Editor’s note: part of a series on Civil War notables.
Braxton Bragg was a West Point-trained U.S. Army officer who became one of the Confederacy’s most prominent — and most criticized — generals in the Western Theater, commanding what became the Army of Tennessee from mid-1862 to late 1863.
Bragg was born in 1817 in Warrenton, North Carolina, to a moderately prosperous family. He entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and graduated near the top of this class. As a young officer, he served in the Second Seminole War and Indian removal operations in Florida. During the Mexican-American War, he earned three brevet promotions for distinguished service, especially for his aggressive artillery work.
At an event in his honor in Thibodeaux, Louisiana, he met Eliza Brooks Ellis, the daughter of a wealthy planter, and they married in June 1849. Bragg resigned from the Army in 1856 after her family helped purchase the Bayside sugar plantation on Bayou Teche, St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana, which he managed with enslaved labor.
Bragg joined the Confederate cause when Louisiana left the Union. In early 1861, he helped organize Louisiana state troops, seizing the federal arsenal at Baton Rogue on Jan. 11.