Historians have called Leonidas Polk “arguably the worst tactical or strategic military leader in the entire [Civil War].”1 Ty Seidule and Connor Williams, A Promise Delivered: Ten American Heroes and the Battle to Rename Our Nation’s Military Bases (St. Martin’s Press, 2025), 202. He had never been in combat, much less led troops, before his close friend and former West Point classmate Jefferson Davis commissioned him a general in the Confederate army.
Historians say Polk made a colossal error early in the war when, without informing Davis, he sent soldiers to occupy a town in the previously neutral border state of Kentucky.2 Thomas Lawrence Connelly, The Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–1862 (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 52; Steven E. Woodworth, Jefferson Davis and his Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West (University Press of Kansas, 1990), 39, 306. Infuriated, Kentucky petitioned for federal troops to drive away the invaders, and thereafter the state sided with the Union.3 Woodworth, Davis and his Generals, 35-42, 306.
Insisting he knew best, Polk never conceded the blunder, or any of those that followed. Davis, seemingly oblivious to Polk’s failures, promoted him to lieutenant general. “Polk’s incompetence and willful disobedience had consistently hamstrung Confederate operations west of the Appalachians, while his special relationship with [Jefferson Davis] made [Polk] untouchable,” historian Steven E. Woodworth wrote.4 Steven E. Woodworth, Sherman: Lessons in Leadership (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), 117.
Encouraging War Crimes
Polk was the immediate superior officer to Nathan Bedford Forrest, who directed the April 1864 massacre of more than 150 Black Union soldiers who were surrendering at Fort Pillow in Tennessee.5 Bruce Tap, The Fort Pillow Massacre: North, South, and the Status of African Americans in the Civil War Era (Routledge, 2014), 109. “The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for 500 yards,” Forrest telegraphed Polk three days after the attack. He continued, “It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.”
Even after newspapers published eyewitness accounts of “the indiscriminate butchery” at Fort Pillow and a congressional investigation publicly implicated Forrest in “a scene of cruelty and murder without parallel in civilized warfare,” Polk had only praise for Forrest. “Your brilliant campaign…has given me great satisfaction,” Polk telegraphed from the opulent Alabama plantation where he was headquartered.6 “The Massacre At Fort Pillow,” The New York Times, April 20, 1864; “The Fort Pillow Massacre,” The New York Times, May 6, 1864; Richard L. Fuchs, An Unerring Fire: The Massacre at Fort Pillow (Stackpole Books, 2002).
Before the war, as Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, Polk was greatly influential in using Christianity to justify slavery. He enslaved about 400 Black men, women, and children on his 2,000-acre plantation, forcing them to do the dangerous and dehumanizing work of harvesting and processing sugar cane.
Bragging About Whipping Enslaved People
Polk was the son of a prosperous North Carolina landowner and enslaver, and second cousin to James K. Polk, the 11th President of the United States. He was in his 20s when he bragged of whipping his father’s enslaved laborers because they had protested a threatened flogging. “I went down the…next morning and beginning with Mingo whipped the whole [group],” he wrote his father. “They have been quiet ever since.”7 Huston Horn, Leonidas Polk: Warrior Bishop of the Confederacy (University Press of Kansas, 2019), 40.
Later, Polk denigrated the people whose backbreaking forced labor created his family’s wealth as “dirty, careless, thriftless”—and a burden for enslavers.8 Horn, Leonidas Polk, 58. “Those mad-caps of the North don’t understand [slavery] at all,” he wrote in 1856. “We hold the Negroes and they hold us. They furnish the yokes and we the necks. My own is getting sore.”9 Horn, Leonidas Polk, 123-24.
Building Institutions to Preserve Slavery
In the five years leading up to the Civil War, tapping into fellow enslavers’ fears of rising Northern abolitionism, Polk led an effort to found the Episcopal University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. The school was designed for the preservation and promotion of slavery. Polk envisioned Sewanee as the counterpoint to Harvard and Yale, where he claimed the sons of the Southern elite were being poisoned by anti-slavery extremists.
Contemporary historians at Sewanee have written that Polk and his co-founders envisioned the university and its School of Ethnology and Universal Geography as a center of “scientific scholarship proving white racial superiority and the ‘aptitude’ of people of African descent for enslavement.”
Together, Sewanee’s 295 funders, who pledged nearly $1.2 million dollars, enslaved about 40,000 people in 1860. As chief fundraiser, Polk used his Southern church network to solicit funds from political leaders, millionaire plantation owners, and a notorious trafficker who had bought and sold thousands of Black people from 1828 to 1836.
“The world is trying hard to persuade us that a slaveholding people cannot be a people of high moral and intellectual culture,” read an 1860 fundraising pamphlet co-authored by Polk.10 Horn, Leonidas Polk, 136-37. Polk claimed Sewanee would prove the opposite. He argued that white Southern men were positioned to make the greatest contribution to civilization because they had slavery—a “caste” system under which enslaved labor freed “the thinking and governing class” for higher pursuits. Polk laid Sewanee’s cornerstone in 1860 before some 5,000 celebrants.11 Glenn Robins, The Bishop of the Old South: The Ministry and Civil War Legacy of Leonidas Polk (Mercer University Press, 2006), 132.
In 1861, Polk separated his Louisiana diocese from the American Episcopal Church, molding it around the Confederacy. He revised the diocese’s prayer book so worshippers prayed not for the president of the United States but for the Confederacy’s president.12 Horn, Leonidas Polk, 471.
In 1941, with many white Americans embracing the Lost Cause mythology that denied the role of slavery in the Civil War, the Army honored the insurrectionist general by establishing Fort Polk in Louisiana.
Fort Polk Renamed for a Black War Hero—But Not for Long
In 2021, Congress outlawed naming military installations for Confederates and established a bipartisan commission to recommend new names. In public meetings at base communities, the commissioners provided historical accounts about the original namesakes and emphasized that they had betrayed their country in a war that killed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers.
In addition to his act of treason, Polk’s story cannot inspire soldiers “unless their mission is to foul up every engagement they fight,” the commission’s historian, Connor Williams, and its vice chair, retired Army Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule, wrote later.13 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 202.
In 2023, Fort Polk was renamed for Henry Johnson, a Black World War I soldier who was wounded 21 times, suffering a permanent foot injury that would leave him with limited mobility, as he singlehandedly drove back a German raiding party in France in 1918.14 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 204-05. In 2015, Sgt. Johnson was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
In June 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the name Fort Polk restored. To evade the federal law banning the naming of installations for Confederates, the Trump administration claimed the base honors Gen. James H. Polk, who served in World War II.
Many believe the renaming dishonors Black Americans and dishonors Sgt. Johnson, who was in his 30s and near poverty when he died, having been unable to work regularly because of his war injury and yet denied the Army disability pay he was owed for his sacrifice to his country.15 Seidule and Williams, A Promise Delivered, 229. The name of this Black American war hero has been relegated to Fort Polk’s exchange, where service members go for haircuts and fast food.