Naming Commission Historian Rationalizes Name Changes in Campus Talk

Yale historian Connor Williams discusses efforts to remove Confederate commemorations.

Robert E. Lee “truly led to the deaths of I think more American soldiers than any enemy we have faced,” said historian Connor Williams during his May 8 talk in W&L’s Hillel House.

The lecture, titled “Making Treason Odious Again,” covered the work of The Naming Commission, a body appointed in 2020 by the U.S. Congress to find replacements for U.S. military assets named after individuals who served in the Confederate States of America.

Williams, who holds a history Ph.D. from Yale University, served as Lead Historian for The Naming Commission.

“This is strange to see,” Williams said of recent changes to historical commemoration and the toppling of Confederate statues on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. “I grew up assuming those statues would always be there, but in some ways, it is very natural, this is one of the oldest processes we have,” he said, an assertion he supported by quoting Cicero and referencing Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

Although he sees such changes as a natural process, he is nonetheless consistently asked several questions: “When you get in the business of changing commemorations, you come into four questions ... ‘Weren’t all Americans racist?’ ... ‘What about all the good things they did?’ ... ‘Isn’t this erasing history?’ ... ‘How can you judge somebody for the culture they grew up in?’” he said.

“The Naming Commission began in the summer of 2020,” Williams said. He explained how Congress, responding to nation-wide unrest over the death of George Floyd, called the Naming Commission to action.

“Congress, with broad bipartisan support, added something on to the [National Defense Authorization Act] … it created a commission to make a plan for the removal of any … ‘name, symbol, monument, display, or paraphernalia’ that commemorated the Confederacy.”

Williams went on to explain how this act was vetoed by President Trump, who believed that “our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not be tampered with.” However, his veto was overridden by the Senate (87-13) and the House of Representatives (322-123). So, the Naming Commission began its work.

“This put me and the commission on a two-year journey,” said Williams, who traveled with the Naming Commission to receive input from people at the various army bases around the country. All nine base names were changed without incident.

To support the changes, Williams compared the bases’ original Confederate namesakes to their new ones. For instance, Fort Eisenhower was formerly named after John Brown Gorden, a man Williams said had “never served a day in his life in the United States Army.” “He wasn't a West Pointer, he wasn’t a VMI (Virginia Military Institute). He was a lawyer and politician from Georgia. He only served in the Confederate Army,” Williams said. “Is it better or worse to have a fort named after him? Or Dwight Eisenhower?”

“The most controversial thing we did,” Williams said, “and we thought about this long and hard, was [to remove] the Confederate monument in Arlington, Virginia.” The monument was surrounded by graves, which he said The Naming Commission ensured a removal would not disturb.

The Naming Commission issued its final report in January 2023.

Williams cited two French historians as the philosophical basis for his views, Ernest Renan and Pierre Nora. “Nations are defined as much by what they forget as what they remember,” said Williams, quoting Renan. Williams recalled Nora saying that, in the modern age, “memory and history, far from being synonymous, now appear to be in fundamental opposition,” a quote Williams sees as expressing the difference between history and memory.

“History on the other hand is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present,” Williams elaborated.

“But we have too much memory of the American Civil War,” Williams said. “We have too much memory of it and too much, I daresay bad memory of it. Not as in ‘bad dreams’ memory, but poor memories, incorrect memories.”

Williams ended his talk by answering audience questions. 

Asked by Neely Young, ‘66, whether every confederate was a white supremacist, Williams clarified that he could not say for certain. However, “whether you are fighting for slaves that maybe your family didn’t own,” he continued, “it was a fight for a society … whose foundation was enslaved people.”

Margaret Alexander, ‘24, asked if the committee had considered renaming “forts after values rather than people,” as was the case with Fort Liberty (previously Fort Bragg). 

Williams responded that “if you name a value, you lose a story.” The decision to rename Fort Bragg after “Liberty,” he noted, was upon the request of officers they spoke to at that base.

When asked about W&L’s own Confederate name, Williams said that if the university does not wish to change its name, they should recognize that “for most of the 100 years after Lee was president, we were — [alongside] Sewannee and William and Mary and a few others — the bastions of white supremacist history.” 

He continued, “because of that history, we want to do absolutely everything we can to push for the society we aspire to, not the one we inhabit. We should lean into Lee’s desire to let the Civil War go.”