McCown collected the type specimen of the species, but the name was changed anyway. A lot of the articles about this name change omit this fact and frame the original name somewhat disingenuously. While many of them claim that the name McCown’s Longspur “[memorialized] someone who fought to defend slavery” or was “named for a Confederate general” the species name was actually coined in 1851 (before the Civil War) because of McCown’s actual contributions to the discovery of the species.
For many people, the context above will be irrelevant. McCown later was a Confederate general and was involved in Native American forced relocations prior to the species discovery. However, the renaming of the species was often framed as the removal of a monument to slavery, which it most definitely was not.
Hold up: when you say the entire species is named for a single human, are you referring to species like Neotibicen linnei, Chrysina beyeri, and things like that? If so, that is something that has been going on for a long time. That is a practice called honoring an entomologist/other person, and the type of epithet is called a patronymic.
If a species has a patronymic, I believe it is acceptable for someone to name a beetle with the common name. Like, Linne’s (Linnaeus’s) Dog-day Cicada, or Beyer’s Jewel Scarab.
the people fighting for the Confederacy in the US civil war, themselves, literally said they were fighting it over slavery. This got conveniently ‘forgotten’ later by those who waht to use that conflict for political reasons now but no, it was about slavery.
Just because something doesn’t bother you doesn’t mean it isn’t hurtful to others. You don’t need to use the name, so if you do you are being willfully spiteful.
Don’t get me wrong, slavery was a huge part of the civil war, but it wasn’t the whole picture. Many people on the Confederate side, including soldiers, were anti-slavery and simply felt loyalty to their state over their country, and felt that the federal government was denying the state’s rights by telling them what they could or couldn’t do?
Nothing is black or white. The civil war was a complex conflict with many issues going on. Slavery was a major one, but simply explaining the civil war on those terms isn’t historically accurate.
I don’t like judging historical figures based on today’s values, but even if you do, just because someone fought on the Confederate side of the civil war does not mean they were slave owners or even in favor of slavery.