Naming Commission’s efforts and the Americans whom it had chosen to honor. A Promise Delivered: Ten American Heroes and the Battle to Rename Our Nation’s Military Bases was published on Veterans Day in November. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns called it “a timely and inspiring history … How fortunate that Seidule and Williams have helped restore full value to the real actions that define heroism, sacrifice, virtue, and honor.”
Williams, 40, lives across Lake Champlain in Westport, N.Y. He frequents the Adirondack Mountains and is the local historian for Great Camp Sagamore, a Gilded Age relic once owned by the Vanderbilt family. He teaches in both the history and Black Studies departments at Middlebury and is completing a new book on the Confederacy.
In an interview with Seven Days, Williams discussed how the Naming Commission gathered information and completed its task, even as forces were building to undo its work.
Was it a difficult decision to join the Naming Commission?
As a historian, it’s very clear to me that this work was overdue and incredibly important to having our national commemorations match our national history. There was a moment of rational questioning: Do I want to make myself part of this and potentially a target for online criticism? The nature of the work was far more important, I thought, than my own personal inbox.
How many names in total were vetted by the commission?
At one point, we had 33,000 recommendations. Many were duplicates, so when we counted the unique names we had about 3,500 different candidates from our military history. We narrowed that down to 500, then to about 90, and then to 10 finalists.
What groups contributed recommendations?
We had senators, congressmen, people who ran the deli down the block — all these different folks giving advice to us. Also reenactors from the African American 54th Massachusetts regiment, the one memorialized in the film Glory. We thought it was our job to listen to all of them.
How did the practice of naming these installations evolve?
At different points in our nation’s history, the Army has named things different ways. Sometimes it’s been the regional commander who just says, “We’re putting up a fort in 1842 in the Iowa territory. Let’s call it ‘The Fort.’” Around the time of the First World War, the Army had established a set of guidelines that the installations should be named for Civil War generals or prominent figures in the war. These figures, the guidelines said, were to be “not unpopular in the vicinity of the camp.” Also, the names should be short. Fort Hood in Texas was a good choice because “Hood” could be stenciled easily on the crates of supplies.
Why did the naming result in so much honor for the Confederacy?
During the Civil War era itself, the nation is very much anti-Confederate and aghast that such a minority is waging this horrific war against the vast majority. Postwar, one way to forget is by making it an all-white reunion: White Northerners and white Southerners get together at places like Gettysburg, 50 years after the battle, and they shake hands and focus on mutual valor. Naming rights are extended as an olive branch to the losers. Many Union veterans bitterly called this “Reconciliast gush.”
You had nine bases to name, so why did you choose 10 individuals?
We realized this was a chance to not just show off military heroism but also some of the practices that have always made the military powerful, such as teamwork. So we named Fort Lee for two path-breaking Black Army officers, Arthur J. Gregg and Charity Adams. We just saw, in all these cases, it was really important to speak to the mosaic of military service — not be defined by a lone soldier with a rifle doing heroic things, nor by a general giving orders.
What requirements were there to determine whether somebody was eligible to be a potential name?
There was no rigid rule where you had to tick every box, but candidates should tick many of them. Generally speaking, that meant being from the area where the post was, living now in that area, training there for some period or if the post somehow had played a big role in their lives.
You cited three outstanding candidates, the first being William Henry Johnson.
He was the first hero of the American effort in the Great War, as World War I was called. But he was an African American man who, by design of the federal government, was put into a segregated unit, the Harlem Hellfighters. By his own desire to serve and prove his patriotism, he did incredibly brave things at the front.
Another was Mary Edwards Walker.
The only female surgeon hired by the U.S. Army in the Civil War and the first and only woman to receive the Medal of Honor. Born in Oswego in central New York in the early 19th century, she was also a tireless advocate for women’s rights.
And, finally, Charity Adams Earley.
With no military training, but encouraged by the dean of her master’s degree program, she entered the first-ever female class at Officer Candidate School and was the first African American officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. During World War II, she was the commanding officer of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion.
Has President Trump acted on his threat to revert to Confederate names?
With the stroke of two orders from Defense Secretary Hegseth and a speech by Trump in June, all nine installations have adopted their former Confederate names. They did this with the exact mechanism that the Naming Commission had evaluated and found faulty: Find other soldiers who were not Confederates and name the posts after them. Trump and Hegseth enlisted some historians to find soldiers with the same spelling, so they found a B-R-A-G-G, for example, and named it for him. And so they found a Hood, a Pickett, a Benning and so on, and they’ve re-renamed them for those people instead. I’ve described this deception as choosing surnames over service.
Do you feel like your work was wasted?
I am aware that we currently live in a system where, as some people have said, it’s “lawful but awful.” The commander in chief and the secretary of defense are able to say what the bases are named after, and, ultimately, while I think that their wisdom is wanting, they won an election, and they get to do whatever they want. We listened to everyone who wanted to be heard. We deliberated. We met with these communities. They just got a list of people with the same last names and slapped them on. ➆
The interview was edited for clarity and length.
From A Promise Delivered
Fort Barfoot (previously Fort Pickett)
The hills and landscape around Blackstone, Virginia, have a way of taking a visitor back in time. Situated about an hour’s drive southwest of Richmond and an hour’s drive southeast of Appomattox, some of the vistas and rolling farm country feel like remnants from a bygone era. Few places in Virginia surpass the region in evoking the kinds of agriculture and country living that once dominated the state.
In 1941, army engineers found another use for the area: it had enough ready land and resources to train multiple divisions at once. So they established a camp, springing up 1,400 buildings in a little under a year—many of them iconic white, rectangular, bunks-all-in-a-row barracks. Some of these still remain at the camp, a tribute to the generation of soldiers who trained there. And training soldiers remains the fort’s purpose to this day. Owned by the army but operated by the Virginia National Guard, the installation has a very small complement of permanent soldiers and civilian workers. But it hosts units from all different services, all of which use the terrain and ranges to practice for all sorts of styles and scenarios of war.
It was originally named Camp Pickett, honoring Confederate general George Pickett, who had grown up on a slave-labor plantation about an hour away by car. Unless entirely swept away by false, romantic visions of the Civil War, soldiers training there could never feel proud of that namesake.
Pickett’s main claim to fame then—and now—was having his name attached to the most disastrous charge of the Civil War, on the last day of Gettysburg. His division suffered more than 50 percent casualties during their two-mile-long assault across open fields. They gained no ground of relevance whatsoever and simply pushed the Confederate “high-water mark” about a meaningless mile farther than if they had just stayed in the woods they’d started from. Stripped of revisionist romanticism, “Pickett’s Charge” remains one of the greatest failures of the entire war. It is the last thing soldiers training for battle should emulate.
The rest of Pickett’s war record fares no better. In 1864, he ordered the execution of twenty-two US prisoners of war and threatened to hang ten more for every Confederate prisoner the United States executed. He was also chronically absent from his division, frequently leaving his men to court (and eventually marry) a teenager half his age. Indeed, most of the flattering letters, actions, and stories about Pickett have proven to be complete fictions, written by his young widow during her fifty-six years following his death.
From A Promise Delivered: Ten American Heroes and the Battle to Rename Our Nation’s Military Bases by Ty Seidule and Connor Williams. © 2026 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
This article appears in February 11 • 2026.
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