Fort Hood & Voluntary Service

The Naming Commission's report suggests that their outcomes were determined prior to doing research to confirm "voluntary" service. The best evidence for that is the case of John Bell Hood.

The Naming Commission on page 42 states: "While serving as an officer in the U.S. Army, he offered his services to his adopted state of Texas and fought with the Confederate Army." By the "facts" they present, Hood is not volunteering for the Confederate Army, but the militia of his adopted state.

In truth, Hood's own memoir, Advance & Retreat, he declared that he first offered his services to his native state of Kentucky but could not get a clear answer whether the state would secede. Therefore, he joined the Confederate Army, by his own admission. While these facts tend to support voluntary action, The Naming Commission has no standard to follow. A variety of Constitutional views could still support this as obligatory since Texas already considered itself part of a new Confederation. We can only assume that the commission is afraid of setting a consistent standard because some of these bases will not qualify for renaming.

The Naming Commission accidently admits in this paragraph that men did not make decisions just for slavery but based upon where they intended to settle or where their military service in the United States military took them. Yet, as we will see in the paragraph about Lee in Part I, the commission suddenly believes that the state registration at West Point was a factor in determining which state a man would serve with during the Civil War. These important historical details explain exactly why the no consistent standards are established.