Whose side was he on anyway?
After the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor, the United States mobilized for war with Spain. Many prominent people clamored for a chance to join the army as high-ranking officers. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt was one. Another was a powerful congressman named Joe Wheeler. President McKinley appointed Wheeler a major general of volunteers. It made perfect sense: Wheeler, after all, had military experience, having served as a general during the Civil War.
Of course, at that time he had been fighting against the United States.
“Fighting Joe” Wheeler was a cavalryman who had earned his stars as a major general in the Confederate Army. Now he was trading in the old gray uniform for a new blue one, to serve as a general in the very army he had once considered his a sworn enemy.
Wheeler was a bantam rooster of a man, five foot two and all fight. “A regular gamecock,” Theodore Roosevelt called him. Competitive to the core, he exclaimed that he wanted to be the first to encounter “the Yankees . . . damn it, I mean the Spaniards.” At times he seemed to think he was fighting the Civil War all over again. “Let’s go, boys!” he reportedly cried at the Battle of San Juan Hill. “We’ve got the damn Yankees on the run again!”
Wheeler’s appointment was greeted by many as a sign that the War Between the States was finally a thing of the past and that the na-
Wheeler was a Confederate general at age twenty-six and a U.S. Army general at age sixty-one. One of the units he commanded in Cuba was Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.
Wheeler stayed in the army after the war. In 1902, former Confederate general James Longstreet was visiting West Point when he ran into Wheeler in full regalia. Recalling a deceased Confederate comrade, the feisty Jubal Early, Longstreet said: “I hope Almighty God takes me before he does you for I want to be within the gates of hell to hear Jubal Early cuss you in the blue uniform.” Wheeler died in 1906 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, one of only two former Confederate generals buried there.
