When Southern states declared war against the Union, George Edward Pickett resigned his post in the U.S. military and joined the Confederate army. He expressed disgust at the thought of Black people being given weapons and serving as soldiers. He wrote that if he had ever captured a Black soldier, “I should have caused him to be immediately executed.”1 Michael Levenson, These Are the 10 U.S. Army Installations Named for Confederates, The New York Times, June 11, 2020; National Park Service, George Edward Pickett; American Battlefield Trust, George E. Pickett; Encyclopedia Virginia, George E. Pickett; Lesley J. Gordon, General George E. Pickett in Life & Legend (UNC Press, 1998), 65, 126, 132.
Pickett was regarded as a poor leader and military commander. He was known to be obnoxious, short-tempered, bitter, jealous, arrogant, vain, extremely offensive, and generally disliked by his men. He was also unwilling to take responsibility for his many failures as a military leader. At one point, Pickett left his unit and attended a fish fry while the men under his command fought and died in battle. Unsurprisingly, a staggering number of his men deserted. Pickett was eventually demoted and then relieved of his command, with his commanding officer calling him “a source of weakness and demoralization.”2 Ron Soodalter, Cloaked Vengeance: George Pickett and the Hanging of Union Prisoners, Oct. 8, 2020; Gordon, Life & Legend, 19, 124, 136-37, 145, 149, 152,154, 61, 99, 106, 108.
Violating the Laws of War
In addition to being a poor military leader, Pickett was a war criminal.3 The Naming Commission, Final Report to Congress – Part I: United States Army Bases, 53; Soodalter, Cloaked Vengeance. Before being relieved of his command, he executed 22 Union soldiers who had been forced to join the Confederate army, but left and joined Union forces at the first opportunity. Pickett ordered that they be tried for desertion, even though he himself had deserted from the U.S. Army and was a traitor to his country.4 Gordon, Life & Legend, 132; Soodalter, Cloaked Vengeance.
Pickett ordered that the prisoners, one of whom was 15 years old, be tried without counsel. Rather than maintain even a veneer of fairness, Pickett ordered the construction of the gallows before any of the verdicts were handed down. His military court condemned the 21 men and one child to death. They were hanged in front of their families and friends, and then their bodies were stripped naked. Even amidst a bloody war, the execution of prisoners was uncommon; the killings horrified the civilian population and disgusted Pickett’s own men.5 Soodalter, Cloaked Vengeance; Gordon, Life & Legend, 134.
Following the Confederacy’s surrender, a board of inquiry was convened to investigate Pickett’s “murder of Union soldiers.” The board, recognizing that the soldiers could not desert from an army of traitors into which they had been forcibly conscripted, recommended that Pickett be brought before a military commission for trial.6 Soodalter, Cloaked Vengeance.
The director of the Bureau of Military Justice supported the board’s decision, finding that service in the Confederate army “was, in itself, a crime from which it was their [the soldiers’] bounden duty, as men and as patriots, to flee at the first opportunity.” The director referred to Pickett’s execution of the soldiers as an “atrocity” and ordered his immediate arrest. When Pickett found out that he was under investigation, he fled with his third wife to Canada.7 George E. Pickett; Naming Commission Report; Soodalter, Cloaked Vengeance.
Before Pickett became a war criminal who fought against his country to preserve slavery, he grew up on his family’s large plantation, where dozens of Black people were enslaved. He married Sally Minge, a woman whose family also enslaved Black people. He believed that Black people could not be the equals of white people.8 Gordon, Life & Legend, 4, 6, 33, 80, 126, 132; George E. Pickett.
Pickett gained admittance to West Point only because of his family’s connections. Once there, he came close to being expelled and graduated last in his class. In the U.S. Army, Pickett was stationed out West, where he protected white settlers as they encroached on Indigenous lands. In his writings, he referred to Indigenous people as “savages, indolent and full of ardent spirits.”9 Gordon, Life & Legend, 12-15, 42-48; George E. Pickett.
Celebrating the Myth of the Lost Cause
After Pickett’s death in 1875, his third wife, LaSalle Corbell Pickett, became a leading purveyor of the myth of the Lost Cause and spread false narratives about how slavery was a benevolent institution and played no role in the Civil War. She wrote books and traveled the country as a lecturer, gaining fame by romanticizing her husband, slavery, and the South. Through her writings and speeches, she turned her husband into an idealized Lost Cause hero, despite his flawed military career and criminal conduct.10 Gordon, Life & Legend, 145, 172-74, 178, 180; George E. Pickett.
Over a period of nearly 50 years, LaSalle Pickett repeatedly claimed that enslaved people had been happy.11 Gordon, Life & Legend, 172, 174; Encyclopedia Virginia, LaSalle Corbell Pickett and the Lost Cause; Encyclopedia Virginia, LaSalle Corbell Pickett (1843–1931). She referred to the era of enslavement as “dem good ole times,” and fondly recounted growing up in “the old atmosphere of the romantic South and the plantation life.” In celebrating an idealized, racist past, she was at the center of efforts to romanticize slavery and the Confederacy.12 Gordon, Life & Legend, 1, 145, 173, 178, 180.
In 1942, a decade after LaSalle Pickett’s death, the military named a base in Virginia in honor of her husband. It was one of eight major military bases named after Confederate traitors during World War II, a war in which over one million Black people served in the U.S. armed forces.13 U.S. Army Center of Military History, “Naming of U.S. Army Posts,” 2017. These base names were a victory for the Lost Cause movement and a source of great distress to Black Americans.14 Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020), 171; The Tennessean (Feb. 27, 1941); The Chicago Defender (Feb. 1, 1941).
Honoring American Service Members
Over the past century, the U.S. military has increasingly come to rely upon the service of African Americans. Nonwhite service members make up 59.5% of the U.S. Army today. But the federal government long resisted efforts to change the names of military bases that honored those “who wrongly fought to protect the institution of slavery and would have denied Black Americans from serving in the military.”15 Alex Ward, The Racist History Behind the 10 US Army Facilities Named After Confederate Leaders, Vox (June 9, 2020).
That changed in 2019, when Congress prohibited naming any new military base or renaming any existing base after “a person who served or held leadership within the Confederacy.” In 2021, an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Congress voted to require the removal of all names and symbols that “honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America (commonly referred to as the ‘‘Confederacy’’) or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America from all assets of the Department of Defense.”
Pursuant to this law, a bipartisan commission was appointed to recommend new names for nine Army bases that honored Confederate traitors. Members of the commission visited the military bases and surrounding communities and met with thousands of stakeholders, many of whom expressed enthusiastic support for removing the Confederate names. In 2022, the commission recommended new names that “reflect the values and virtues of our nation’s communities, military and mission.”
In 2023, Fort Pickett was officially renamed Fort Barfoot after Col. Van T. Barfoot. Barfoot served in the 45th Infantry Division (the “Thunderbirds”), which trained at the base renamed in his honor. He served for a total of 34 years, including tours in northern Italy during World War II and then in Korea and Vietnam, and “fought with great valor, evincing tactical skill, commitment to his mission, and dedication to his men.”16 Naming Commission, Final Report.
Dishonoring Black Americans in 2025
In June, President Donald Trump announced that all nine renamed bases would once again honor Confederate traitors. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered that the names of Confederate traitors, including Pickett, be restored to the military bases. In a cynical attempt to get around the federal ban on honoring people who fought against the United States, the Army identified service members with the same last names as the secessionists.
When questioned at a Congressional hearing about why the military would choose to honor Confederate traitors in 2025, Hegseth stated that this was “something that we’ve been proud to do” and criticized “this game of erasing names.” In response, Sen. Angus King stated:
We’re not erasing history, Mr. Secretary, we’re recognizing history and recognizing that mistakes have been made in this country. The greatest of all was the Civil War, where people took up arms against their country on behalf of the institution of slavery. And to continue the practice of recognizing those people and honoring them by the naming of these bases is, I believe, an insult to the people of the United States.