The defense secretary's maneuver on our Army base is nothing to Bragg about

Fort Bragg officially has its old name back. But WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his “On My Mind” commentary, says it might be enlightening to know who it was named for in the first place.

I’m not sure there’s a better symbol for the tragicomedy of our current governmental situation than the re-re-naming of North Carolina’s own Fort Bragg.

You might have missed this because it was way down the list of crazy and infuriating things to happen last week, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed an order giving our big Army base its old name back.

Sort of.

Fort Bragg is now officially named for a soldier from Maine named Roland L. Bragg. He was an Army paratrooper who earned a Silver Star and a Purple Heart for his service during World War II. Among other things, he once stole a German ambulance and took four wounded soldiers to an Allied hospital in Belgium, while under heavy fire the whole trip. He served with bravery and honor.

Having said that, if his name were Roland L. Briggs, we wouldn’t be talking about him today. He just happens to share the last name of the man Fort Bragg was originally, and unfortunately, named for.

The fort’s original namesake was a military commander from Warrenton, North Carolina, named Braxton Bragg. He first gained fame with his success in the Mexican-American War in the late 1840s. After that, he married a sugar heiress and they bought a plantation in Louisiana, owning more than 100 slaves. But then Jefferson Davis called on him to lead troops in the Civil War. Bragg was eventually promoted to general. And that’s when things started to go sideways.

One way to summarize it is that a historian wrote a book about Bragg called “Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy.”

He constantly quarreled with his soldiers and his superiors. He executed one of his own men for sneaking away to visit his widowed mother. Worst of all, from the Confederate point of view, he was a terrible strategist. He attacked when he should have retreated, retreated when he should have attacked. In an army of losers, he might have been the biggest loser of all.

So how in the world did that guy get an Army base named after him? There are at least two stories floating around out there. One is that the Army left the naming of the base to the local Chamber of Commerce, and they picked Bragg because he was the only North Carolina general in the Civil War. The other story is that an Army official named the base after Bragg simply because his name was short.

Whatever the reason, after police killed George Floyd in 2020, the federal government launched a broad effort to rename institutions named for Confederate leaders. Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty in 2023.

Now Hegseth has reversed the decision. He has done a clever thing here. Technically he didn’t rename the base for Braxton Bragg … but he knows that most people won’t pay attention to the fine print, and they’ll just know that Fort Bragg got its name back. It’s like rebuilding a Confederate monument and just putting a different guy on top.

So maybe, as this administration goes about the business of turning back the clock of progress with both hands, we should remember exactly who we honored in those early days.

Men like Braxton Bragg, who was described this way by a fellow Confederate officer: “obstinate but without firmness, ruthless without enterprise, crafty yet without stratagem, suspicious, envious, jealous, vain, a bantam in success and a dunghill in disaster.”