Cecily Zander

supposedly moved the paper over to the desk across the room his post commander desk and denied the request and said it had been improperly filed and sent it back and then he moved back across the room and he sat down at the quartermaster desk and wrote this explanation of why it had been properly done and then sent it back to the post commander who was him and then you know they sent it back all the way up to the kind of

Chief of the region for the army.

And he said, my God, Mr. Bragg, you've quarreled with every man in this army and now you're quarreling with yourself.

And that, I think, is the quintessence of Bragg's failure.

He could not get along with another human being.

He could he could hardly get along with his own mind.

Yeah, and that tells you the sort of paucity.

So the kind of general plan there in the First World War was name forts after the most famous American soldier from that state.

Bragg was a North Carolinian, and there were simply no others, I suppose, who they could have chosen.

Yeah.

No, not really.

He was someone who would sort of fixate on all the bad things that were going to happen.

You know, he would kind of spool out this scenario where if he did this, well, that was going to be disastrous, so he should do this, but that could also be disastrous.

And he sort of immobilized himself.

And his men sort of rarely knew what they were supposed to be doing.

And then he would tend to place blame for the failure...

Of a campaign or a battle on whichever subordinate had happened to sort of rub him the wrong way most recently.

And that's not something that commanding generals are supposed to do.

Well, he spends about six weeks sort of bumbling around central Kentucky.

He's facing a Union army under the command of Don Carlos Buell, not a name that rings through history, but one that I think haunted Braxton Bragg.