Field Notes

They’ve sounded retreat and lowered the flag over old Fort Bragg, sundowning the memory of a man who may rightfully claim his place along with with the bumbling Burnside, “Beast” Butler and Jubilation T. “Cornpone ” among the Civil War’s worst generals. A ferocious disciplinarian who survived two assassination attempts by his own men, a man so quarrelsome that it was said in the Army that if he could not find someone else to argue with he would pick a fight with himself, Braxton Bragg arguably contributed more to losing the Lost Cause than any other man wearing gray.

At Shiloh, he wasted hours in repeated frontal attacks on the Hornet’s Nest when he might have flanked the position and pressed on to break the union center and drive the federals back into the Tennessee River, ending U.S. Grant’s career before it had scarcely begun. His greatest victory, at Chickamauga, cost him 18,000 casualties the Confederacy could not afford to lose and was ultimately pointless because Bragg failed to follow up and entrap the retreating federals. Instead he went on to lose the supposedly impregnable Missionary Ridge and so Chattanooga, thus opening the way for Sherman’s March on Georgia. As Flashman says in the epitaph of another general, “We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again.”

Taken altogether it’s surprising we’re not erecting monuments to the man rather than ejecting him from the public square. Not that any of that would have mattered to or was likely even known to the “Naming Commission” that defenestrated him. Naming the North Carolina post after a Tar Heel native son was an attempt to unite a still divided nation as we marched into World War. “It was kind of a gesture of, ‘Yes, we acknowledge your patriotism,’ which is kind of absurd to acknowledge the patriotism of people who rebelled against a country,” according to Nina Silber, a historian at Boston University.

The professor is certainly aware Bragg and his men fought for their families, their homes and not least for the State’s Rights they had embedded in the Constitution. They believed with Lee that, “The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.” Robert E. Lee

None of that matters to those busily tearing down statues and renaming not just military bases but the mountains themselves; the only thing worth talking about is slavery. In that respect, I believe Bragg paid his full share in reparations. The Union Army freed his slaves and confiscated his plantation for use as the Bragg Home Colony under the control of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Most of the rest of his wealth was in worthless Confederate currency and bonds. So he exited the war worse than even his former slaves, who at least were left with a roof over their heads.

“To be truly human is to bear the burden of our own mortality and to strive, in grace, to help others carry theirs; sometimes lightly, sometimes courageously. In communally accepting death into our lives through the Irish wake we are all able to relearn the first and oldest lessons of humanity. How to be brave in irreversible sorrow. How to reach out to the dying, the dead and the bereaved. How to go on living no matter how great the rupture or loss. How to face your own.” https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/09/why-the-irish-get-death-right