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By Paul Horton.

Part 1: Historians and the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy

Part 2: The Confederate “Lost Cause” and Southern Women

Part 4: Where “Southern Heritage” Falls Short

As calls are made to remove monuments devoted to those who fought against the Union during the Civil War are being made, increasing attention is being focused on learning history from differing narratives. As Yale historian David Blight contends, in most of the South today, the Confederate narrative dominates discussions of monuments, memorials, and Southern memory; but two other major narratives and multiple variations of these narratives are excluded: Freedman’s and Southern Unionist histories.

Large areas of the South did not vote for secession or were not allowed to vote for secession and Union regiments were raised from these areas late in the war. Likewise, escaped slaves were given the opportunity to form after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863.

Moreover, many Southerners refused to enlist in the Confederate army until the passage of a Conscription Act in early 1862, when thousands of Confederates joined “Home Guard” units because they could only be motivated to defend local property rather than fight in other theaters of combat. “Home Guard” units were led by local officers who typically resisted secession.

Loyalty for Confederate nationalism was thus much more complicated than most white Southerners who claim that their “heritage” is being destroyed claim. Most Southern white farmers did not own slaves, but large numbers either neither fully committed to the Confederate cause or joined Unionist regiments when the situation permitted in many areas.

All of the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments today raises some big questions: Do we get rid of current monuments, or do we build monuments and memorials to remember the narratives that have been whitewashed by the “Lost Cause”

The following lesson will focus on the case of Confederate General Joseph Wheeler who makes an interesting case because he was recommissioned as a general officer in the United States army during the Spanish American war after serving several terms as a U.S. congressman from Alabama during the 1880s and 1890s.

At present, a TVA dam (Alabama), a National Bird Refuge (Alabama), a state park (Alabama), and a public high school (Atlanta area) are named after him.

Students will read the documents below and conduct additional research into Joseph Wheeler to decide whether the above sites should be renamed. They will work in teams to present testimony before state and Federal commissions set up to review determining the continuation of current designation of “Joseph Wheeler” public institutions. As a part of their presentations, students should include discussions of possible alternative designations that call attention to different legacies. The following names are suggested as alternatives because they played prominent roles in the area surrounding the current sites:

Bessie Smith (Blues singer)

W.C. Handy (credited by many for “inventing” the Blues)

James T. Rapier (Black Reconstruction Congressman)

Jesse Owens (born Oakville, Alabama)

Thomas Minott Peters (leader of North Alabama Unionists)

Helen Keller

Student group testimony should consist of a ten-minute determination of whether Joseph Wheeler’s name should remain on all or some of the institutions above, and a ten-minute discussion of which names should be memorialized and a description of memorial plans.

Joseph Wheeler: A Complicated Legacy

While the positive and negative information about Nathan Bedford Forrest is abundant online and at academic search engines, the same cannot be said of sources for the military and political career of Joseph Wheeler. Lt. General Wheeler commanded the cavalry of the right wing of the Confederacy’s second largest army, the Army of the Tennessee, and notably defended Atlanta from Sherman’s Army and harassed Sherman’s army on the fabled “March to the Sea.” As the excerpts below suggest, Wheeler’s troops lacked discipline. Indeed, his troops were accused of theft of civilian property, including horse theft, torching foodstuffs in areas where people were starving, and murdering and “mutilating” Sherman’s pickets (posted lookouts). The first excerpt describes an inspection made of Wheeler’s troops by his commanding officers. The second excerpt chronicles the Ebenezer Creek massacre that resulted when one of Sherman’s commanders, Jefferson C. Davis, ordered the removal of a pontoon bridge to protect the Federal advance toward Savannah. As a result of this order, as many as five thousand freedmen who had been following Sherman’s army were left stranded on the bank of Ebenezer Creek as Wheeler’s cavalry arrived. Hundreds ran for their lives into the river and were either shot in the river or drowned, hundreds were slaughtered by Wheeler’s troops, and any survivors were resold into slavery. Unlike Fort Pillow where troop estimates could establish probable numbers of the murdered and drowned, the number of African American war refugees slaughtered or drowned at Ebenezer creek cannot be accurately estimated. The third excerpt, is drawn from a book about the Philippine War, were Wheeler, then in his 60s, fought under General Arthur McArthur. Wheeler had been appointed by William McKinley as a general officer in the Spanish American War in an attempt to reunite the military and gain southern votes.

As you read these three documents consider:

1)What were the strengths of Wheeler as a combat commander?

2)What were the failing of Wheeler as a combat commander?

3)Were soldiers under Wheeler’s command guilty of war crimes? Murder?

4)Under today’s Army Field Manual, the United States Military Code of Justice, and the United Nations Convention on Torture and War Crimes, would general Wheeler be brought up on charges today? Explain. 

From, John P. Dyer, From Shiloh to San Juan: The Life of “Fightin Joe” Wheeler (Baton Rouge, 1961), 167-169.

Once Hardee’s troops were across the river to temporary safety in South Carolina, General Beauregard again turned to the matter of Wheeler’s command.  On December 28 he sent Inspector Alfred Roman to make a special inspection of Wheeler’s corps, and on January 24, 1865, Roman sent his voluminous report to Beauregard.  According to Roman the organization, armament, equipment, discipline, and military appearance were bad.  Divisions were not larger than brigades and brigades were not larger than regiments, he reported.  One company had one officer and one man.  Another had one man and no officer at all.  The armament, he found, was deficient.  There were but 3,896 rifles for near five thousand men, and only 1,978 pistols.  Clothing, he reported, was “very deficient.”  Men were “in a suffering condition, many of them in a ragged condition.”  Discipline, he thought, was poor, having become “loose, uncertain, wavering,”  Roll calls, he said, were neglected and “the careless way about most of the officers and men plainly indicates how little they value the details of army regulations and of tactics in general.”  As for the depredations Roman Reported:

Much has been said—and is still being said—of the gross misconduct of Gen. Wheeler’s men.  Their alleged depredations and straggling propensities and their reported brutal interference with private property, gave become common by-words in every county where it has been their misfortune to pass.  Public rumor condemns them everywhere and not a few do we find in Georgia as well as in South Carolina who look upon them more than as a band of highway robbers than as an organized military band.

But the inspector defended Wheeler’s command against all these charges.  “While I am ready to admit that much truth is hidden under some of the rumors thus brought into circulation,” he wrote, “yet justice makes it a duty upon me to add that not a little is said about the command which is utterly false.” The cry of “mad dog,” he thought, was being brought into play.  “Men, depredators, horse-thieves, purporting to be of Wheeler’s command, have been arrested of late, who, when confronted have been proven to have never belonged to the corps under whose name they have striven to conceal their misdeeds, in order to avoid the punishment they justly deserved.”  He would not, he reported, screen the bad men which formed “only a small portion of the corps,” but suggested that the corps should not be judged by their conduct.  Most of the men who rode with Wheeler were, he said, of the same type, “the very same type,” as found in every branch of the Confederate service.

The chief trouble, he thought, was fivefold.  “After having carefully weighed the different reasons which could have brought forth the undisciplined, loose, and relative inefficiency of Wheeler’s command,” he came to the conclusion that five things accounted for the condition, namely:

  1. The negligence and incompetency of many of the company and regiment commanders.
  2. The want of system and good administration in the commissary department.
  3. The great irregularity in the payment of troops.
  4. The error of allowing cavalrymen to procure their own horses, instead of having them furnished by the government.
  5. Excessive leniency of the corps commander.

As the last item indicates, Roan held Wheeler personally responsible for part of the confusion. While, he said, he was aware that the reasons given for the loose discipline in Wheeler’s corps “exist also, more or less, in Forrest’s and Hampton’s commands,” he was strongly of the opinion that conditions could not be improved so long as Wheeler was in command.  “Had I the power to act in the matter,” he concluded, “I would relieve General Wheeler from his command; not as a rebuke, not as a punishment, for he surely deserves neither; but on higher grounds—that is to say for the good of the cause, and for his own reputation.”

From, Jacqueline Jones, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (New York, 2008), 202.

During the first week of December, a notorious incident at Ebenezer Creek, not far from Savannah, exposed the strategy of the Union army:  an eager appropriation of black men’s muscle power and a simultaneous denigration of the lives of black people who were deemed useless to the troops.  With a rebel cavalry hard on their heels, General Jefferson C. Davis (not to be confused with the Confederate president), led his Fourteenth Corps over a pontoon bridge and then ordered it pulled up before scores of black refugees waiting on the other side could cross.  Some plunged into the deep icy water and drowned.  Others huddled on the banks, only to die at the hands of “Fighting Joe” Wheeler’s cavalrymen.  The “hellish slaughter” provided “great indignation among the troops” (according to an Indiana physician), and received some attention in the northern press, though Sherman later justified the incident in terms of military necessity, and exonerated Davis.  According to Sherman, the sympathy expressed for blacks by Davis’s detractors “was not of pure humanity, but of politics.”36

From Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War: 1899-1902 (Lawrence, Kansas, 2000), 152-3.

(Douglas) MacArthur’s problems were exacerbated by the presence of the irrepressible Brig. Gen. Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, a sixty-three-year-old Confederate cavalry officer turned Alabama congressman.  In 1898 McKinley made Wheeler a general in an attempt to both bind up the emotional wounds made of the Civil War and win over Southern voters.  Wheeler achieved a checkered career in Cuba:  the correspondents and public loved him, but his impetuosity and negligence appalled professional officers.  Excitable and disorganized, he often abandoned his headquarters and rushed to the front to lead a charge.  In the Philippines he often treated the bewildered natives as potential voters, stropping to lecture young Filipinos that they could become president of the islands.  Given command of a brigade composed of the 9th and 12th Infantry, the free-spirited and fiery Wheeler was directed to distract the man enemy force while other units flanked it. But once the firing began, Wheeler could not restrain himself and ordered a charge.  MacArthur directed him to halt this advance, but Wheeler, his blood up, sent his entire brigade into the assault. Fighting their way across the river, his companies became a disorganized mob, pressing forward miles beyond their support.  Had the defenders held their ground, the result could well have been a massacre; instead it was a notable victory.  MacArthur sent Wheeler and his brigade to the rear to maintain the supply the supply line.  This he did with commendable skill, constructing a bamboo bridge over a half-mile washout at Tarlac and bringing up 25,000 rations to maintain the advance.  But despite Wheeler’s protests, MacArthur kept him in reserve.

Paul Horton
 is History Instructor
University High School, The University of Chicago Laboratory School

Author

Anthony Cody

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