As commander of the Army of the Mississippi, Braxton Bragg (Fort Bragg, North Carolina) was outmaneuvered in several campaigns; defeated Union forces at Chickamauga but was then routed by U.S. Grant in the battle of Chattanooga.
Relieved of his command by Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, Bragg has been deemed one the most incompetent generals in the Civil War.
One of the Confederacy’s youngest generals, George Washington Gordon (Fort Gordon, Texas) was captured at the Battle of Franklin in 1864 and remained a prisoner for the remainder of the war.
A brigade commander for most of the Civil War, Henry Benning (Fort Benning, Georgia) supported the Confederacy because it “put slavery under control of those most interested in it.”
Plucked from obscurity in the early 20th century to please southern segregationists, these dead White men – and generals P.G.T. Beauregard, A.P. Hill, Robert E. Lee, George Pickett, and Edmund Rucker – all of whom fought to destroy the Union, do not represent “the Greatest Nation in the World” to which President Trump referred in his tweet.
