General Braxton Bragg

“ He was accompanied in the carriage by General Braxton Bragg—the "Little-more-grape-Captain-Bragg" of Mexican war memory. By the way, persons who ought to know declare that General Taylor never used the expression, his actual language being: "Captain Bragg, give them ----!"
President Lincoln's Inaugural, looked for with intense interest, has just arrived. All the papers denounce it bitterly. The Delta, which has advocated Secession these ten years, makes it a signal for the war-whoop:—
"War is a great calamity ”

“ On the other side was Braxton Bragg, brother-in-law of Jefferson Davis, who could never forget Bragg's kinship, and the service that he had done fifteen years before at Buena Vista, when he had broken with his guns the last of Santa Anna's squares, deciding the victory. By the side of him was Hardee, the famous tactician, taught in the best schools of both America and Europe. Then there was Polk, who, when a youth, had left the army to enter the church and become a bishop, and who was now a soldier again and a general. ”

“ Where was that escaped picket? And where was Braggs' army? Instantly we formed in line of battle and commenced digging holes for ourselves. We worked like beavers, turn about; no spade was idle for one moment. Daylight found us there, two thousand strong, with rifle pits a mile in length. Other brigades got over the river, pontoons soon were down; still other troops, whole divisions, were across, and forty cannon were massed close to the crossing to protect us. What a sight was that for General Bragg, when he woke up that morning at his headquarters' perch, on top of Missionary Ridge! ”

“ He had twenty thousand men, and General Taylor's troops were reduced in numbers. The fight was a hot one, lasting all day, and the Americans were saved by Bragg's artillery. Bragg used the old Colonial method of rolling his guns up to the nose of the enemy and then discharging an iron-foundry into his midst. This disgusted the enemy so that General Santa Anna that evening took the shreds of his army and went away.
THE FIGHT WAS A HOT ONE.
General Kearney was sent to take New Mexico and California. ”

“ General Bragg rested his forces for a few days and renewed the fight around Chattanooga, Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. He found the enemy well fortified and ready. The battle was a sanguinary one; Howell's battery besides losing two pieces of artillery, which were recovered in the evening and returned to us, lost in wounded, Leonidas Hines, Frank Bailey and Corporal Braswell, and captured James Mullen, John S. Kelley, John Tompkins and John Braswell. That night General Bragg withdrew as quietly as possible and went into camp at Dalton, where we spent in winter quarters. ”

“ The army was routed, and Bragg looked so scared. Poor fellow, he looked so hacked and whipped and mortified and chagrined at defeat, and all along the line, when Bragg would pass, the soldiers would raise the yell, "Here is your mule;" "Bully for Bragg, he's h—l on retreat."
Bragg was a good disciplinarian, and if he had cultivated the love and respect of his troops by feeding and clothing them better than they were, the result would have been different. More depends on a good general than the lives of many privates. The private loses his life, the general his country. ”

“ For ten long hours the fighting went on. The Mexicans gained the high ground above the pass and put the American troops in danger. Charge after charge was made, but like bulldogs the Yankee soldiers held their ground. On came the dashing Mexican lancers, shouting their war-cry of "God and Liberty," and charging a battery commanded by Captain Bragg. The lancers captured some of the guns and drove the soldiers back. Captain Bragg sent a messenger in haste to General Taylor, saying that he must have more men or he could not hold his ground.
"I have no more men to send you," said Rough and Ready. ”

“ Then a strapping fellow with a big rawhide would make the blood flow and spurt at every lick, the wretch begging and howling like a hound, and then he was branded with a red hot iron with the letter D on both hips, when he was marched through the army to the music of the "Rogue's March." It was enough. None of General Bragg's soldiers ever loved him. They had no faith in his ability as a general. He was looked upon as a merciless tyrant. The soldiers were very scantily fed. Bragg never was a good feeder or commissary-general. Rations with us were always scarce. ”

“ No extra rations were ever allowed to the negroes who were with us as servants. No coffee or whisky or tobacco were ever allowed to be issued to the troops. If they obtained these luxuries, they were not from the government. These luxuries were withheld in order to crush the very heart and spirit of his troops. We were crushed. Bragg was the great autocrat. In the mind of the soldier, his word was law. He loved to crush the spirit of his men. The more of a hang-dog look they had about them the better was General Bragg pleased. Not a single soldier in the whole army ever loved or respected him. ”

“ He is the same kind of a man as General Bragg—no more heart than a tiger, I have seen a good deal of the inside of the rebel army, unt General Bragg is the coldest-blooded, cruelest man in it or in the whole world. ”

“ Nearly half of Bragg’s army consisted of recent reinforcements, sent to Northern Georgia while the authorities at Washington, perplexed with the military situation, were resting under the delusion that General Bragg was reinforcing Lee. But this heavy draft upon the resources of the Confederacy was burdened with the fatality which clung to all the grander efforts of the insurgents in the west. And General Bragg’s broken and exhausted army was a symbol of the fast-coming exhaustion of the Confederacy itself. ”

“ On the morning of the 21st the enemy failed to advance, and his inaction gave us the opportunity for getting the broken and disorganized army into shape. It took a large part of the day to accomplish this, and the chances of complete victory would have been greatly in Bragg's favor if he could have attacked us vigorously at this time. But he had been badly hurt in the two days' conflict, and his inactivity on the 21st showed that he too had to go through the process of reorganization. ”

“ All these crossings of the plateau were made without resistance by the enemy, although there were small Confederate cavalry outlooks here and there, which fell back when the Union troops appeared. It seemed as if Bragg desired to have the Union Army advance as far as possible from its base of supplies into the mountain gorges and over a long and difficult line of communications. That course would afford him a better chance, as his army being reinforced would be in better condition to successfully attack and destroy the Union Army. ”

“ How strange is it that a commander who could thus resolve to fight his foes, when he believed them to be united, should fear to encounter them separately. Whatever may be the verdict upon General Polk's disobedience of orders, whether it was one of those cases in which a subordinate can rightfully exercise this discretion or not, the fact of General Bragg's incompetency looms up in unmistakable proportions.
The most remarkable feature of General Bragg's conduct was this strange, unexampled vacillation. ”

“ On the 23d of June Bragg was covering his position north of Duck River with a front extending from McMinnville, where his cavalry rested, through Wartrace and Shelbyville to Columbia, his depot being at Tullahoma. Rosecrans, thinking that Bragg would offer strong resistance at Shelbyville—which was somewhat protected by a spur of low mountains or hills, offshoots of the Cumberland Mountains —decided to turn that place; consequently, he directed the mass of the Union army on the enemy's right flank, about Manchester. ”

“ Pursuit of the enemy was not continued in force beyond Crab Orchard, but some portions of the army kept at Bragg's heels until he crossed the Cumberland River, a part of his troops retiring to Tennessee by way of Cumberland Gap, but the major portion through Somerset. As the retreat of Bragg transferred the theatre of operations back to Tennessee, orders were now issued for a concentration of Buell's army at Bowling Green, with a view to marching it to Nashville, and my division moved to that point without noteworthy incident. ”

“ Said Bragg: "An educated soldier, possessing in an eminent degree the love and confidence of his officers and men, he had been specially selected for this important and perilous post. The result fully vindicates the fortunate choice, and presents for our admiration, blended in perfect harmony, the modest but heroic soldier with the humble but confiding Christian." Villepigue was appointed chief of engineers and artillery on the staff of General Bragg, was for a time in command at Pensacola, then was at Mobile, and joining Bragg was promoted brigadier-general early in 1862. ”

“ There are those born into our lives who seem always to oppose, thwart, counteract what we do. Braxton Bragg had played this part in my life. I could not escape him, try as I would. Even when I was in Germany, with an ocean between us, had he not cheated me of my own birthright? He was with his company in the city of Nashville, where the Tennessee troops were mobilized for the war. ”

“ It is not infallibly certain that General Bragg could have defeated Buell. Nothing is positively certain in a military sense, not even the impregnability of a work built by a West Pointer, and pronounced so by a committee of his classmates. War is a game of various and varying chances. What I mean to urge, is, that General Bragg should, under all the circumstances, have, by all the rules of the game, risked the chances of a battle. ”

“ Bragg’s army remains in front of the enemy’s defenses, with orders not to assault him. The only thing Bragg has done well (says Gen. ——) was to order the attack on the 19th of September; everything else has been wrong: and now only God can save us or help us—while Bragg commands. He begs that Gen. Lee be sent there, while the Army of Virginia remains on the defensive, to prosecute offensive measures against Rosecrans. He says Bragg’s army has neither organization nor [Pg 66] mobility; and B. cannot remedy the evil. ”

“ From 1859 to 1861 he was commissioner of the board of public works of the state. When in 1861 the Civil War began, Bragg was made a brigadier-general in the Confederate service, and assigned to command at Pensacola. In February 1862, having meanwhile become major-general, he took up a command in the Army of the Mississippi, and he was present at the battle of Shiloh (April) . The vacancy created by the death of Sidney Johnston at that battle was filled by the promotion of Bragg to full general’s rank, and he succeeded General Beauregard when that officer retired from the Western command. ”

“ On September 12, General Leonidas Polk was ordered to attack Crittenden the next day, at Lee and Gordon’s Mill. Polk would not attack however, without reinforcements. Bragg spent the next five days getting his army in position along the west Chickamauga Creek, and on its east side from the north end of Pigeon Mountains to Reed’s Bridge. Brigadier-General B. R. Johnson, who had been holding Ringgold on the east side of the Chickamauga with one brigade, moved on the 18th to Reed’s Bridge on the west Chickamauga; this caused his force to become the extreme right of Bragg’s line. ”

“ General Bragg, to him it appeared, had sent him upon the most dangerous mission of the war, and as if to render the task doubly hazardous, had taken from him the men he so much needed for the work he was required to do, and had given him instead men whose inexperience and lack of drill and discipline would render his success full of uncertainty and well-nigh impossible. ”

“ Before the battle, each general overestimated the strength of the other and underestimated his own. On September 12th, General Rosecrans believed that "the main body of Johnston's army had joined Bragg," and that he had been heavily reinforced from Virginia. The truth is, that so far as Bragg's reinforcements affected the engagements of the armies at Chickamauga, they did not add a man more than 10,000 to Bragg's strength, if, indeed, they added so many. ”

“ The physical disability was denied or contested, but even granting this, his detractors claimed that it did not excuse his ignorance of the true condition of the fight, and finally worsted his champions by pointing out that Bragg's retreat by way of Harrodsburg beyond Dick's River so jeopardized the Confederate army, that had a skillful and energetic advance of the Union troops been made, instead of wasting precious time in slow and unnecessary tactical manoeuvres, the enemy could have been destroyed before he could quit the State of Kentucky. ”

“ It is sufficient to say they are entirely unsatisfactory.
If Bragg's contention that the way to the main Chattanooga road from his right — that is, around the left flank of Thomas and to his rear — was open early in the morning, was well-founded, the salvation of the Union army from entire destruction was doubtless due to the delay of the rebel attack. But a search of all the reports of the general officers commanding on the rebel right failed to discover any evidence corroborating Bragg's allegation. ”