The Virginia military base that was named in honor of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from 1917 to 2023 is once again known as Fort Lee. But what in Lee’s own words and actions make him deserving of such recognition? His military service against the United States government, rooted in a commitment to white supremacy? His belief that Black people needed and benefited from slavery? His personal use of law and violence to trap Black people in bondage?
After the Civil War, Lee claimed that he had always supported “gradual emancipation.” But in February 1866, he told the Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction that Black people have less capacity to learn compared to white people and said he opposed Black voting rights. When one lawmaker asked Lee if he thought Virginia would be best served by the relocation of its Black residents—who then constituted 30% of the state’s population—he answered, “I think it would be better for Virginia if she could get rid of them. That is no new opinion with me.”
Exceptional Cruelty and Greed
Robert E. Lee’s support for slavery was not just theoretical—he was an enslaver and, as executor of his father-in-law’s estate, fought the promised emancipation of nearly 200 enslaved Black people.
When Lee’s father-in-law, George Custis, died in 1857, he left a will ordering that the nearly 200 Black people he enslaved should be freed as soon as possible, within five years. As executor of the estate, Lee tried to delay freeing these enslaved people and maximized the profit he could derive from their labor in the meantime.
After two courts rejected Lee’s bid to indefinitely postpone the will’s order, the Black people enslaved by Custis were formally freed on December 29, 1862—after the Union Army had seized the Custis estate’s main property, and just three days before President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect.
One of the people enslaved by Custis, a Black man named Wesley Norris, shared his account of Lee’s cruelty with an abolitionist newspaper in 1866:
I remained with Gen. Lee for about seventeen months, when my sister Mary, a cousin of ours, and I determined to run away, which we did in the year 1859; we had already reached Westminster, in Maryland, on our way to the North, when we were apprehended and thrown into prison, and Gen. Lee notified of our arrest; we remained in prison fifteen days, when we were sent back to Arlington; we were immediately taken before Gen. Lee, who demanded the reason why we ran away; we frankly told him that we considered ourselves free; he then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget; he then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; we were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well, an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.
Multiple historians have confirmed Mr. Norris’s account through corroborating documentation. In a letter to his son after a New York newspaper published anonymous letters describing the same incident, Lee said only, “The N.Y. Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather’s slaves, but I shall not reply. He has left me an unpleasant legacy.”
Honoring a Traitor
Indeed, Lee’s opposition to racial equality and attacks on Black citizenship outlived the Confederacy and the institution of slavery. Perhaps that is why, nearly a century after his 1870 death, and decades after the U.S. Army named Fort Lee in his honor, white Americans opposed to the 20th-century movement for Black civil rights embraced him as a symbol of Southern resistance to racial equality.
Between 1945 and 1980, at least 29 schools across the U.S. were named in honor of Robert E. Lee, according to research by Education Week. In 1955, one year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racially segregated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education and just months after the Court ordered schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” Robert E. Lee High School opened in Montgomery, Alabama, as a brand new, state-of-the-art campus—for white students only. Officials later placed a bronze figure of Lee at its entrance.
Perhaps the most well known of Confederate military figures, Lee graduated from West Point in 1829 and served several decades in the U.S. Army. But a mere three days after Virginia voted to secede from the United States in April 1861, Lee resigned from the U.S. Army, and two days after that, he accepted appointment as major general of Virginia’s state forces.
Lee was commissioned a brigadier general in the Confederate army within a month, and on August 31 he was promoted to full general, the third-highest position in the Confederate forces. This rapid rise reflected his willingness to embrace the ideological foundations of the Confederacy’s pro-slavery cause.
Lee was a son of Virginia, but his choice to command Confederate forces in war against the United States was indeed a choice. Of the eight West Point graduates from Virginia who were serving as Army colonels when the Civil War began in 1861, Lee was the only one who deserted his post to take up arms against the Union.
When the U.S. Army honored Lee by naming a Virginia military base after him in 1917—while Black people in the South remained largely disenfranchised and politically silenced—newspapers praised the move for promoting reconciliation and honoring American military prowess in all its forms.
Dishonoring Black Soldiers in 2025
After more than a century, Congress appointed a commission to research and ultimately recommend renaming military assets that honored Confederate military personnel.
In April 2023, Fort Lee was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams to honor two Black veterans: Lt. Gen Arthur J. Gregg, the Army’s first Black three-star general, and Lt. Col. Charity Adams, the first Black woman to become an officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.1 Lt. Col. Adams was portrayed by Kerry Washington in the 2024 film, The Six Triple Eight.
Just two years later, Fort Lee is back.
To sidestep the bipartisan law Congress passed in 2020 to prohibit naming military assets for Confederate figures, the current administration claims that Fort Lee is now named in honor of Pvt. Fitz Lee, a Black soldier who received the Medal of Honor in 1898 while serving in the Spanish-American War.2 Gen. Robert E. Lee had a nephew named Fitzhugh “Fitz” Lee, who also served in the Confederate Army and was later elected governor of Virginia. The 2020 law against naming U.S. military assets after Confederate soldiers also renders him ineligible to be the acknowledged source of Fort Lee’s name. Pvt. Lee was born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, in 1866, one year after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and soon after Emancipation and the start of Reconstruction. In 1889, at about 23 years old, he enlisted in the U.S. Army in Philadelphia.
Little is known about Fitz Lee’s early years, but slavery and racial violence undoubtedly impacted his life and his parents’ lives.3 Three in four Black people living in Dinwiddie County in 1860 were enslaved, according to that year’s U.S. census. Just one month before Fitz Lee’s June 1866 birth, Freedmen’s Bureau records documenting racial violence during Reconstruction reported that three Black churches in Dinwiddie County were burned to the ground. And in April 1880, when Fitz was just 13 years old, a Black man named Joe Black was seized from the Dinwiddie County jail and hanged by a white lynch mob—one of thousands of victims of racial terror lynching killed in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950. As a soldier, Pvt. Lee served in the U.S. Army for nearly nine years, received the Medal of Honor for service in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and returned to the U.S. in poor health. He was honorably discharged in late 1898 and, in September 1899, died of his ailments at age 33.
As one of approximately 30 African American “Buffalo Soldiers” who received the Medal of Honor for their service, Pvt. Lee has been singled out for this cynical “Fort Lee” recognition simply because he is a convenient veil to weakly hide the administration’s true aim: evading the law to once again name a U.S. military base in honor of Robert E. Lee, who waged war to ensure that Black people like Fitz Lee would remain enslaved.
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s defining military campaign sought to condemn Fitz Lee and other Black boys born in 1866 Virginia to a life of slavery rather than freedom. The “renaming” of Fort Lee resurrects Pvt. Lee’s worthy name and memory in perpetual service to Gen. Lee: a white man whose words and actions refused to recognize Black people as deserving honor and consistently denied their very humanity.