In the case of street names that memorialize Confederates in New York, jurisdiction is an issue, especially on an Army base. The plaque that marked the Brooklyn tree planted by Lee was on private property: the lawn of a boarded-up Episcopal church. Its takedown was fairly straightforward; the local Episcopal bishop had the authority to remove it, and did so a few weeks after I called his office to ask about its status. A tree is still there, but it is not the same tree that Lee planted. It is a replacement tree, planted by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or U.D.C., the original installers of the plaque, which commemorated Lee’s attendance at the church. The U.D.C has deep roots in New York City, and has spent a century working to make the Confederate generals seem less like they were part of an armed white-secessionist movement and more like patriotic heroes of a civil, if not genteel, war.
As the rally took place yesterday, in a park adjacent to Fort Hamilton, city police guarded the base’s gate on the city side, blocking it with patrol cars, while the gate was guarded on the inside by Army personnel, standing, it appeared to me, very near another U.D.C. memorial to Robert E. Lee: a plaque on a boulder. That plaque offers details on Lee. “Then Captain, Corps of Engineers, U.S.A. resided on this site 1841-1846,” it says, adding, “Presented by New York Division United Daughters of the Confederacy.” Lee, a West Point-trained engineer, was assigned to the base in 1841, charged with improving its defenses. (He also designed the defenses for Fort Tompkins, across the Narrows, in Staten Island.) Stonewall Jackson arrived in 1848, just after Lee left to fight Mexico, in 1847.
At the beginning of the summer, Clarke wrote to the Secretary of the Army to ask that names of the streets be changed. The office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army wrote back to deny the request. “The great generals of the Civil War, Union and Confederate, are an inextricable part of our military history,” the office wrote. “The men in question were honored on Fort Hamilton as individuals, not as representatives of any particular cause or ideology. After over a century, any effort to rename memorializations on Fort Hamilton would be controversial and divisive. This is contrary to the Nation’s original intent in naming these streets, which was the spirit of reconciliation.”