‘RIVALRY’ RENEWED
JOE WHEELER IS CONSIDERED by many Civil War historians, somewhat unfairly it seems, the Confederate Army’s most overrated general. In their opinion, as Edward G. Longacre writes in his 2006 book A Soldier to the Last, Wheeler was an inept tactician—a commander who “failed to inspire or discipline his troops…and whose ambition-driven support of equally inept superiors [e.g., Braxton Bragg] retarded rather than advanced Confederate fortunes” in the Western Theater. The criticisms have some merit, Longacre concedes, but are also overblown. What cannot be disregarded in any assessment of Wheeler is the part he played defending against Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s 1864 March to the Sea and the 1865 Carolinas Campaign. Sherman, for one, was not about to underestimate Wheeler and his small, yet seasoned, Cavalry Corps, and he wanted to make sure his own cavalry commander, Brig. Gen. Judson Kilpatrick, did not either. An earnest duel between Kilpatrick and Wheeler, which actually had begun a few years earlier when the two were cadets at West Point, would play out over several months and provide a fascinating sideshow as Sherman rolled through Georgia in late 1864 and the Carolinas in early 1865.
After the capture of Atlanta on September 2, 1864, Sherman spent the next 10 weeks destroying Confederate supplies and infrastructure, consolidating his own resources, and contemplating his next move. Confederate General John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee, meanwhile, did whatever it could to disrupt Sherman’s supply lines. But in late October, Hood had his army retire into Alabama. Sherman, presuming from comments made by Confederate President Jefferson Davis that Hood intended to invade Tennessee, saw this as an opportunity. Instead of chasing Hood, he would lead his Military Division of the Mississippi on a devastating march through Georgia. Sherman dispatched the Army of the Cumberland (minus two corps), under Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, to defend Tennessee and kept four corps, comprising the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of Georgia, back in
