Fort Bragg does have a venerable military history, of course. But its eponym, Gen. Bragg, not so much.
Bragg was a “merciless tyrant” who had an “uncanny ability to turn minor wins and losses into strategic defeat,” wrote Sam Watkins, who served under the man historians call the South’s worst and most hated general.
Bragg, a U.S. Military Academy graduate from North Carolina, first gained fame in the Mexican-American War when artillery troops fired projectiles called “grapeshots,” canvas bags filled with gunpowder and metal balls packed tightly like clusters of grapes. During the 1847 Battle of Buena Vista, Gen. Zachary Taylor rode his horse over to Bragg and supposedly said, “Give them a little more grape, Captain Bragg.” The phrase, a variation of the actual order, became so famous that Taylor used it in his successful 1848 presidential campaign.
But as a company commander, Bragg became known for his ruthless style that didn’t exactly endear him to his troops, such as the time he ordered a soldier to ride into enemy fire to retrieve harnesses from dead artillery horses. One soldier tried to kill Bragg, slipping a 12-pound artillery shell under Bragg’s cot; the shell exploded, destroying the cot, but Bragg was uninjured.
When the Civil War broke out, Confederate President Jefferson Davis called on Bragg to leave his Louisiana sugar plantation and 105 people he enslaved to be a rebel officer. In his first campaign as a full general, in 1862, Bragg brashly invaded Kentucky, figuring he would be welcomed with open arms. He issued a proclamation: “Kentuckians! I have entered your State with the Confederate Army of the West and offer you an opportunity to free yourselves from the tyranny of a despotic ruler” — meaning President Abraham Lincoln.
Bragg’s “insufferable piece of nonsense,” the Louisville Courier responded, “reminds us very much of the song, ‘Will you walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.’” Most Kentuckians didn’t rally to Bragg’s call, and he retreated by year’s end.
The day after Christmas, Bragg directed a firing squad to execute a 19-year-old infantryman, Asa Lewis, who had been convicted of desertion after going to the Kentucky home of his widowed mother without permission. When Confederate Gen. John Breckinridge of Kentucky appealed for mercy, Bragg sneered: “You Kentuckians are too independent for the good of the army. I’ll shoot every one of them if I have to.” Lewis’s execution proceeded.
Bragg led his troops the next year into Tennessee, where he suffered a string of losses, leaving Union troops in control of Middle Tennessee. In September, he finally scored a win at the bloody Battle of Chickamauga, in northern Georgia, but fellow officers, including Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, berated him for not pursuing the Union troops to stop them from retreating to nearby Chattanooga, Tenn.