Today in 1800, the man credited with providing the spark that lit the powder keg known as the Civil War was born in Torrington, Connecticut. The fourth of the eight children, John was born to Owen and Ruth, and he could trace his ancestry all the way back to 17th-century English Puritans. The family moved west to Hudson, Ohio, in 1805, where Owen opened a tannery. Owen soon hired an apprentice, Jesse R. Grant, father of future general and U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant.
Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War hero and 18th President of the United States
Owen became a supporter of the Oberlin Institute (the original name of Oberlin College) in its early stage, although he was ultimately critical of the school’s “Perfectionist” leanings, especially renowned in the preaching and teaching of Charles Finney and Asa Mahan. John withdrew his membership from the Congregational church in the 1840s and he never officially joined another church, but both he and his father Owen were fairly conventional evangelicals for the period with its focus on the pursuit of personal righteousness. John’s personal religion is fairly well documented in the papers of the Rev Clarence Gee, a family expert, now held in the Hudson [Ohio] Library and Historical Society.
John led a relatively quiet life until he heard about the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy, in 1837. In response to the murder, John publicly vowed: “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery! From 1846 to 1850, when he left Springfield, John was a regular parishioner at the Free Church, where he attended frequent abolitionist lectures by the noted
and celebrated abolitionists Sojourner Truth and the dynamic Frederick Douglass. In 1847, after speaking at the “Free Church”, Frederick Douglass spent a night speaking with John, after which he wrote, “From this night spent with John in Springfield, Mass. 1847 while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less hopeful for its peaceful abolition. My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this man’s strong impressions.”
Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. He was born a slave, but became an Abolitionist, Suffragist, Author, Editor, and Diplomat
Over the next twelve years, all of America came to know John, although not all of America was happy to know him. In particular, the citizens of Pottawatomie, Kansas were not pleased to see him. Nor were the citizens of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, a few years later. Here John had
Robert E. Lee, General CSA, Hero of the Confederacy
the opportunity to meet two future Southern heroes, Col. Robert Edward Lee and Lt. James Ewell Brown Stuart, known to his friends as Jeb, when they came to arrest him for his failed insurrection.
James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart, CSA General
John was hung for this, and his death sparked the War Between the States, and an anthem to victory for one side. Blow out the candles for John “Potowatamie” Brown.
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Hiram Ulysses Grant, but more commonly known as Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War leader and 18th president of the United States, is born on this day in 1822.
Ulysses H. Grant, Civil War Hero and 18th President
The son of a tanner, Grant showed little enthusiasm for joining his father’s business, so the elder Grant enrolled his son at West Point in 1839. It was in the process of joining West Point that his name was changed by accident, and he never bothered to correct it. Though Grant later admitted in his memoirs he had no interest in the military apart from honing his equestrian skills, he graduated in 1843 and went on to serve in the Mexican-American War, though he opposed it on moral grounds. He then left his beloved wife and children again to fulfill a tour of duty in California and Oregon. The loneliness and sheer boredom of duty in the West drove Grant to binge drinking. By 1854, Grant’s alcohol consumption so alarmed his superiors that he was asked to resign from the army. He did, and returned to Ohio to try his hand at farming and land speculation. Although he kicked the alcohol habit, he failed miserably at both vocations and was forced to take a job as a clerk in his father’s tanning business.
If it were not for the Civil War, Grant might have slipped quickly into obscurity. Instead, at the encouragement of one of his friends, a hot tempered red-haired fighter named William Tecumseh Sherman, he re-en-listed in the
US General, William Tecumseh Sherman, Civil War hero and the scourge of Georgia
army in 1861 and embarked on a stellar military career, although his tendency to binge-drink re-emerged and he developed another unhealthy habit: chain cigar-smoking. He struggled throughout the Civil War to control the addictions. In 1862, he led troops in the captures of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee, and forced the Confederate Army to retreat back into Mississippi after the Battle of Shiloh. (After the Donelson campaign, Grant received over 10,000 boxes of congratulatory cigars from a grateful citizenry.)
In 1863, after leading a Union Army to victory at Vicksburg, Grant caught President Lincoln’s attention. The Union Army had suffered under the service of a series of incompetent generals and Lincoln was in the market for a new Union supreme commander. In March 1864, Lincoln revived the rank of lieutenant general—a rank that had previously been held only by George Washington in 1798–and gave it to Grant. As supreme commander of Union forces, Grant led a series of epic and bloody battles against the wily Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Robert E. Lee, General CSA, Hero of the Confederacy
It all came to an end, however, on April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. As a side note, Lee would never tolerate anyone saying anything negative about Grant after this because of the magnanimity of his surrender terms. The victory solidified Grant’s status as national hero and, in 1868, he was elected to the first of two terms as president.
Grant’s talent as a political leader paled woefully in comparison to his military prowess. He was un-able to stem the rampant corruption of his administration and failed to combat a severe economic depression in 1873. There were bright spots in Grant’s tenure, however, including the passage of the Enforcement Act in 1870, which temporarily curtailed the political influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Civil War South, and the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which attempted to desegregate public places such as restrooms, inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement. In addition, Grant helped heal U.S. and British diplomatic relations, despite the fact that Britain had offered to supply the Confederate Army with the tools to break the Union naval blockade during the Civil War. He also managed to stay sober during his two terms in office.
Upon leaving office, Grant’s fortunes again declined. He and his wife Julia traveled to Europe be-tween 1877 and 1879 amid great fanfare, but the couple came home to bankruptcy caused by Grant’s unwise investment in a scandal-prone banking firm. Grant spent the last few years of his life writing a detailed account of the Civil War, urged on by his good friend, Mark Twain.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, humorist and author
He held off death by sheer will, the same sheer will that drove him to success in the war, until he deemed them completed and then died of throat cancer the same day, in 1885. Julia managed to scrape by on the royalties earned from his memoirs and a pension given her by Congress as the widow of a President.
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Today in 1861, Colonel Robert E. Lee resigns from the United States Army two days after he was offered command of the Union army and three days after his native state, Virginia, seceded from the Union. This will be the Union’s biggest loss in terms of commanders,
Robert E. Lee, General CSA, Hero of the Confederacy
and there will be no one to challenge his skill and genius until a former Army captain returns to the Army, after several years of failure in civilian life. Lee opposed secession, but he was a loyal son of Virginia. His official resignation was only one sentence, but he wrote a longer explanation to his friend and mentor, General Winfield Scott, later that day. Lee had fought under Scott during the Mexican War (1846-48),
General Winfield Scott, Union Army commander
and he revealed to his former commander the depth of his struggle. Lee spoke with Scott on April 18, and explained that he would have resigned then “but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted the best years of my life and all the ability I possess.” Lee expressed gratitude for the kindness shown him by all in the army during his 25-year service, but Lee was most grateful to Scott. “To no one, general, have I been as much indebted as to yourself for uniform kindness and consideration…” He concluded with this poignant sentiment: “Save in the defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.”
But draw it he would. Two days later, Lee was appointed commander of Virginia’s forces with the rank of major general. He spent the next few months raising troops in Virginia, and in July he was sent to western Virginia to advise Confederate commanders struggling to maintain control over the mountainous region. Lee did little to build his reputation there as the Confederates experienced a series of setbacks, and he returned to Richmond when the Union gained control of the area. The next year, Lee assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia after General Joseph Johnston was wounded in battle. Lee quickly turned the tables on Union General George B. McClellan, as he would
Joseph E. Johnston, General CSAUnion General George B. McClellan
several other commanders of the Army of the Potomac. His brilliance as a battlefield tactician earned him a place among the great military leaders of all time. Lee was able to outmaneuver or outwit every general who was forced to face him through the war. Every general but one, that is.
His name was Hiram. Although Hiram had a bad reputation that was mostly undeserved and exaggerated by his jealous colleagues, Hiram rose to prominence based upon his personal philosophy. That philosophy was forged in his time in the Mexican War, when he discovered that his fear of battle was matched by his opponent’s and he never forgot this vital lesson. Although he struggled with his studies, he was a master horseman. He had a superb level of concentration, and when he was at his desk writing, if he had to get up to get a paper, he maintained his seated posture all the way to the document and back to his chair, where he would continue writing as if he had never gotten up. It was later said that Hiram, when he rose to the top of the ladder, was the ONLY commander that Lee had any real trepidation about, because he knew that Hiram didn’t back up and wasn’t scared or bluffed into retreating, he just kept coming on. Hiram wasn’t known by his real name, due to an error back when he entered West Point. He was called Sam by his friends, but the name the world knew him by was Ulysses S. Grant.
Lt. General Ulysses Grant, Union Army
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Today, in 1865, at 7:22 a.m., President Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, dies
Abraham Lincoln, Martyred 16th US President
from an assassin’s bullet. Lincoln had lived for a long nine hours before finally succumbing to the severe head wound he sustained at Ford’s Theater in Washington the night before. An angry Con-federate actor and radical Confederate sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth, had
John WIlkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln
shot Lincoln in the back of the head while the presidential party had been attending Laura Keene’s acclaimed performance in Our American Cousin at a performance at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. the night before.
Booth, who had remained in the North during the war despite his Confederate sympathies, had orig-inally intended only to capture President Lincoln and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of the planned kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Even worse news lay ahead, as two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces. In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth had hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy.
Learning that Lincoln was to attend Ford’s Theater on April 14, Booth plotted the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into a paralyzing disarray.
William Henry Seward, Secretary of State under President Lincoln
On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell burst into Secretary of State Seward’s home, seriously wounding him and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled. Meanwhile, just after 10 p.m., Booth entered Lincoln’s private theater box unnoticed and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his head. Slashing an army officer who rushed at him, Booth leapt to the stage and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants]–the South is avenged!” Although Booth broke his leg jumping from Lincoln’s box, he managed to escape Washington on horseback. A 23-year-old doctor named Charles Leale was in the audience and rushed up to the presidential box immediately upon hearing the shot and Mrs. Lincoln’s scream. He found the president slumped in his chair, paralyzed and struggling to breathe. Several soldiers carried Lincoln to a house across the street and placed him on a bed. When the surgeon general arrived at the house, he concluded that Lincoln could not be saved and would die during the night.
Vice President Andrew Johnson, members of Lincoln’s cabinet and several of the president’s closest friends stood vigil by Lincoln’s bedside until he was officially pronounced dead at 7:22 am. The first lady lay on a bed in an adjoining room with her eldest son Robert at her side, overwhelmed with shock and grief.
The president’s body was placed in a temporary coffin, draped with a flag and escorted by armed cavalry to the White House, where surgeons conducted a thorough autopsy. Edward Curtis, an Army surgeon in attendance, later wrote that, during the autopsy, while he removed Lincoln’s brain, a bullet dropped out through my fingers into a basin with a clatter. The doctors stopped to stare at the offending bullet, the cause of such mighty changes in the world’s history as we may perhaps never realize. During the autopsy, Mary Lincoln sent the surgeons a note requesting they cut a lock of Lincoln’s hair for her.
Booth, pursued by the army and secret service forces, was finally cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died from a possibly self-inflicted bullet wound as the barn was burned to the ground. Another story, and the one that is more commonly believed, is that he was killed by one of the soldiers, Boston Corbett, who shot Booth through the openings between the slats in the burning tobacco barn. Of the eight other persons eventually charged with the conspiracy, four were jailed (including the doctor, Samuel Mudd, who added his name to popular lexicon as a synonym for losing popular support) and four were hanged, including a woman and the mother of one of the co-conspirators, Mary Surrat.
Mary Surratt, a victim of circumstantial evidence and mob mentality
The president’s death came only six days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War. Lincoln had just served the most difficult presidency in history, successfully leading the country through civil war. His job was exhausting and overwhelming at times. He had to manage a tre-mendous military effort, deal with diverse opinions in his own Republican party, counter his Demo-cratic critics, maintain morale on the northern home front, and keep foreign countries such as France and Great Britain from recognizing the Confederacy. He did all of this, and changed American history when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, converting the war goal from reunion of the nation to a crusade to end slavery.
Now, the great man was dead. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton said, “Now, he belongs to the ages.” Word spread quickly across the nation, stunning a people who were still celebrating the Union vic-tory. Troops in the field wept, as did General Ulysses S. Grant, the overall Union commander. Per-haps no group was more grief stricken than the freed slaves. Although the abolitionists considered Lincoln slow in moving against slavery, many freedmen saw “Father Abraham” as their savior. They faced an uncertain world, and now had lost their most powerful proponent.
News of the president’s death had traveled quickly and, by the end of the day, flags across the country flew at half-staff, businesses were closed and people who had recently rejoiced at the end of the Civil War mourned Lincoln’s shocking assassination. Lincoln’s funeral was held on April 19, before a funeral train carried his body back to his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. During the two-week journey, hundreds of thousands gathered along the railroad tracks to pay their respects, and the casket was unloaded for public viewing at several stops. He and his son, Willie, who died in the White House of typhoid fever in 1862, were interred on May 4.
His body was taken to the White House, where it lay until April 18, at which point it was carried to the Capitol rotunda to lay in state on a catafalque. On April 21, Lincoln’s body was taken to the railroad station and boarded on a train that conveyed it to Springfield, Illinois, his home be-fore becoming president. Tens of thousands of Americans lined the train’s railroad route and paid their respects to their fallen leader during the train’s solemn progression through the North. Lincoln was buried on May 4, 1865, at Oak Ridge Cemetery, near Springfield.
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Today, April 10, 1865, one day after surrendering his army to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, Confederate General Robert E. Lee addresses his army for the last time, and issues this farewell to his men.
“After four years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard-fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to the result from no distrust of them…I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen…I bid you an affectionate farewell.”
This closed the book on one of the most remarkable armies in history. The Army of Northern Virginia had fought against long odds for four years and won most of the battles in which it engaged the Union’s Army of the Potomac. Along the way, Lee was idolized by his troops as few military leaders ever have been. The final surrender was a bitter pill for Lee to swallow, but the grace of his final communiqué to his troops exhibited the virtues that made him the single most enduring symbol of the Confederacy.
The signing of the surrender is a historic event that overwhelms everyone. Many of the witnesses want some souvenir from this eventful day. General “Little Phil” Philip Sheridan buys the table the surrender was signed
US General Philip Sheridan
on from the owner of the house, Wilmer McCLean, and he gives to the man he considers his most valuable commander, General George Armstrong Custer. Custer rides home with the table strapped across his
Gen. George Armstrong Custer, hero of the Civil War and victim of the Indian Wars
horse, and gives it to his wife, Libby Custer. Sheridan will be Custer’s best protector from this moment on right up to the last, which will come on June 25, 1876.
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Today, April 9, 1865, it is finally over. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders his remaining
Robert E. Lee, General CSA, Hero of the Confederacy
28,000 troops at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War. Finally forced to abandon the Confederate capital of Richmond, and effectively blocked from joining the surviving Confederate force in North Carolina, and harassed constantly by enthusiastic Union cavalry, Lee had no other option.
Lt. General Ulysses S. Grant, USA
For more than a week, Lee had tried to outrun Grant to the west of Richmond and Petersburg in Virginia. After a ten-month siege of the two cities, the Union forces broke through the defenses and forced Lee to retreat. The Confederates moved along the Appomattox River, with Union General Philip Sheridan nipping at their heels all the way south. Lee’s army had little food, and they began to desert in
US General Philip Sheridan
large numbers on the retreat. When Lee arrived at Appomattox, he found that his path was blocked. He had no choice but to request a meeting with Grant. In retreating from the Union army’s Appomattox Campaign, the Army of Northern Virginia had stumbled through the Virginia countryside stripped of food and supplies. At one point, Union cavalry forces under General Philip Sheridan had actually outrun Lee’s army, blocking their retreat and taking 6,000 prisoners at Sayler’s Creek (it was also known as Sailor’s Creek). Desertions were mounting daily, and by April 8 the Confederates were surrounded with no possibility of escape.
On April 9, Lee sent a message to Grant announcing his willingness to surrender. The two generals met in the parlor of the Wilmer McLean home at one o’clock in the afternoon.
They met at a house in Appomattox at 2:00 p.m. on the afternoon of April 9. Lee was resplendent in his dress uniform and a fine sword at his side. Grant arrived wearing a simple soldier’s coat that was muddy from his long ride. The great generals spoke of their service in the Mexican War, and then set about the business at hand. Grant offered generous terms. Officers could keep their side arms, and all men would be immediately released to return home. Any officers and enlisted men who owned horses could take them home, Grant said, to help put crops in the field and carry their families through the next winter. These terms, said Lee, would have “the best possible effect upon the men,” and “will do much toward conciliating our people.” The papers were signed and Lee prepared to return to his men.
Wimer McCLean ca 1860. He tried to run from the war, but it started in his front yard and ended in his parlor.
In one of the great ironies of the war, the surrender took place in the parlor of Wilmer McClean‘s home. McClean had once lived along the banks of Bull Run, Virginia, the site of the first major battle of the war in July 1861. Seeking refuge from the fighting, McClean decided to move out of the Washington-Richmond corridor to try to avoid the fighting that would surely take place there. He moved to Appomattox Court House only to see the war end in his home.
Lee and Grant, both holding the highest rank in their respective armies, had known each other slightly during the Mexican War and exchanged awkward personal inquiries. Characteristically, Grant arrived in his muddy field uniform while Lee had turned out in full dress attire, complete with sash and sword. Lee asked for the terms, and Grant hurriedly wrote them out. All officers and men were to be pardoned, and they would be sent home with their private property–most important, the horses, which could be used for a late spring planting. Officers would keep their side arms, and Lee’s starving men would be given Union rations.
Shushing a band that had begun to play in celebration, General Grant told his officers, “The war is over. The Rebels are our countrymen again.” Although there were still Confederate armies in the field, and scattered resistance contin-ued for several weeks, for all practical purposes the Civil War had come to an end and the war was officially over. Four years of bloodshed had left a devas-tating mark on the country: 360,000 Union and 260,000 Confederate soldiers had perished during the Civil War.
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Today, in 1865, Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant finally capture the trenches around Petersburg,
Lt. General Ulysses S. Grant, USA
Virginia, after a dreary ten-month siege and Confederate General Robert E. Lee leads his troops on a desperate retreat westward.
Robert E. Lee, General CSA, Hero of the Confederacy
The ragged Confederate troops could no longer maintain the 40-mile network of defenses that ran from southwest of Petersburg to north of Richmond, the Rebel capital 25 miles north of Petersburg. Through the long winter, desertion and attrition melted Lee’s army down to less than 60,000, while Grant’s army swelled to over 120,000. Grant attacked Five Forks southwest of Petersburg on April 1, scoring a huge victory that cut Lee’s supply line and inflicted 5,000 casualties on the already thin lines. The next day, Lee wrote to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, “I think it absolutely necessary that we should
Jefferson Davis, First and Only President of the CSA
abandon our position tonight…” Davis began to pack the Government files.
Grant’s men attacked all along the Petersburg front. In the predawn hours, hundreds of Federal can-non roared to life as the Yankees bombarded the Rebel fortifications. Said one soldier, “the shells screamed through the air in a semi-circle of flame.” At 5:00 in the morning, Union troops silently crawled toward the Confederates, shrouded in darkness. Confederate pickets alerted the troops, and the Yankees were raked by heavy fire, but the determined troops poured forth and began over-running the trenches. Four thousand Union troops were killed or wounded, but a northern officer wrote, “It was a great relief, a positive lifting of a load of misery to be at last let at them.”
Ambrose Powell Hill, CSA General
Confederate General Ambrose Powell Hill, a corps commander in the Army of Northern Virginia and one of Lee’s most trusted lieutenants, rode to the front to rally his men. As he approached some trees with his aide, two Union soldiers emerged and fired, killing Hill instantly. Hill had survived four years of war and dozens of battles only to die during the final days of the Confederacy. When Lee received the news, he quietly said, “He is at rest now, and we who are left are the ones to suffer.”
By nightfall, President Davis and the Confederate government were in flight and Richmond was on fire. Retreating Rebel troops set ablaze several huge warehouses to prevent them from being captured by the Federals and the fires soon spread. With the army and government officials gone, bands of thugs roamed the streets looting what was left.
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Today in 1865, with the end in sight, the final campaign of the Civil War begins in Virginia when Union troops under General Ulysses S. Grant begin to move against the Confederate trenches built around
Lt. General Ulysses S. Grant, USA
Petersburg. General Robert E. Lee’s outnumbered Rebels were soon forced to evacuate the city and
Robert E. Lee, General CSA
begin a desperate race to escape to the west.
Eleven months earlier, Grant had moved his army across the Rapidan River in northern Virginia and began the bloodiest campaign of the war. For six weeks, Lee and Grant fought along an arc that swung east of the Confederate capital at Richmond. They engaged in some of the conflict’s bloodiest battles at Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor before settling into trenches for a siege of Petersburg, 25 miles south of Richmond. The fighting in the Wilderness and at Cold Harbor had earned Grant the uneviable nickname of “Butcher” as a result of the heavy casualties. Years later, Grant said that fight was a mistake. The trenches eventually stretched all the way to Richmond, and during the ensuing months the armies glowered at each other across a no man’s land. From time to time, Grant would launch attacks against sections of the Rebel defenses, but Lee’s men always managed to fend them off.
Time was running out for Lee, though, and he knew it. His army was dwindling in size to about 55,000, due to illness, soldiers not coming back from leave, and even mass desertions as the men could see the handwriting on the wall. On the other side of the trenches, Grant’s army continued to grow–the Army of the Potomac now had more than 125,000 men ready for service. On March 25, Lee attempted to split the Union lines when he attacked Fort Stedman, a stronghold along the Yankee trenches. His army was beaten back, and he lost nearly 5,000 men. On March 29, Grant seized the initiative, sending 12,000 men past the Confederates’ left flank and threatening to cut Lee’s escape route from Petersburg. Fight-ing broke out there, several miles southwest of the city. Lee’s men simply were not enought, in number or strength, to stop the Federal advance. On April 1, the Yankees struck at Five Forks, soundly defeat-ing the Rebels and leaving Lee no viable alternative. He pulled his forces from their trenches and raced west, followed by Grant. It was a race that even the great Lee could not win. Upon learning there were boxcars on a railroad siding that held the rations his men so desperately needed to go on, he fled to Danville. When he got there, the boxcars were there as well, but due to a mixup of instructions in the war Department, all they held was ammunition. Lee knew it was over, and there was no reason to sacrifice his men any further. He surrendered his army on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House.
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On this day in 1817, Confederate General Braxton Bragg is born in Warrenton, North Carolina. Bragg
CSA General Braxton Bragg, President Davis’s favorite and everyone else’s headache.
commanded the Army of Tennessee for 17 months, leading them to several defeats and losing most of the state of Tennessee to the Yankees.
Bragg graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1837, and went on to fight in the Seminole War of the 1830s and the Mexican War in 1846 and 1847. In Mexico, he earned three pro-motions but also managed to survived two assassination attempts by by his own soldiers. Bragg was temperamental and acerbic, a capable soldier but a difficult personality. These character flaws would later badly damage the Confederate war effort, as despite being a favorite of Jefferson Davis, Bragg fought with every other officer in the Confederate Army.
When the Civil War began, Bragg was appointed commander of the Gulf Coast defenses but he was quickly promoted to major general and then sent to join General Albert Sidney Johnston’s Army of
CSA General Albert Sydney Johnston
Tennessee. Bragg fought bravely at the Battle of Shiloh on April 6-7, 1862, leading attacks while having two horses shot out from under him. When Johnston was killed during the battle, Bragg became second in command to Pierre G. T. Beauregard. After Beauregard was forced to relinquish his command for
Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard
health reasons, Confederate President Jefferson Davis turned to Bragg.
Bragg’s record as army commander was absolutely dismal. He marched northward in the fall of 1862 to regain Kentucky, but was turned back at the Battle of Perryville in October. On New Year’s Eve, Bragg clashed with the army of Union General William Rosecrans at the Battle of Stones River, Tennessee
US General William “Old Rosey” Rosecrans
where they fought to a standstill, but Bragg was forced to retreat and leave the Union in control of central Tennessee. Then, in the summer of 1863, Rosecrans totally outmaneuvered Bragg, backing the Confederates entirely out of the state. Only at Chickamauga, Georgia, in September did Bragg finally win a battle, but the victory came in spite of Bragg’s leadership rather than as a result of his leader-ship. Bragg followed up his single victory by pinning the Yankees in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Union forces, now led by General Ulysses S. Grant, broke the siege in November and nearly destroyed Bragg’s
Lt. General Ulysses Grant
army. Bragg was finished, having now alienated most of his generals and lost the confidence of his soldiers. He resigned his command and went to Richmond, Virginia, to be a military advisor to President Davis. Bragg fled southward with Davis at the end of the war but both men were captured in Georgia. Bragg was soon released, and worked as an engineer and a railroad executive before his death in 1876.
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Photo courtesy of wikipedia.com
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