The Renaming of Fort Hood, Texas
By
John C Abercrombie
The first order of business when America became independent from England was the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the adoption of a constitution and the election of leaders.
- The Declaration of Independence was written in 1776 and declared Independence from Great Britain. It laid out the principles of individual liberty, natural rights, and self-government.
- The Constitution was written in 1787 and replaced the articles of confederation as the law of the land. The Constitution established the relationship between the national government and the states, creating the three branches of government.
- The Legislature
- The Executive
- The Judicial
- The Constitution outlined the powers and responsibilities of each of the above
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The Constitution establishes a system of checks and balances for each branch. The Constitution also includes the Bill of Rights guaranteeing individual liberties, including freedom of speech, religion, and the press.
The order of succession from the United States of America by South Carolina was signed December 24, 1860, and followed by ten other states. It is important to note that four slave stated did not succeed and remained in the United States of America. These eleven states formed a new country, the Confederate States of America. They adopted a constitution, elected a president, vice president and operated as a separate country.
Fort Hood located near the town of Killeen, Texas was named after one of the Confederate generals who took up arms against the United States of America. The shameful practice has resulted in many United States of America military facilities being named after the enemy soldiers. This practice is particularly shameful as it honors those who fought to take and maintain all rights from people of color. Fort Hood has recently been renamed after the Army’s first Hispanic four-stat general.
The base was redesignated Fort Cavazos in honor of Gen. Richard Edward Cavazos, a veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars who was born in Texas to Mexican American parents. In 1982, he became the first Hispanic to wear four stars on his uniform.
Fort Hood is one of nine United States Army installations being renamed following the recommendations of a congressional commission. The prior or Hood is named after Confederate General John Bell Hood.
The Army has made efforts to confront racial injustice and inequality within the ranks. This came to the fore after the killing of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police.
This morning, Fort Hood will be redesignated Fort Cavazos. Get to know its namesake – Gen. Richard Edward Cavazos.
“General Cavazos’ combat proven leadership, his moral character and his loyalty to his Soldiers and their families made him the fearless yet respected and influential leader that he was during the time he served, and beyond,” said Lt. Gen. Sean Bernabe, Commanding General of III Armored Corps, headquartered at the Texas post.
Cavazos, who retired from the Army in 1984 after 33 years of service, died in 2017.
At a ceremony, attended by relatives of Cavazos, soldiers cased the Fort Hood colors and uncased the official flag of the Fort Cavazos garrison before unveiling a new sign at the main entrance to the 218,000-plus acre military installation.
“Given the importance of this installation for our Army and for our nation I can think of no better namesake than Gen. Richard Cavazos,”
“Let his name and all that it represents inspire us all every single day to live up to his legacy as a warrior, as a soldier’s soldier, as a master trainer, as a military innovator, as a coach and mentor and as a humble servant leader.”
The renaming of bases became a heated political issue in the final months of the Trump administration, when the former president blasted the idea, accusing others of wanting to “throw those names away.”
Trump had vetoed the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which included the Naming Commission, but in the waning days of his administration, Congress delivered its first and only veto override during his tenure, approving the legislation with overwhelming bipartisan support.
And the renaming comes at a time when Gen. Lloyd Austin, the country’s first Black secretary of defense, has identified racism and domestic extremism as some of the most pressing issues facing the country and the armed services.
“The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies. But we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks,” Austin said at his confirmation hearing.
Austin called the insurrection a “wake-up call” for the military. The heavy participation of service members reignited concerns at the Pentagon.
Austin reached the highest post in the Pentagon through West Point, the elite military academy that is only now beginning to come to terms with a legacy of racism.
And Austin was a lieutenant colonel with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1995 — when two neo-Nazi skinheads from the elite unit murdered a Black man and a Black woman in a racially charged killing. Austin spoke about the episode at his confirmation hearing.
Fort Bragg, named after Confederate General Braxton Bragg, will be renamed Fort Liberty on June 2.
Cavazos was known for his leadership and for mentoring many Army commanders, according to the Army.
He served as platoon leader for the Borinqueneers, a unit of mostly Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican soldiers, during the Korean War and later commanded the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, in Vietnam. Cavazos received three major military decorations for valor in combat, including the Distinguished Service Cross twice for his service in those two wars. He served as the commander of the III Armored Corps and Fort Hood from 1980 to 1982.
The primary reason there is so much honoring of Confederates in America is that that chapter in history was written by the loser of the Civil War. Historians, journalists, and authors sympathetic with the position of the South are the ones we see telling the story. When we look at the timing of the erection of Confederate memorials, we see it coincide with legal wins by people of color.
It is beyond the pale to honor enemies of the United States despite the large number of American soldiers who are tormented by the thought of fighting in the name of those who were willing to die to deny them of their constitutional and civil rights.
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Civil War author Stephen Davis writes John Bell Hood book.
The Atlanta Campaign and the subsequent march into Middle Tennessee by Confederate forces during the Civil War is the topic of author Stephen Davis’s newest book, “Into Tennessee And Failure.”
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Book
Remember using the links, you can sample the book either in electronic or audio and order from Audible using our links if it is available in that format.
John Bell Hood: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of a Confederate General
An award-winning biography of one of the Confederacy’s most successful—and most criticized—generals.
Winner of the 2014 Albert Castel Book Award and the 2014 Walt Whitman Award
John Bell Hood died at forty-eight after a brief illness in August 1879, leaving behind the first draft of his memoirs, Advance and Retreat: Personal Experiences in the United States and Confederate States Armies. Published posthumously the following year, the memoirs immediately became as controversial as their author. A careful and balanced examination of these controversies, however, coupled with the recent discovery of Hood’s personal papers—which were long considered lost—finally sets the record straight in this book.
Hood’s published version of many of the major events and controversies of his Confederate military career were met with scorn and skepticism. Some described his memoirs as merely a polemic against his arch-rival Joseph E. Johnston. These opinions persisted through the decades and reached their nadir in 1992, when an influential author described Hood’s memoirs as a bitter, misleading, and highly biased treatise replete with distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications. Without any personal papers to contradict them, many writers portrayed Hood as an inept, dishonest opium addict and a conniving, vindictive cripple of a man. One went so far as to brand him a fool with a license to kill his own men.
What most readers don’t know is that nearly all of these authors misused sources, ignored contrary evidence, and/or suppressed facts sympathetic to Hood. Stephen M. Hood, a distant relative of the general, embarked on a meticulous forensic study of the common perceptions and controversies of his famous kinsman. His careful examination of the original sources utilized to create the broadly accepted facts about John Bell Hood uncovered startlingly poor scholarship by some of the most well-known and influential historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These discoveries, coupled with his access to a large cache of recently discovered Hood papers, many penned by generals and other officers who served with Hood, confirm Hood’s account that originally appeared in his memoir and resolve, for the first time, some of the most controversial aspects of Hood’s long career.
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A Biography of Gen John Bell Hood
A video documentary of General John Bell Hood, who commanded the famous Hood’s Texas Brigade. Recognized for his bravery, daring and courage by Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, Hood was beloved by his troops and maligned by his critics.
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Book
Into Tennessee and Failure: John Bell Hood
INTO TENNESSEE AND FAILURE is the second volume of Stephen Davis’s study of John Bell Hood’s generalship in 1864. Here Davis picks up the story in September-October 1864, tracing Hood and his army into North Georgia and Alabama. Entering Tennessee in late November, Hood’s forces failed to trap Union Maj. Gen. John Schofield’s infantry at Spring Hill. On November 30, Hood ordered his soldiers to attack Schofield’s fortified lines at Franklin. A tragic and bloody repulse followed. Schofield escaped to Nashville, joining Maj. Gen. George Thomas’s forces. With few options left, Hood approached Nashville and had his troops dig in. Though his army was half the size of Thomas’s 50,000, Hood hoped to win a defensive victory when Thomas attacked him. Instead, in the battle of Nashville, December 15-16, the Army of Tennessee was routed from the field. By the time it ended its retreat in North Mississippi, Confederate authorities were ready to relieve Hood from command. Hood resigned in January 1865.
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General John Bell Hood Lecture at the Historic Granbury Opera House in Hood County
Dr Steven Woodworth, Author and Professor of History at TCU was invited by the Bridge Street History Center in Granbury, Texas to give a lecture on General John Bell Hood. This lecture is significant for Granbury as it is the county seat of Hood County which is named in honor of General Hood.
The lecture took place in front of a capacity crowd at the Historic Granbury Opera House.
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Book
Advance and Retreat: Personal Experiences in the United States and Confederate Armies
John Bell Hood was one of the most notorious Confederate generals of the Civil War, arguably the best division commander in the Army of Northern Virginia and also arguably the worst overall army commander of the Confederacy. The big Texan and his brigade were crucial at Antietam, and he fought hard and was injured at Gettysburg and Chickamauga, but when he took over the Army of Tennessee in 1864, he made disastrous decisions that wrecked the army at Franklin and Nashville.
Hood died in 1879, fairly shortly after the war, but his generalship was so controversial that he felt compelled to defend it in a hastily written memoir. In addition to talking about his own experiences, it rebuts General Joseph E. Johnston’s writings, as the two men traded blame over the Atlanta campaign against Union general William Tecumseh Sherman.
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A Biography of Gen John Bell Hood
A video documentary of General John Bell Hood, who commanded the famous Hood’s Texas Brigade. Recognized for his bravery, daring and courage by Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, Hood was beloved by his troops and maligned by his critics.
**
Book
Texas Brigadier to the Fall of Atlanta: John Bell Hood
Late in life, writing his memoirs, John Bell Hood wrote, “no man is justly entitled to be considered a great General, unless he has won his spurs.”
Hood did not explain how an officer earned his spurs, but he didn’t need to. One may assume that such an accomplishment came about when a soldier conscientiously performed his duty, and gave his all in attempting to meet his country’s expectations of him.
In this work, the first of two volumes, Hood’s rise in rank is chronicled. In three years, 1861-1864, Hood rose from lieutenant to full general in the Confederate army.
Davis emphasizes Hood’s fatal flaw: ambition. Hood constantly sought promotion, even after he had found his highest level of competence as division commander in Robert E. Lee’s army. As corps commander in the Army of Tennessee, his performance was good, but no better. Promoted to succeed Johnston, Hood did his utmost to defend Atlanta against Sherman.
In this latter effort he failed. But he had won his spurs, even if he had been denied greatness as a general.
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JOHN BELL HOOD AND THE MYSTERIES OF SPRING HILL, WITH ERIC JACOBSON
Confederate general John Bell Hood’s Tennessee campaign of 1864 is one of the most controversial of the Civil War. In particular, Hood’s frontal assault on an entrenched army led by John Schofield at Franklin, about twenty miles south of Nashville, on 30 November 1864, was an attack larger, bloodier, and more futile than Pickett’s charge, resulting in nearly 2000 Confederate dead. Yet the day before Hood had let Schofield’s army slip through his fingers at the Battle of Spring Hill. Following several piecemeal Confederate attacks, Schofield’s command escaped to Franklin — within a few hundred yards of Hood’s men in their camps for the night. Hood had lost perhaps his best chance to isolate and defeat the Union army, and his anger at Schofield’s escape may have contributed to the tragedy the next day at Franklin. How was it that Hood and his army let Schofield escape their clutches?
Eric A Jacobson is the Chief Executive Officer of The Battle of Franklin Trust, and the author of For Cause & For Country: A Study of the Affair at Spring Hill and the Battle of Franklin (
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It is very awkward to think of honoring an enemy of the United States particularly when it offends many of the brave men and women willing to fight and die for their country. Think about that for a minute. It is cruel beyond comprehension and time to stop it. It is about time that we find Americans to honor, and give enemies of those ideals the boot.