Edmund W. Rucker killed U.S. soldiers to defend slavery. After the Civil War, he aligned himself with the most extreme Southern leaders in promoting white supremacy, the disenfranchisement and abuse of Black people, and racist ideology. He profited from the notorious, lethal system of exploiting formerly enslaved people known as ‘convict leasing,’ which historians have called “worse than slavery.”1 Wayne Cline, Alabama Railroads (University of Alabama Press, 2024), 87; and The Meanest & ‘Damnest’ Job: The Civil War Experiences and Civilian History of Colonel Edmund Winchester Rucker (NewSouth Books, 2019), 224-234, by Michael P. Rucker, who has a shared ancestor with Edmund W. Rucker. His abuse of Black people forced to labor in his post-Civil War businesses was so severe that even Alabama officials required him to return incarcerated Black people leased to him because “their condition was such that unless they were better cared for they would all soon die.”2 Rucker, Meanest & ‘Damnest’ Job, 224-25.
Rucker volunteered for the Confederacy and maimed, killed, and drowned U.S. troops as a commander of rebelling forces.3 The Naming Commission, Final Report to Congress, Part I: United States Army Bases (Aug. 2022), 66. He never rose above the rank of colonel but forced reluctant white men in Tennessee, his home state, to enlist in the Confederate militia or face “harsh retribution.”4 Naming Commission, Final Report, 66; Rucker, Meanest & ‘Damnest’ Job, 244-49.
Arrested for treason after the war, Rucker was pardoned and went into the railroad business with his close friend and associate, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.5 Al Mackey, “United States v. Rucker,” Student of the American Civil War, Nov. 29, 2015; Meanest & ‘Damnest’ Job, 219-228. Rucker served under Forrest during the Civil War, when Forrest ordered his soldiers to summarily execute or enslave any Black people they encountered.6 Rucker, Meanest & ‘Damnest’ Job, 4, 109, 115; John R. Sanders, “Operational Leadership of Nathan Bedford Forrest,” (Naval War College, 1994) 18-19; Naming Commission, Final Report, 66; “Edmund Rucker,” Encyclopedia of Alabama, accessed Sept. 10, 2025. At Fort Pillow in Tennessee, Forrest led the massacre of over 150 Black soldiers who, according to other Confederate officers, were “shot down like dogs” after they surrendered.7 Richard Fuchs, An Unerring Fire: The Massacre at Fort Pillow (Stackpole Books, 2002), 23 and 123-124; John Cimprich and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., “The Fort Pillow Massacre: A Statistical Note,” Journal of American History 76, no. 3, (1989), 830-837; “The Hard Reality of Fort Pillow: Interpreting the Massacre of US Colored Troops in 1864,” National Park Service, updated Sept 19, 2024; “Fort Pillow,” National Park Service, accessed Sept 10, 2025.
For decades, Rucker “leased” Black people who had been arrested under discriminatory Black Codes—laws criminalizing formerly enslaved Black people for “obscene language,” vagrancy, and gambling.8 Rucker, Meanest & ‘Damnest’ Job, 224-228, quoting Larkin Willis’ report to the state prison’s board of inspectors; Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Anchor, 2008), 1, 99.
Rucker became known for his abuse of Black workers. A judge in Perry County, Alabama, ordered Rucker to return prisoners leased to his railroad business after he subjected them to horrific conditions and violence.9 Bertis D. English, “Civil Wars and Civil Beings: Violence, Religion, Race, Politics, Education, Culture, and Agrarianism in Perry County, Alabama, 1860-1875,” Ph.D diss. (Auburn University, 2006), 435-437. In 1873, an Alabama prison warden did the same for Black prisoners forced to endure Rucker’s extreme, and often fatal, mistreatment.10 Rucker, Meanest & ‘Damnest’ Job, 224-25.
In 1886, Rucker invested in the Sloss Iron & Steel Company, a massive mining operation in Birmingham, Alabama, that notoriously relied on convict labor. By 1892, he was the company’s vice president.11 Rucker, Meanest & ‘Damnest’ Job, 233; American Iron and Steel Institute, Directory of the Iron and Steel Works of the United States and Canada (1890), 45; David W. Lewis, Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District (University of Alabama Press, 2011), 258; “Sloss Sheffield Company,” The Times (Richmond), Nov. 18, 1899. Rucker was part of a group of investors who purchased the Sloss Furnace Company in 1886 and reorganized it as the Sloss Iron & Steel Company. “Companies Consolidated,” Mining Herald and Colliery Engineer, vol. 7 (April 30, 1887), 131. Conditions for the hundreds of Black men arrested for violations of the Black Codes and forced to labor in the company’s mines were dangerous, demoralizing, and often deadly.12 Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, 98-99. More than 100 prisoners forced to labor in the Coalburg mine died during a two-year period in the 1890s.13 Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, 109.
After the Civil War, Rucker urged white Southerners to be prepared to take up arms against free Black men and women. His speech at an 1868 rally was followed by white people parading through the streets of Memphis, Tennessee, “waving flags and lurid torches.”14 “Tennessee: The Rebel General E. W. Rucker on The Situation—Radicals To Be Watched,” The New York Times, Aug. 18, 1868; “Y.M.I.D. Club. Torchlight Procession,” Memphis Daily Appeal, Aug. 13, 1868.
The threats of violence came just two years after the Memphis Massacre—during which dozens of Black people were killed by white mobs in Memphis—and two months before a white congressman who championed Black rights was assassinated in nearby Arkansas.15 Equal Justice Initiative, “Racial Terror Massacre: Memphis, Tennessee,” in Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865-1876 (2020); “White Police and Mobs Terrorize and Kill Black Residents in Memphis,” Equal Justice Initiative, A History of Racial Injustice, accessed Sept. 10, 2025; Amanda Stanton, “James Hinds, 1833-1868,” Encyclopedia of Arkansas, updated 2023; United States Congress, “Hinds, James, 1833-1868,” accessed Sept. 10, 2025.
Rucker never abandoned his racist views. More than 40 years after the Civil War, in 1909, he campaigned for Prohibition by arguing that it would “keep the drunken negro…from endangering our homes and our women.”16 “General Rucker Defends Cause of the Amendment,” Birmingham News, Oct. 19, 1909; “Pro-Amendment Comments; What the State Papers Say: Brave Gen. Rucker,” Southern Democrat (Oneonta, Alabama), Nov. 4, 1909.
Despite Rucker’s history, the Army named Fort Rucker (originally Camp Rucker) for him in 1942. U.S. Sen. J. Lister Hill, an Alabama politician who opposed every civil rights measure that came before Congress during his long tenure, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965—and whose sister had married Rucker’s son—lobbied for the name.17 Peter Kerr, “Lister Hill, Longtime Senator From Alabama,” The New York Times, Dec. 22, 1884; Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, “Lister Hill,” Encyclopedia of Alabama, updated Nov. 22, 2024; “Naming of U.S. Army Posts,” U.S. Army Center of Military History, accessed Sept. 10, 2025.
Naming bases for traitors like Rucker was “a deal made with the Jim Crow South,” U.S. Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska and an Air Force combat veteran, told Politico.
Bacon co-sponsored a law passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Congress in 2021 that established a Naming Commission to rename or remove “names, symbols, displays, monuments and paraphernalia” that commemorate the Confederacy or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America.
Based on the commission’s work, Fort Rucker was renamed in 2023 for Army helicopter pilot Michael Novosel Sr., who rescued 5,500 wounded Vietnam War soldiers and received the Medal of Honor for saving the lives of 29 men despite machine-gun fire and his own wounds.
But this year, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth restored the Confederate names of the nine Army bases that had been rededicated pursuant to the 2021 law. The Defense Department found service members with convenient last names to suit “the limits of what Congress allowed us,” Hegseth told the Senate Armed Services Committee in June. On July 17, Fort Novosel became Fort Rucker again—officially named for Edward W. Rucker Jr., a World War I aviator.
Hegseth said the old names “never should have been changed.”