One of the subjects of the two statues donated by Alabama to the National Statuary Hall Collection is Joseph Wheeler. Joseph Wheeler was also one of two Confederate generals that is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. The other was Marcus Joseph Wright, a Brigadier General in the Confederate Army, who after the war was an agent for the War Department charged with collecting official Confederate Army records. Wright served in that post for thirty years.
Joseph Wheeler, the subject of this post, was born in Georgia, and raised by relatives in Connecticut, yet was appointed to West Point from the state of Georgia. Upon graduation from West Point in 1859, he was commissioned in Dragoons. He saw service in various Indian campaigns in Kansas and New Mexico before resigning in April 1861 to become First Lieutenant of Artillery in the Confederate Army.
During the Civil War, Joseph Wheeler was in many campaigns, including the opposition to Sherman’s advance on Atlanta. Wheeler was considered by General Robert E. Lee to be one of the two most outstanding Confederate cavalry leaders.
After the Civil War, Wheeler moved to Alabama and became a planter and lawyer. In 1880 he ran for Congress. Although Wheeler’s first election was close, it was contested, and he lost after a lengthy legal battle. However, only 4 months after taking office, his opponent died from tuberculosis. A special election was held, Wheeler won and would continue to win subsequent elections, serving in Congress until 1900.
Congressman Wheeler, whose military nickname had been “Fighting Joe”, fought hard in congress to heal the fracture between the North and the South. He defended economic policies that would help rebuild the Southern states.
Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, volunteered his services in 1898 at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Wheeler was 62 years old. According to Arlingtoncemetery.net, Wheeler was appointed a Major General of U.S. Volunteers by President William McKinley and given command of a Cavalry Division (largely unmounted) in William R. Shafter’s V Corps. Troops under his command, which included Leonard Wood’s and Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘Rough Riders’, won the Battle of Las Guasimas, June 24, and took part in the assault on San Juan Heights before Santiago de Cuba on July 1, where they formed the U.S. right while Jacob F. Kent’s Infantry Division formed the left. At the conclusion of that campaign, he commanded briefly the convalescent camp at Montauk Point, New York, and also briefly commanded a Brigade in the Philippines, August 1899-January 1900.
Joseph Wheeler died in 1906. In 1925, the state of Alabama donated a statue of him to the National Statuary Hall Collection. Joseph Wheeler’s sculpture has him wearing his Confederate uniform. Henry B. Steagall, a Congressman from Alabama said this of Wheeler at the state’s unveiling in the Capitol in 1925.
“General Wheeler, with the same courage that had characterized his conduct on the field of battle accepted bravely and without a murmur the result of the conflict and went back home to engage in the struggle to bring order out of chaos, to free his people from misrule and usurpation, and set his state once more on the glad highway of peace and happiness.”
Diana Erbio is a freelance writer and author of “Coming to America: A Girl Struggles to Find her Way in a New World”. Read more in her series Statues: The People They Salute visit The Table of Contents and the Facebook Page. (I’ll be adding to the Substack Table of Contents as I transfer the Blog Posts. Please subscribe to this Substack 😊🇺🇸🤓)
Great story of one of the important parts of American history 👍