Phil Zwerling’s remarks at the debate August 22, 2023

I want to thank people for coming and Bruce Anderson for suggesting this debate.

I would like to begin by recognizing that we are uninvited guests on native lands.

That makes our name even more offensive. Our double whammy is the name FORT and the name BRAGG

First that name BRAGG.

Bruce Anderson wrote in the Anderson Valley Advertiser: “Stop the next ten Fort Braggers you see on the street and ask them who Braxton Bragg was. No one will know or care.”

What a damning charge. How can we not know our history? Has history been canceled in Fort Bragg?

I think there are 4 myths about Braxton Bragg that people here tell themselves to make them feel better about our name.

1) he did not own slaves/ Maybe his wife owned slaves

2) he was not a white supremacist

3) he did not favor Secession

4) the city was named before the Civil War when Bragg was considered a hero

All four of these comforting myths are lies.

1) Bragg owned enslaved people all his life. He was born into a slave owning family in North Carolina. When he went off to West Point it is likely that an enslaved person went with him to serve him. When he entered the Army as a First Lieutenant an enslaved man accompanied him to serve him. When he mustered out of the Army in 1856 he married a Louisiana woman and used her money to buy a 1,600 acre sugar plantation and 105 enslaved men, women and children. The plantation and the enslaved workers, were titled in his name only. He became one of the richest men in Louisiana on the sweat and misery of the enslaved people who worked 12 to 18 hours a day, six and a half days a week.

2) Bragg was a white supremacist. He thought slavery “just and necessary. We have a large class of our population in subordination. Give me well disciplined masters...and we shall never hear of insurrections” as he wrote in a letter.

3) Bragg favored Secession writing “The Union is already gone. The only question now is, can we reconstruct any government without bloodshed. I do not think we can....Our course [the Confederacy] is just and we must triumph.”

4) Bragg reached the apex of his military career in 1847 when as an artillery commander in the US invasion of Mexico he directed his battery while under enemy fire. He became known as the “Hero of Buena Vista.”

It was all downhill from there. After multiple battlefield losses in the Civil War, Confederate General Bragg was removed from battlefield command in 1863 and kicked upstairs as an aide to Confederate President Jeff Davis. One of Bragg’s biographies is aptly titled” “Braxton Bragg: the most hated man in the Confederacy.”

The military encampment Fort Bragg was indeed named in 1857 before Bragg betrayed his country by joining the Confederacy and killing our troops. However our City took the name Fort Bragg in 1889 long after the Civil War and a decade after Bragg’s death. They consciously chose his name.

What about the Fort?

Bruce Anderson also wrote in the AVA: “As a matter of verifiable historic fact, Fort Bragg was founded to protect Indians from the first wave of white settlers...— not murder them, one of many reasons to keep Fort Bragg as Fort Bragg.” This is another myth perpetuated to make us feel better about our history and our name.

In fact, I invite you and Bruce Anderson take a walk out on the Coastal Trail, where the park service has placed some signs that were developed with direct input from the descendants of our indigenous tribes. I quote from one:

"You're standing on land that was, in 1856, the Mendocino Indian Reservation. You might imagine that these 25,000 coastal acres were a refuge for our people, a place where survivors of European diseases, land theft, and white persecution could finally live in peace. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

“Like other reservations established along the coast, the Mendocino Indian Reservation operated like a concentration camp. The Fort Bragg army post was set up to keep our people confined and to force them into slave labor at the mills and on local ranches.

“Our children were abducted, sold, and forced into child labor and our women were brutalized. The Reservation was officially closed in 1868, amid these and other scandals, but whites had already settled much of the reservation land, using native improvements to justify property ownership.”

The US Army troops were the guards at the concentration camp

Troops were posted here, according to Indian Agent Henry Ford, “ for the better security of employees and the preservation of government property.” (History of the Mendocino Indian Reservation by Robert Winn, p. 18 They were nerver meant to protect Indigenous people.

G. Markle of Cloverdale wrote in a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1859 describing how white men with guns were taking young Indian women from their husbands. This was so common on the Mendocino Indian Reservation that, wrote Markle, the men called it “The U.S. Brothel.” (Winn p. 24)

Indian Commissioner P.N. Cooley’s report to the Secretary on the Interior in 1866 noted: “It is said that the the soldiers and employees of the [Mendocino] reservation would make incursions into the interior valleys and corral and drive the Indians into the reservation just as they would so many wild hogs or cattle. It was immaterial if a tribe was hostile or not, all Indians were considered legitimate game for these paid man-hunters.” (Winn, p. 16)

Army operations often facilitated slaving and sex trafficking. On July 15, 1861, Northern California Indian Affairs superintendent George M. Hanson reported that, ‘‘In the frontier portions of Humboldt and Mendocino counties a band of desperate men have carried on a system of kidnapping for two years past: Indian children were seized and carried into the lower counties and sold into virtual slavery. These crimes against humanity so excited the Indians that they began to retaliate by killing the cattle of the whites.’’ Following this resistance, ‘‘At once an order was issued to chastise the guilty.’’ Thus, ‘‘a company of United States troops, attended by a considerable volunteer force, has been pursuing the poor creatures from one retreat to another. The kidnappers follow at the heels of the soldiers to seize the children when their parents are murdered and sell them to the best advantage.’’
Geo. M. Hanson, Superintending Agent Indian Affairs, Northern District of California to William P. Dole, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, July 15, 1861, in United States Office of Indian Affairs, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, For the Year 1861 (Washington, D.C., 1861), 149.

In his book “An American Genocide” Benjamin Madley writes “The U.S. Army waged genocidal campaigns against California Indians.” (p. 14)
We have these comforting myths but now it is time to face the real history of Bragg and the Fort.

Concluding Remarks

It might seem strange to be listening to two older white guys talk about slavery and racism. But not if you think about it. Other white men caused this - they were in the Army, they were enslavers, they were settlers and it is up to us to do something about it today.

We are, I believe, in the midst of a 3rd Civil Rights movement. Statues of Confederates and enslavers have been removed in Richmond, VA. the former capitol of the Confederacy. Schools are being renamed - think of Hastings Law School. The nine Army bases below the Mason-Dixon line named for Confederate Generals have now be all been renamed. Congress voted to change the names. How many things get bipartisan support in Congress today? The House of Representatives voted 295-125 to change the names and the Senate voted 86 to 14 and when President Trump vetoed the name changes, Congress voted by over 2/3 to override the veto.

We are now the only place in the country named Fort Bragg

A friend wrote to me about changing the name of Fort Bragg: “Surely everyone agrees it’s an honor to have a town named after you. It tells the world, including our children, this person has done something we admire. What exactly did Bragg do that is worthy of admiration? Naming our town after a Confederate general honors the Confederacy that killed almost half a million US citizens in a crazy war to preserve slavery. Is that what we value, slavery and the attempt to preserve it? Is that what we want to honor? Is that what we want to teach our children? We are better than this.”

But this about more than a name change. We have to confront those comforting myths of History we have been telling ourselves. Erasing reminders of America's bloody history is a bad idea because it also erases the truth of what happened. We are now excavating the truth from under the lies that have accrued and listening to the voice of Indigenous people who have been canceled in revisionist books written by whites.

If I could change the name of Fort Bragg tomorrow I would not do it.

Just changing the name of this city may do little but if it involves public education, a reexamination of the past, a changing of attitudes and if accompanied by other actions - like giving land back to Indigenous people, reparations to Black and indigenous people, better education about Indigenous people in FBUSD, a cultural Center , more educational material available in places like the remaining Fort building - then it can be meaningful.

The history here was violent and genocidal. The name Fort Bragg is offensive because it white washes our history. A new name is a new beginning for our city.