RATING:
Braxton Bragg. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
There were flashes of brilliance, as when, after Shiloh, he put his army on a train to ride the long way round to Chattanooga to checkmate Don Carlos Buell, and there were spasms of ferocity, as when his II Corps went up against the Hornets’ Nest at Shiloh. Many of his contemporaries believed that he was a fine trainer of soldiers and that the harsh discipline he meted out was just the tonic for the unruly, ill-educated Confederate enlisted boy and man. More typically, however, Braxton Bragg showed himself to be pathologically disputatious, unimaginative, indecisive, hesitant, insufficiently aggressive, unwilling to exploit his few victories, and generally contemptuous of others. Perhaps the only major figure in the Confederate military hierarchy who had faith in him was Jefferson Davis. Of course, that counted for a great deal.
Principal Battles
PRE–CIVIL WAR
Second Seminole War, 1835–1842
U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–1848
Civil War
Great generals are often hard men. Braxton Bragg was a hard man, but no one would call him a great general. Sometimes, however, he came close to being just good enough.
Did his men love him?
During the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848), it is believed that he was twice the target of what today would be called attempted “fragging”—deliberate assassination by friendly fire. One attempt involved the detonation of a twelve-pound explosive artillery shell under his sleeping cot. The cot was a total loss. Bragg escaped unscathed.
Was he a fighter?
Absolutely. But not always with the enemy. In his Private Memoirs, U. S. Grant related an “old army” (that is, pre–Civil War) anecdote he called “very characteristic of Bragg.” Assigned to a typically undermanned western outpost during the early 1840s, Bragg was both a company commander and the post quartermaster. Grant related that Bragg once submitted a requisition to supply his company, but that, as quartermaster, he rejected his own request. In his capacity as company CO, he resubmitted the document, complete with justification for the expense, only, as quartermaster, to reject it again. Seeing no means of resolution, he appealed to an understandably incredulous post commandant. “My God, Mr. Bragg,” he sputtered in exasperation, “you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarreling with yourself!” That virtually all military historians believe the story is the stuff of fantasy and legend does nothing to diminish what it says about how contemporaries perceived Braxton Bragg. Alternately on the verge of success or breakdown, he was an enigma whose “military capabilities,” historian Ezra J. Warner observed in 1959, began an argument “during the war [that] has not ceased to this day.”
Braxton Bragg’s mother had to be released from prison to give birth to him, on March 22, 1817, in Warrenton, North Carolina. That fact alone may have laid on his shoulder a chip he would never allow anyone to knock off. Awaiting trial for having murdered a freed slave, Mrs. Bragg never denied killing the man, but she claimed it was self-defense because he had “disrespected” her. Although she was finally let go without the matter ever coming to trial, neighborhood boys would not let young Braxton forget the circumstances under which he came into the world, and, from then on, it seemed to one and all that he’d been born with what Grant called an “irascible temper” that made him “naturally disputatious.” That his father’s success in business failed to win him and his family acceptance among the local old-money “aristocracy” doubtless added to the boy’s freight of resentment, but it was the senior Bragg’s idea that Braxton should acquire the social imprimatur of a West Point education. Mr. Bragg’s eldest son, Thomas, was in the North Carolina state legislature and was able to call in a political favor that secured his younger son an appointment to the academy.
Enrolling in 1833, Braxton Bragg was, not unexpectedly, an unpopular cadet, but he nevertheless earned an enviable reputation as bright, hardworking, and “efficient.” He graduated in 1837, fifth in a class of fifty, and chose the artillery as his service branch. Commissioned a second lieutenant in the 3rd U.S. Artillery, he was sent to Florida, where he saw light action in the Second Seminole War (1835–1842). He then served in various posts, including on the western frontier, seeing no significant action but enduring much tedium before the outbreak of the U.S.-Mexican War.
Given the glacial pace of promotion in the nineteenth-century peacetime army, Bragg’s entry into the war at the regular army rank of first lieutenant under Major General Zachary Taylor suggests that his commanding officers rated him highly. This could have owed absolutely nothing to his personality. In 1843, while stationed at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, Bragg responded to a social invitation from his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel William Gates, with rudeness bordering on insubordination: “If you order me to drink a glass of wine, I shall have to do it.” On another occasion he was even hauled before a court-martial for publicly criticizing Major General Winfield Scott.
He proved to be a valiant and energetic light artillery battery commander in the war with Mexico, earning three brevet promotions and one permanent promotion. The first brevet, for valor at the Battle of Fort Brown (May 3–9, 1846), was to captain, which was made permanent in the regular army the next month. His second brevet, to major, came after the Battle of Monterrey (September 21–24, 1846), and the third, to lieutenant colonel, was the result of his conduct at the Battle of Buena Vista (February 22–23, 1847). Zachary Taylor took notice, as did Colonel Jefferson Davis, after Bragg’s timely artillery support extricated a part of Davis’s Mississippi Rifles from a particularly tight spot at Monterrey. Bragg and Davis forged a bond of personal and professional friendship that would become critically important during the Civil War.
Bragg received enough press coverage to emerge from the U.S.-Mexican War with a national reputation as a military hero, and when he returned to his hometown of Warrenton, no one dared cast aspersions on him or on his father’s “new money” pretensions. Universally feted, he was freely invited into parlors formerly closed to him. The war with Mexico had done nothing to improve Bragg’s looks—“sickly, cadaverous, haggard,” the British military diarist Lieutenant Colonel James A. L. Fremantle described him, with “bushy black eye-brows which united in a tuff on top of his nose”—but it had nevertheless made him infinitely more attractive, and in 1849 he married Eliza Brooks, a comely Louisiana heiress.
Bragg quietly carried out routine peacetime assignments until December 1855, when a dispute with his friend Jefferson Davis, now secretary of war in the Cabinet of Franklin Pierce, erupted into a major breach. Davis proposed to station artillery units in various western frontier posts. Artillerist Bragg objected to what he deemed the absurdity of “chas[ing] Indians with six-pounders” and called on Davis in Washington to tell him so personally. When the secretary refused to back down, Bragg tendered his resignation. Possibly to Bragg’s surprise, Davis jumped on it, accepting it without argument. It may also have been that Bragg deliberately used the dispute as an excuse to leave the army, which he did in January 1856, dipping into his wife’s money to finance a sugar plantation outside of Thibodaux, Louisiana.
While operating his sugar plantation, Bragg obtained two state appointments, one a lucrative position as state commissioner of public works and the other as colonel of the Louisiana Militia. On February 20, 1861, after Louisiana seceded from the Union, he was promoted to major general of the militia and was put in command of forces defending New Orleans. On March 7, 1861, his commission was transferred to the Provisional Army of the Confederate States, and on April 16 he was sent to Pensacola, Florida, to command coastal defenses as well as the Department of West Florida. Promoted to major general on September 12, 1861, his authority was extended the following month to include Alabama and the Gulf Coast, as well as the diminutive Army of Pensacola.
Bragg worked diligently to build up coastal defenses but warned Jefferson Davis that “our strength consists in the enemy’s weakness.” In other words, given the poverty of Southern military resources, the major ports of New Orleans and Mobile could not be expected to resist a sustained effort against them. Bragg did endeavor to do the best with what he had, and he transformed his small army into the best-trained, most highly disciplined force in the Confederacy. Recognizing his own talent for training troops—a “talent” that was built mainly on his willingness to impose draconian disciplinary penalties—Bragg offered to send his best four regiments to Virginia, where the action was hottest, in exchange for green Virginia recruits, whom he would whip into shape. It was a genuinely valuable and entirely unselfish contribution to the cause.
In February 1862, Davis ordered Bragg to reinforce Albert Sidney Johnston’s imperiled western command in Kentucky and Tennessee. He went to work training the combined forces, which were soon joined by a contingent under P. G. T. Beauregard, recruits (according to Bragg) who showed “more enthusiasm than discipline, more capacity than knowledge, and more valor than instructions.” He applied himself to these men as well, driven by a combination of genuine passion for instilling efficient discipline and his own ill temper, which was aggravated by a battery of ailments ranging from dyspepsia and migraine headaches to periodic nervous collapse.
Johnston directed Beauregard and Bragg to concentrate all available forces at Corinth, Mississippi, in preparation for a massive assault against Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee before it could be reinforced by Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio. By the start of April 1862, the Confederates had mustered some fifty thousand men at Corinth. Grant was vulnerable, encamped at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, with forty-two thousand men (Johnston, Beauregard, and Bragg thought he had more). Johnston ill-advisedly entrusted the detailed execution of his planned surprise assault entirely to Beauregard, who sufficiently botched the advance on Pittsburg Landing to delay the possibility of attack by two days. Convinced that the element of surprise had been lost, both Bragg and Beauregard advised Johnston to call off the attack, but he insisted that it go forward.
Largely because Grant had dropped his guard, leaving his encampment around Shiloh Church almost entirely undefended, the attack, launched on April 6, began extremely well and looked so promising that victory seemed certain. By midday, however, Confederate forces encountered a pocket of Union resistance so fierce that they dubbed the redoubt the “Hornets’ Nest.” Bragg led his II Corps strongly against the position, ordering his men to “drive the enemy into the river,” but after a half hour of continuous, bloody combat at the Hornets’ Nest, Beauregard ordered Bragg and the others to withdraw. To his credit, Bragg vehemently protested that it was essential to complete the attack before nightfall and that it was fatal to let up, but Beauregard pointed out that the men were exhausted, the fight drained out of them. He was confident, he said, that the Yankees could be finished off the next morning.
In the meantime, Albert Sidney Johnston had been mortally wounded, and Beauregard assumed full command. By the time Beauregard resumed the attack on April 7, Buell’s army had arrived to reinforce Grant, and, now outnumbered, the Confederates were driven into retreat. The opportunity was forever lost, both sides having spilled more blood than in any other battle so far: 10,699 killed, wounded, captured, or missing among the Confederates, and 13,047 among the Union forces.
On the very day that the Battle of Shiloh began, April 6, 1862, Bragg learned that he had been promoted to full general and named to command the Army of Mississippi. Having fallen back on Corinth on April 7, Beauregard decided to evacuate the town, leaving it to Union forces even though he had earlier claimed that to lose Corinth would be to “lose the whole Mississippi Valley and probably the cause.” Appalled, Davis seized on Beauregard’s decision to take an unauthorized medical leave of absence (his doctor had advised taking a water cure at Bladon Springs, Alabama) to cashier Beauregard and replace him with Bragg as commanding general of the Army of Tennessee.
The new commander believed it essential to rehabilitate a force that Beauregard had left a largely undisciplined mob. Through a combination of stern fatherly concern and harsh regulations—in which many transgressions, such as the unauthorized discharge of a firearm, were punishable by firing squad—he whipped the army into shape. Having put spine into his men, he decided that the next step was to use the army to check the advance of Buell’s Army of the Ohio to Chattanooga.
But how? Buell was two hundred miles away. How could he beat the Yankee to Chattanooga?
Bragg’s solution was brilliant. Instead of marching overland the two hundred miles to Chattanooga, he put the Army of Tennessee on trains for a nearly eight-hundred-mile roundabout rail journey south to Mobile, then northeast to Atlanta, and from Atlanta to Chattanooga. In this way, he made the trip in just two weeks, taking up defensive positions in Chattanooga well before Buell arrived. From his base in Chattanooga, Bragg next decided to invade Kentucky, a slaveholding border state that had not seceded from the Union but that had declared itself neutral in the Civil War. Bragg believed that a majority of Kentuckians would regard his entrance into their state as “liberation” from Northern oppression and would flock to the cause. He therefore led his army out of Chattanooga into Kentucky in August and, now pursued by Buell, easily captured the town of Munfordville, taking the entire Union garrison of 4,148 prisoner. From here, Bragg advanced to Bardstown and, on October 4, 1862, paraded his army through Frankfort, the state capital, to show support for the inauguration of Richard Hawes as the provisional Confederate governor.
Despite the installation of a Confederate governor, few people in Kentucky rallied to Bragg’s army and the cause it represented. As a result, Bragg grew increasingly nervous, especially as Buell’s Army of the Ohio had been reinforced to a strength of some seventy-seven thousand men.
On October 1, Buell sent two divisions toward Frankfort, as if intending to attack it. He led the rest of his army in continued pursuit of Bragg. Leading a wing of Bragg’s army, Major General Leonidas Polk clashed with Buell at Perryville on October 8 and scored a tactical victory, inflicting 4,276 casualties—killed, wounded, captured, or missing—for a loss of 3,401. General Edmund Kirby Smith, who had linked up with Bragg in the Kentucky invasion, implored him to exploit Polk’s initial gain: “For God’s sake, general,” he pleaded, “let us fight Buell here.”
“I will do it, sir,” Bragg replied. But he did no such thing. Instead, he issued an order to retreat out of Kentucky via the Cumberland Gap to Knoxville, Tennessee. In dispatches to Richmond, he described the retreat as a “strategic withdrawal” after a great “raid” into Kentucky.
Smith and Bragg’s other subordinates were not convinced. They condemned the so-called withdrawal as nothing more or less than a retreat, the product of a failure of nerve, and Bragg’s action has been the subject of debate ever since. Some believe Bragg’s justification that, with the defeat of Earl Van Dorn and Sterling Price at Corinth, Mississippi, and Lee’s withdrawal from Maryland after the Battle of Antietam, an isolated victory at Perryville would have actually cut off what Bragg described in a letter to his wife as his “noble little army,” leaving it surrounded by hostile forces, useless and subject to starvation. Others, however, interpret the retreat as a capitulation, the loss of yet another opportunity and the cancellation of a tactical victory by a self-inflicted strategic defeat.
Following his withdrawal from Perryville, Bragg’s star was in decline with the Southern press, the Confederate people, and most of his fellow commanders. Only his friend President Davis remained a steadfast supporter. On New Year’s Eve 1862, the general had an opportunity to redeem himself at the Battle of Stones River, near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, against William S. Rosecrans, whom President Lincoln had tapped to relieve the hesitant Buell as commander of the Army of the Ohio (now known as the Army of the Cumberland). Bragg attacked Rosecrans’s right and made considerable progress until Major General George Thomas rallied his men and pushed back. Bragg ordered up his reserves, who, however, failed to make a coordinated response and were defeated in detail. Nevertheless, Bragg wired President Davis his belief that “God has granted us a Happy New Year.”
The Battle of Stones River. KURZ & ALLISON LITHOGRAPH, CA. 1891
The joy did not last long. On January 2, Rosecrans counterattacked with an infantry assault supported by an artillery bombardment so intense that it “opened the door of hell” upon the Army of Tennessee, driving it back to where it had started from. Instead of regrouping and launching a new assault, Bragg, fearing that Rosecrans was about to be reinforced, withdrew. He did not withdraw his claim of victory, but few took that claim seriously as he yielded central Tennessee. A joke began to circulate through the ranks of the Confederate army: Braxton Bragg would never get to heaven because the moment he was invited to enter, he would fall back.
For the Army of Tennessee, it was a winter of discontent. Virtually every one of Bragg’s subordinate commanders expressed their loss of faith in him, and his top two generals, William J. Hardee and Leonidas Polk, wrote to Jefferson Davis to ask that Joseph E. Johnston be ordered to replace Bragg. Ill-tempered and emotionally inept as ever, Bragg retaliated with court-martials and threats of court-martial, but he also wrote to Davis to suggest that he comply and order his relief. With Bragg’s army on the verge of mutiny, Davis responded by authorizing Johnston, as commander of the Western Theater, to relieve Bragg of command if he thought fit to do so. Never one to act impulsively, Johnston personally visited Bragg and the army. He found that many generals were indeed hostile to their commander, but, to his surprise, he judged that morale among the army as a whole was intact, the army was well fed, reasonably well equipped, and certainly well disciplined. He concluded that it would do more harm than good to replace Bragg.
But Bragg was exhausted. In his celebrated Tullahoma Campaign of June 1863, Rosecrans had pushed the Army of Tennessee from one position to another, driving it from Tullahoma to Chattanooga and then into Georgia.
From Rosecrans’s point of view, he had Bragg on the run. Bragg, however, considered his withdrawal into Georgia a move in a “game of wits,” intended to dupe Rosecrans into believing he had been defeated when, in fact, he was continually taking on reinforcements. At last, on September 19, he turned on his pursuer just west of Chickamauga Creek, in Georgia. That first day, Bragg concentrated on holding the high ground until James Longstreet arrived with an entire corps to reinforce him. Bragg prepared his anxious men by telling them that they were being “held ready for an immediate move against the enemy,” and he exhorted them to trust “God and the justice of our cause,” which, together with “the love of the dear ones at home” made “failure . . . impossible,” so that “victory must be ours.”
On September 20, reinforced by Longstreet and three more divisions as well as a number of brigades, Bragg struck at the Union’s left flank, which broke, largely because, in the confusion of battle, Rosecrans, believing he was closing a gap in his line, actually opened one. Most of the Army of the Cumberland fell back in confusion on Chattanooga. Only George H. Thomas, the “Rock of Chickamauga,” stood fast, thereby preventing a rout that would have annihilated the Union army. Nevertheless, it was clear to Bragg that he had scored a great victory—albeit at a tremendous price (18,454 killed, wounded, captured, or missing versus 16,170 on the Union side). Mindful of the carnage, Bragg ordered his troops to stand down. There would be time enough to finish the battle the following day. Longstreet and Nathan Bedford Forrest, the generals who had led the reinforcements, raised vehement objection. Failing to persuade Bragg to press the army’s hard-won advantage, Longstreet fell silent. The fiery Forrest, however, railed at Bragg: “You have played the part of a damn scoundrel. . . . If you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path, it will be at the peril of your life.”
“Chattanooga from the North Bank of the Tennessee.” HARPER’S ILLUSTRATED WEEKLY
After Chickamauga, Bragg deployed his forces on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge to lay siege to the Army of the Cumberland in Chattanooga below. Ulysses S. Grant arrived on November 24 and, in coordination with the besieged army, swept Bragg from both positions over the next two days. Exhaustion and poorly placed artillery—a surprising error on Bragg’s part—contributed to what was very nearly a rout as the Army of Tennessee fled into Georgia.
Usually modest on the subject of his victories, Grant positively crowed that “an army never was whipped so badly as Bragg’s was.” No one would have agreed with this assessment more than Bragg himself who, on November 28, asked Davis to relieve him of command. Those orders came through two days later, and he was replaced by Joseph E. Johnston.
Three months after his relief at Chattanooga, Braxton Bragg was posted to Richmond, with official orders charging him “with the conduct of military operations of the Confederate States.” Technically, this made him something like general-in-chief of the Confederate armies. In actuality, he had been kicked upstairs to serve as President Davis’s personal military advisor without any direct authority of command.
If he was humiliated or even discouraged by this dubious “promotion,” Bragg did not betray such feelings. Instead, he applied himself diligently to improving massive problems of logistics and supply and to plugging loopholes in the conscription system of a Confederate military starved for manpower. In short order, his portfolio was expanded to include successive command of the defenses of Wilmington, North Carolina, the Department of North Carolina and Southern Virginia, the defenses of Augusta, Georgia, and the defenses of Savannah and Charleston. In January 1865, he was returned to command of the defenses of Wilmington, the only Confederate port not yet completely closed to blockade runners.
From January 13 to 15, 1865, a joint Union army and navy assault on Fort Fisher, sometimes called the “Gibraltar of the South,” which guarded Wilmington, succeeded in taking the fort and, with it, the town and its port. Bragg, who had delayed sending in more troops until it was too late, was able to withdraw the fort’s garrison intact.
Bragg now offered his services as a corps commander (in actuality the depleted “corps” was smaller than a normal division) in what was now Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee. Johnston accepted, and Bragg fought against William T. Sherman at the Battle of Bentonville, North Carolina. Outnumbered sixty thousand to twenty-one thousand, the Army of Tennessee struggled to what was largely a foregone conclusion: surrender. It was the last major engagement of the Civil War.
Bragg and his wife accompanied Jefferson Davis in flight from Richmond. They separated from the president and, in May, were picked up by Union forces, the commander of which immediately accepted Bragg’s parole and released him to find his way home. On reaching his Louisiana plantation, Bragg learned that it had been seized and sold at auction by federal authorities. Worse, he discovered that he now had a multitude of creditors but a dearth of friends. He hired himself out on a variety of jobs, ranging from civil engineer to insurance salesman, but his naturally disagreeable ways bounced him from one employment to another. Positions as New Orleans waterworks superintendent and chief engineer for the state of Alabama finally helped him do more than just scrape by, and a lucrative offer to become chief railroad inspector for the state of Texas lured him to Galveston, where, on September 27, 1876, while out for a stroll, he was felled by a massive stroke that killed him instantly.