Braxton Bragg:
The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy
Earl J. Hess
University of North Carolina Press, 2016, 368 pp., $35.00
Review by Gordon Berg
Among Civil War enthusiasts and
scholars, Braxton Bragg has long occupied a place near the top of the list of
generals we love to hate. Truth be told,
he did a lot to earn the reputation both during his lifetime and after. But a reevaluation of his personality and
professional capabilities by a reputable scholar is long overdue and Earl Hess
is just the man to do it.
Hess is a prolific author on many Civil
War subjects with a well-earned reputation for shedding new light on long
accepted theses. Bragg could not have
asked for a more thoughtful, careful, and scrupulously honest evaluator. "Historians," Hess maintains,
"have tended to see Bragg as the actor in creating a circle of negativity
around him, but we also must understand that he was in turn deeply affected by
the actions and opinions of others."
Fortunately, Hess has never been awed by pedigree, either from the
subjects he investigates or from fellow historians with whom he spars,
intellectually of course. This tends to
make him a lively and informative read.
The book is an investigation of Bragg's
military career, not a full blown biography.
Nevertheless, Hess makes clear that Bragg's wife Elsie was the
staunchest--and sometimes the only--source of emotional support for him. Bragg's inability to form personal
attachments and accept the limitations of others haunted him throughout his
military career. "He saw life in
black-and-white terms," Hess posits, "had scant ability to accept the
complexities to be found in others, and possessed a stubborn streak that served
him ill in his relations with subordinates."
The breadth of Hess' expertise allows
him to analyze carefully Bragg's abilities on the battlefield, both as a
tactical commander and as the commanding general of an entire army. Bragg fought with distinction at Shiloh although
he can rightly be criticized for inserting his units piecemeal into the fray. Hess believes that the troops
of the Army of Tennessee did some of their best fighting under Bragg's command
at Stones River. At Chickamauga, the
Army of Tennessee was at the height of its powers and achieved one of the
Confederacy's few tactical victories in the West. Nonetheless, Hess boldly writes, "The sad
truth was that all three of Bragg's corps commanders--Polk, Longstreet, and
Hill--were willful, unreliable subordinates who could not be counted on to
obey orders or to cooperate with their commanders." Not surprisingly, this nest of vipers spawned
the revolt of the generals that spread through Bragg's army and percolated up
to the attention of President Jefferson Davis.
Bragg never fully recovered from this attempted coup de grace.
Too many historians, Hess believes, have
relied on negative observations and conclusions offered by Bragg's subordinates and which
were repeated in newspapers of the day and, as a result, have become cemented
in the historical record. Hess, on the
other hand, sees Bragg as "an officer of undoubted qualities" that
included being "hardworking, meticulous, detail-oriented and extremely
self-disciplined." Of course, those
same qualities can be attributed to someone who is overbearing, petty, and
reclusive. Bragg has often been seen
that way as well.
Hess writes with an easy grace born of
erudite scholarship and years in the classroom challenging fresh eyes to look
upon old stories and interpret them in new ways. Readers may or may not come away with the same
interpretation of Bragg as Hess posits, but it is hard to argue with his final assessment of the general: "Bragg was a fascinating mixture of good
and bad qualities; his impact on Confederate history was enormous, and we are
still grappling with it." Clearly
Hess makes no claim on having the last word about his subject. Good historians never do.
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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org). His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.
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