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Hood, full of praise for Wheeler, sent the cavalryman forth again in less than a week. At the same time, he sent Forrest in another direction. Hood was "hopeful that this combined movement would compel Sherman to retreat for want of supplies, and thus allow me an opportunity to fall upon his rear with our main body."

McKinley (left) and General Wheeler (right) inspect a military hospital on Montauk Point

In five days, Wheeler's men ripped up 30 miles of railroad track and burned a bridge on the Etowah River. They ordered Union troops in Dalton to surrender on August 14, but Colonel Bernard Laiboldt's men held off two assaults in two days. After that, Wheeler headed northeast, almost to Knoxville, burning a second bridge at Strawberry Plains. Then he crossed the Tennessee River and turned southwest.

Wheeler tore up more railroad tracks on the way to Tuscumbia, Ala. On his 28th birthday, he crossed back to the south side of the river, saying later that he "averaged 25 miles a day, swam or forded 27 rivers" and seized "1,000 horses and mules, 200 wagons, 600 prisoners and 1,700 head of beef cattle." Wheeler's cavalry force also "captured, killed or wounded three times the greatest effective strength it has ever been able to carry into action." He lost 150 men killed and wounded, along with a number of stragglers who were captured.

Teddy Roosevely with General Joseph Wheeler and Leonard Wood 1898

But all of Wheeler's efforts were not enough. Hood now learned the same lesson Sherman had: Cavalry raids alone could not compel an enemy to retreat. Worse, while Wheeler and Forrest were away, Hood was driven out of Atlanta on September 1. When Hood marched north, Wheeler was left behind, becoming the only major force opposing Sherman in his March to the Sea. For the most part, he was not strong enough even to make Sherman pay attention to him.

But "Fightin' Joe" Wheeler's men continued to fight -- first under Maj. Gen. Wade Hampton, then under Joe Johnston -- holding off the Federals as best they could until they heard of Lee's surrender on April 9, 1865. Wheeler fled for Texas, hoping to keep up the fight from there. It was not to be. His party was caught just east of Atlanta.

Major George Dann, Major Brodie, General Joseph Wheeler, Chaplain Brown, Colonel Leonard Wood, and Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, June 1898. This photo was taken at the American embarkation camp at Tampa, Florida, just before the voyage to Santiago de Cuba (Photo by U.S. Army Signal Corps; print acquired by Philip S. Hench).

Wheeler spent two months in prison. After his parole, he married a woman he had met during the war. They moved to Loui-siana and opened a hardware store. Four years later, he sold the store and bought a farm in Alabama, near his wife's family. He then passed the bar and set up a law practice. In 1880 Wheeler ran for a seat in the House of Representatives and lost, but he won in 1883, serving for the next 16 years. The Army remained his first love, and he kept up with it through an appointment to the House Military Affairs Committee.

When war with Spain came in 1898, President William McKinley commissioned a number of ex-Confederates, Wheeler among them. Now a major general of U.S. Volunteers, Wheeler commanded the Cavalry Division in the invasion of Cuba. Malaria compelled Wheeler to relinquish command of the division to brevet Brig. Gen. Samuel S. Sumner before the assaults up San Juan Hill and Kettle Hill on July 1, but Wheeler managed to rise from his sick-bed in time to participate in the battle. At the sight of blue-coated Spaniards retreating, he reportedly yelled: "Hurrah! We've got the damn Yankees on the run!"

After the war, he lost a bid to regain his old House seat and returned to the Army with a regular commission as a brigadier general. After commanding a brigade in the Philippines between August 1899 and January 1900, followed by a brief command of the Department of the Lakes, he retired on September 10, 1900, and spent his last years traveling around the country. The former scourge of the Yankees died in Brooklyn, N.Y., on January 25, 1906.

Additional Sources:

sherpaguides.com/georgia
www.cs.amedd.army.mil
freepages.books.rootsweb.com
www.rootsweb.com
www.cr.nps.gov
www.med.virginia.edu
www.cubaheritage.com
www.generalsandbrevets.com
www.webbgarrison.com
www.battleofbrownsmill.org

General Joseph "Fightin Joe" Wheeler

General Joseph Wheeler was the only one of 425 Confederate general officers to attain the same rank later in the United States Army. Three decades after he commanded Confederate cavalry forces, he volunteered at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War and was commissioned a Major General of Volunteers in Cuba. He later became a Brigadier General of the Regular Army in the Philippines.

Fresh from the West Point class of 1858, with strong personal convictions and unshakable courage, he fought for his native Georgia at the outbreak of the Civil War and won fame as a cavalryman. During the Civil War he was in more than 500 skirmishes; commanded in 127 full-scale battles; had 18 horses shot from under him; and lost 36 staff officers from his side.

"Fighting Joe" moved to Alabama in 1869, practiced law, and operated his plantation in Lawrence County. He was elected to Congress in 1884 and to successive terms until 1898, when he again entered military service. It was his intense desire to show that Southerners could be counted on as citizens of the United States that prompted him to volunteer, at 62, for service in the Spanish-American War.

During one of the engagements of the Spanish-American War, General Wheeler started on the two-mile journey to the front in an ambulance (he was suffering from yellow fever). About halfway to the front, he met some litters bearing wounded. The veteran General against the protest of the surgeons, immediately ordered his horse, and after personally assisting the wounded into the ambulance, mounted and rode onward. The men burst into frantic cheers, which followed the General all along the line.

James Lindsay Gordon in the New York Tribune wrote the following poem to mark the moment:

General Wheeler at Santigo

Into the thick of the fight he went, pallid and sick and wan,
Borne in an ambulance to the front, a ghostly wisp of a man;
But the fighting soul of a fighting man, approved in the long ago,
Went to the front in that ambulance and the body of Fighting Joe.

Out from the front they were coming back, smitten of Spanish shells
Wounded boys from the Vermont hills and the Alabama dells;
"Put them into this ambulance; I’ll ride to the front," he said:
And he climbed to the saddle and rode right on, that little old ex-Confed

From end to end of the long blue ranks rose up the ringing cheers,
And many a powder-blackened face furrowed with sodden tears,
As with flashing eyes and gleaming sword, and hair and beard of snow,
Into the hell of shot and shell road little old Fighting Joe!

Sick with fever and racked with pain, he could not stay away,
For he heard the song of the yester-years in the deep-mouthed cannon’s bay
He heard in the calling song of the guns there was work for him to do,
Where his country’s best blood splashed and flowed ‘round the old Red, White and Blue.

Fevered body and hero heart! This Union’s heart to you
Beats cut in love and reverence --- and to each dear boy in blue
Who stood or fell mid the shot and shell, and cheered in the face of the foe,
As, wan and white, to the heart of the fight rode little old Fighting Joe!

General Joseph Wheeler died in 1906 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.