38 Facts About Joseph Wheeler

1.

Joseph "Fighting Joe" Wheeler was a Confederate military commander and politician.

2.

Joseph Wheeler was the grandson of Brigadier General William Hull, a veteran of the American Revolution.

3.

Joseph Wheeler entered West Point in July 1854, barely meeting the height requirement at the time for entry.

4.

Joseph Wheeler graduated on July 1,1859, placing 19th out of 22 cadets, and was commissioned a brevet second lieutenant in the 1st US Dragoons.

5.

Joseph Wheeler attended the US Army Cavalry School located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and upon completion was transferred on June 26,1860, to the Regiment of Mounted Rifles stationed in the New Mexico Territory.

6.

Joseph Wheeler began to suffer from poor relations with the Confederacy's arguably greatest cavalryman, Nathan Bedford Forrest, when Bragg reassigned most of Forrest's men to Wheeler, sending Forrest to Murfreesboro, Tennessee to recruit a new brigade.

7.

Now commanding all of the Army of Tennessee's cavalry, Joseph Wheeler skirmished aggressively to delay their advance.

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8.

Joseph Wheeler drove into the rear of the US army, destroying hundreds of wagons and capturing more than 700 prisoners.

9.

Bragg recommended that Joseph Wheeler be promoted as a "just reward", and he became a major general on January 20,1863.

10.

Joseph Wheeler led the army's Cavalry Corps from January to November 24, then from December to November 15,1864.

11.

Joseph Wheeler's men captured the town of Dalton, but he failed to defeat the US garrison protected in a nearby fort.

12.

Joseph Wheeler then took his men into East Tennessee, crossing the Tennessee River above Knoxville.

13.

Joseph Wheeler's raid continued to the west, causing minor interruptions in the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad and then continued south through Franklin, Tennessee, until he recrossed the Tennessee at Tuscumbia, Alabama.

14.

The raid Joseph Wheeler was ordered to undertake was described by historian Ed Bearss as a "Confederate disaster" because it caused minimal damage to the United States while denying Gen.

15.

Joseph Wheeler had intended to reach the Trans-Mississippi and Gen.

16.

Joseph Wheeler's home, Pond Spring, in an area now known as Wheeler, Alabama, is a historical site owned by the Alabama Historical Commission.

17.

In 1880, Joseph Wheeler was elected from Alabama as a Democrat to the United States House of Representatives.

18.

Joseph Wheeler won a special election to return and serve the remaining weeks of the term.

19.

Joseph Wheeler supported the election of Luke Pryor in 1882 and did not run for reelection, but was elected again in 1884 and re-elected to seven subsequent terms before resigning in 1900.

20.

At the 1884 Democratic National Convention, Joseph Wheeler supported Grover Cleveland to be the Democratic Party's nominee for President of the United States.

21.

In foreign policy, Joseph Wheeler was outspokenly Anglophile; he sought a closer relationship between the United States and the British Empire and is regarded as one of the earliest advocates of what would later be called the "Special Relationship" between the United States of America and the United Kingdom.

22.

In January 1890, when House Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed began the process of eliminating the disappearing quorum by calling the names of House members who refused to answer, Joseph Wheeler climbed onto one of the desks and then proceeded to leap from desk to desk in an attempt to reach the center and stop the Speaker.

23.

Joseph Wheeler assumed command of the cavalry division, which included Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, and was nominally second-in-command of the Fifth Army Corps.

24.

Joseph Wheeler sailed for Cuba and was charged with scouting for the US advance by General William Rufus Shafter, overall commander of V Corps.

25.

Joseph Wheeler was ordered not to engage the enemy on his own until the American troop disembarkation had been completed.

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26.

Joseph Wheeler requested the assistance of the attached Cuban forces in an immediate attack, but their commander, Col.

27.

Joseph Wheeler attacked anyway, rushing his men forward with two guns to the front.

28.

Joseph Wheeler fell seriously ill during the campaign and turned over command of the division to Brig.

29.

Joseph Wheeler led the division through the Siege of Santiago and was a senior member of the peace commission.

30.

When back in the United States, Joseph Wheeler commanded the convalescent camp of the army at Montauk Point, now a state park in New York.

31.

General "Fighting Joe" Joseph Wheeler insisted that the Filipinos had mutilated their own dead, murdered women and children, and burned down villages solely to discredit American soldiers.

32.

Joseph Wheeler authored several books on military history and strategy and civil subjects.

33.

Joseph Wheeler co-wrote several more books throughout the rest of his life, the last of which, The New America and the Far East: A Picturesque and Historic Description of These Lands and Peoples, was published in 1907, after his death.

34.

Joseph Wheeler appeared in an early film called Surrender of General Toral with William Rufus Shafter.

35.

At the festivities, Joseph Wheeler wore the dress uniform of his most recent rank, that of a general in the US Army.

36.

General Joseph Wheeler was a member of the District of Columbia Society of the Sons of the American Revolution and the Society of Colonial Wars.

37.

Joseph Wheeler is one of the few former Confederate officers buried within Arlington National Cemetery.

38.

The City of Derby, Connecticut, where Joseph Wheeler grew up, named him as one of the first members of its Hall of Fame in 2007.