Braxton Bragg was an unpopular military figure whose own soldiers tried to kill him before he was court-martialed for disrespecting Army leadership. He resumed military command for the Confederacy during the Civil War to preserve slavery and became “known for his pettiness and cruelty, along with the battlefield failures that eventually led to his being relieved of command.” Bragg was deeply committed to the institution of slavery and the exploitation of Black people. He contended that slavery was “just and necessary” and claimed it was “the best and most humane” labor system in the world. He told Irish journalist William H. Russell in 1861 that forced slave labor was the only way to farm in Louisiana:
“If a northern population…settled in Louisiana tomorrow, they would discover that they must till the land by the labour of the black race, and the only mode of making [them] work was to hold them in a condition of involuntary servitude.”1 Grady McWhiney, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat: Volume I (University of Alabama Press, 2017), 142-143; Earl J. Hess, Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 258-59.
Bragg added that, to prevent the abolition of slavery, he would fight against the Union “as long as he had a drop of blood in his body.”2 Hess, Braxton Bragg, 24.
The Horrors of Slavery
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, Southern enslavers like Braxton Bragg defended slavery as a benevolent system that benefitted enslaved Black people. Records from the era paint a much different picture, revealing American slavery as a system that was always dehumanizing and barbaric, and often bloody, brutal, and violent.
Enslavers had complete power over the Black men, women, and children legally recognized as their property—enslavers could force enslaved people to marry against their will, and enslaved people could do nothing when their spouses or children were sold away. Enslaved families were regularly and easily separated at an enslaver’s whim, never to see each other again.
Enslaved laborers faced constant surveillance, threats of violence, and the prospect of torture or death for failing to complete assigned tasks, visiting a spouse living on another plantation, learning to read, arguing with white people, working too slowly, possessing anti-slavery materials, or trying to prevent the sale of their relatives.
Before the start of the Civil War, Braxton Bragg was earning today’s equivalent of $1 million a year by exploiting the labor of enslaved Black people. He owned a 1,600-acre plantation in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, where he enslaved more than 100 people to do the backbreaking work of sugarcane cultivation. He named the slave labor camp “Bivouac,” a military term for a temporary encampment under little or no shelter.3 Hess, Braxton Bragg, 7.
Conditions on sugarcane plantations like Bragg’s were especially brutal and often deadly. Enslaved men, women, and children were forced to work as many as 18 hours straight to plant, cut, crush, and boil the cane amidst hazards like snake-infested fields, open furnaces, and grinding iron rollers.4 Hess, Braxton Bragg, 10.
To protect his investment in slavery, Bragg eagerly joined the Confederate cause and led Louisiana state troops in seizing a federal fort weeks before the state formally seceded. After the war ended in the Confederacy’s defeat, the federal government confiscated Bragg’s Louisiana plantation.5 Hess, Braxton Bragg, 11-12, 14, 252.
Battlefield Failure
Born to a family of enslavers in North Carolina, Bragg was an Army commander in 1846 during the Mexican-American War. He forced several people he enslaved to go with him on the campaign—one was killed and another severely wounded. One person he enslaved managed to escape to freedom in Mexico during the conflict.6 McWhiney, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat, 2, 55, 59.
Bragg was not popular among his troops and was court-martialed for disrespecting his superior officers. He ordered a firing squad to execute for “desertion” a 19-year-old soldier who had gone home to see his widowed mother. One of his own soldiers tried to kill him by putting a 12-pound artillery shell under his cot; the shell exploded but Bragg was not injured.
During the Civil War, Bragg served as a commander of Confederate forces. He eventually resigned after a humiliating defeat to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of Chattanooga in 1863 and became an advisor to Jefferson Davis. In that role, he issued orders on behalf of the Confederate president requiring that Black Union soldiers taken as prisoners of war be returned to their former enslavers and re-enslaved.7 Hess, Braxton Bragg, 218-220.
In 1864, Bragg ordered Confederate troops to “surprise and capture if possible a garrison of Negro Soldiers” at Fort Pocahontas, Virginia, near Jamestown, where members of the U.S. Colored Troops were garrisoned. The rebel attack was repelled.
Honoring a Champion of Slavery
Despite Bragg’s poor track record as a military leader and legacy as a notorious enslaver and defender of racial hierarchy, Camp Bragg was established in 1918 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and became Fort Bragg in 1922.
For decades, the choice to name U.S. military bases after individuals who defended slavery and showed contempt for the lives and capabilities of Black soldiers has been criticized as divisive, dishonorable, and antithetical to democratic values.
In the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2021, a bipartisan majority of Congress voted overwhelmingly to end this painful legacy and established a Naming Commission to rename or remove all military assets that commemorate Confederate traitors.
In 2022, the commission recommended new names for nine Army bases, including Fort Bragg, which was officially redesignated as Fort Liberty in June 2023.
The renaming of Fort Bragg represented an acknowledgment of the name’s harm to decades of Black service members and community members.
“America should not have vestiges of slavery and secessionism and celebrate them,” Army veteran Isiah James, a senior policy officer at the Black Veterans Project, told PBS. “We should not laud them and hold them up and venerate them to where every time a Black soldier goes onto the base, they get the message that this base Bragg is named after someone who wanted to keep you as human property.”
Less than two years later, this progress was reversed.
In March 2025, at the urging of President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered that Bragg’s name be restored to the base. To get around federal law, which prohibits naming military installations for people who fought against the U.S., the Defense Department said it was naming the base after Pvt. Roland L. Bragg, an infantryman in World War II.
But the Trump administration has been clear that its goal is to reimpose the names of insurrectionists who killed U.S. soldiers to defend slavery.
“This is about restoring all bases to their original names,” Hegseth told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee at a hearing earlier this year.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised, “We’re going to change the name back to Fort Bragg.” In June 2025, President Trump gave a speech at the base, where he told service members, “Fort Bragg is in. That’s the name. And Fort Bragg it shall always remain.”