Braxton Bragg - Wikipedia

Braxton Bragg (March 22, 1817 – September 27, 1876) was a senior officer of the Confederate States Army who was assigned to duty at Richmond, under direction of the President of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, and charged with the conduct of military operations of the armies of the Confederate States from February 24, 1864, until January 13, 1865, when he was charged with command and defense of Wilmington, North Carolina. He previously had command of an army in the Western Theater.

Bragg, a native of Warrenton, North Carolina, was educated at West Point and became an artillery officer. He served in Florida and then received three brevet promotions for distinguished service in the Mexican–American War, most notably the Battle of Buena Vista.

He established a reputation as a strict disciplinarian, but also as a junior officer willing to publicly argue with and criticize his superior officers, including those at the highest levels of the Army. After a series of posts in the Indian Territory, he resigned from the U.S. Army in 1856 to become a sugar plantation slave owner in Louisiana.

During the Civil War, Bragg trained soldiers in the Gulf Coast region. He was a corps commander at the Battle of Shiloh and subsequently was named to command the Army of Mississippi (later known as the Army of Tennessee).

He and Edmund Kirby Smith attempted an invasion of Kentucky in 1862, but Bragg retreated following the inconclusive Battle of Perryville, Kentucky, in October. In December, he fought another inconclusive battle at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the Battle of Stones River, but once again withdrew his army. In 1863, he fought a series of battles against Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans and the Union Army of the Cumberland.

In June, he was outmaneuvered in the Tullahoma Campaign and retreated into Chattanooga. In September, he was forced to evacuate Chattanooga, but counterattacked Rosecrans and defeated him at the Battle of Chickamauga, the bloodiest battle in the Western Theater, and the only major Confederate victory therein. In November, Bragg's army was routed in turn by Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the Battles for Chattanooga.

Throughout these campaigns, Bragg fought almost as bitterly against some of his uncooperative subordinates as he did against the enemy, and they made multiple attempts to have him replaced as army commander. The defeat at Chattanooga was the last straw, and Bragg was recalled in early 1864 to Richmond, where he became the military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Near the end of the war, he defended Wilmington, North Carolina, and served as a corps commander in the Carolinas Campaign. After the war, Bragg worked as the superintendent of the New Orleans waterworks, a supervisor of harbor improvements at Mobile, Alabama, and as a railroad engineer and inspector in Texas.

Bragg is generally considered among the worst generals of the Civil War. Although his commands often outnumbered those he fought against, most of the battles in which he engaged ended in defeats. The only exception was Chickamauga, which was largely due to the timely arrival of Lieutenant General James Longstreet's corps.

Some historians fault Bragg as a commander for impatience and poor treatment of others. Some, however, point towards the failures of Bragg's subordinates, especially Leonidas Polk, a close ally of Davis and known enemy of Bragg, as the more significant factors in the many Confederate defeats at which Bragg commanded.