Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy

As a leading Confederate general, Braxton Bragg (181776) earned areputation for incompetence, for wantonly shooting his own soldiers, andfor losing battles. This public image established him not only as a scapegoatfor the Souths military failures but also as the chief whipping boy ofthe Confederacy. The strongly negative opinions of Braggs contemporarieshave continued to color assessments of the generals military career andcharacter by generations of historians. Rather than take these assessments atface value, Earl J. Hess's biography offers a much more balanced account ofBragg, the man and the officer.

While Hess analyzes Braggs many campaigns and battles, he also emphasizeshow his contemporaries viewed his successes and failures and howthese reactions affected Bragg both personally and professionally. The testimonyand opinions of other members of the Confederate armyincludingBraggs superiors, his fellow generals, and his subordinatesreveal howthe general became a symbol for the larger military failures that undid theConfederacy. By connecting the generals personal life to his military career,Hess positions Bragg as a figure saddled with unwarranted infamy andhumanizes him as a flawed yet misunderstood figure in Civil War history. See more