Braxton Bragg progressed through a diverse and demanding career to become a military strategist and ultimately General-in- Chief of Confederate States of America (CSA) Armies. General Braxton Bragg devoted over four years, of his life to senior CSA Army leadership positions, mostly in command. He surpassed every general officer in the CSA and Union in holding such a wide range of senior officer responsibilities. Bragg observed closely and operated in and around the operational and strategic environment for the majority of his life. By virtue of his previous duties, assignments, and experiences, Bragg observed, participated in, and influenced hundreds of meetings and decisions that are best described as "strategic art." He developed his strategic competencies through: civilian and military education; an honorable, diverse, demanding, and rare service and assignment history; and, life-threatening experiences that only a few would ever taste. Braxton Bragg strategized with the best experts of his day.

Braxton Bragg progressed through a diverse and demanding career to become a military strategist and ultimately General-in- Chief of Confederate States of America (CSA) Armies. General Braxton Bragg devoted over four years, of his life to senior CSA Army leadership positions, mostly in command. He surpassed every general officer in the CSA and Union in holding such a wide range of senior officer responsibilities. Bragg observed closely and operated in and around the operational and strategic environment for the majority of his life. By virtue of his previous duties, assignments, and experiences, Bragg observed, participated in, and influenced hundreds of meetings and decisions that are best described as "strategic art." He developed his strategic competencies through: civilian and military education; an honorable, diverse, demanding, and rare service and assignment history; and, life-threatening experiences that only a few would ever taste. Braxton Bragg strategized with the best experts of his day.

As a leading Confederate general, Braxton Bragg (1817–1876) earned a reputation for incompetence, for wantonly shooting his own soldiers, and for losing battles. This public image established him not only as a scapegoat for the South's military failures but also as the chief whipping boy of the Confederacy. The strongly negative opinions of Bragg's contemporaries have continued to color assessments of the general's military career and character by generations of historians. Rather than take these assessments at face value, Earl J. Hess's biography offers a much more balanced account of Bragg, the man and the officer. While Hess analyzes Bragg's many campaigns and battles, he also emphasizes how his contemporaries viewed his successes and failures and how these reactions affected Bragg both personally and professionally. The testimony and opinions of other members of the Confederate army--including Bragg's superiors, his fellow generals, and his subordinates--reveal how the general became a symbol for the larger military failures that undid the Confederacy. By connecting the general's personal life to his military career, Hess positions Bragg as a figure saddled with unwarranted infamy and humanizes him as a flawed yet misunderstood figure in Civil War history.

In the Summer of 1863, Confederate General Braxton Bragg was commander of the Army of Tennessee, still reeling from its defeat in January at Murfreesboro, Tenn.

General Braxton Bragg is often described as a despicable, friendless man, the most hated general of the Confederacy. Historians have denigrated Bragg by accepting without challenge the self-serving accusations of prominent, disgruntled subordinates, each of whom sought to explain their own failures by assigning them to Bragg. This biography, without dodging Bragg's deficiencies, refutes much of this false testimony. The result is a balanced view of this controversial general, from his early rise to power in the Western theater to his subsequent fall from grace in the latter years of the Civil War.