A Soldier to the Last: Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler in Blue and Gray (review)

Joseph Wheeler seemingly possessed none of the desired qualities necessary to become a professional soldier. His impoverished background, wiry frame, genteel personality, and subpar achievement in martial, athletic, and academic subjects at West Point seemingly doomed any chance for a successful military career. Wheeler’s dutiful service, insatiable ambition, good fortune, and remarkable self-promotional skills, however, propelled him into the military pantheons of both the short-lived Confederacy and the reconstructed United States. Yet, few have undertaken a serious study of Wheeler’s remarkable career and legacy, perhaps because he served in the western theater or was not as “southern” or as “colorful” as Nathan B. Forrest and John Hunt Morgan. Edward Longacre, a U.S. Air Force historian and honorary director of the U.S. Cavalry Association, has remedied this oversight with the first Wheeler biography in over sixty-five years, attempting to fill out the marginal aspects of Wheeler’s Civil War operations and to explore the public memory of this astonishing figure.

Longacre describes well how his unsoldierly appearance and dismal West Point record belied Wheeler’s brilliance and how his even-keeled, gentlemanly temperament hid a fiery spirit and addiction to battle. Many of his contemporaries admired his charm, perseverance, and attitude despite his less than stellar early career. Wheeler’s fortunes received a boost when his valiant efforts saved a family from an 1860 Apache attack (he even assisted in the birth of a child during the fray) and cemented his “Fightin’ Joe” nickname. He suddenly appeared the stereotypical American hero, but when the Civil War erupted, Wheeler had few qualms about serving his native Georgia and the Confederacy.

The young Wheeler quickly earned his laurels and became one of Braxton Bragg’s most trusted officers. He became the Army of Tennessee’s Chief of Cavalry at twenty-five, earning him another unlikely moniker, “War Child.” However, he was a professional, regular army officer in an army rife with unprofessional attitudes and in a theater that demanded an irregular approach. Longacre’s drums-and-trumpets narrative portrays Wheeler as a tactically sound, above-average field commander whose “hard work and quiet competence” was indicative of the conventional cavalry service rendered during the war that was “indispensable to his army” (p. 50). The author also details how the newly-promoted Wheeler’s barely adequate administrative abilities, raw skills as a staff officer, unabashed ambition, and undynamic strategic vision undermined his Civil War legacy. While not absolving Wheeler of the Army of Tennessee’s problems, Longacre definitely mitigates disputes or controversies in Wheeler’s favor. Feuds with other roughhewn types such as Forrest, his failures at Stones River and during the Tullahoma-Chickamauga-Chattanooga campaigns, and his inaccurate reports that led to several ill-advised operations beg for a more consistent, unbiased perspective.

The last chapters on Wheeler’s equally extraordinary postwar activities are frustratingly brief and lack substantive analysis. Wheeler served nearly a decade in Congress, and at the age of sixty three, he became the only ex-Confederate to serve in a field command during the Spanish-American War. During this later period of his life, he wrote several works on military strategy and history, and authored numerous, often self-serving pieces for the Southern Historical Society Papers and other periodicals. His battles with the “Lost Cause” and his own failings might prove as or more compelling than those with the Yankees, Cubans, or Filipinos, but are given only a cursory treatment by Longacre.

A Soldier to the Last is sure to reinvigorate studies of the Army of Tennessee’s frequently dysfunctional command and its strategic philosophies. It should also serve as a new platform to investigate Civil War historiography on the western theater, public memory, and reconciliation.