Joseph Wheeler was born in Augusta, Georgia, September 10, 1836, the youngest of the four children of Joseph Wheeler, a transplanted Connecticut Yankee merchant and planter, and Julia Hull Wheeler, the daughter of Revolutionary War veteran and War of 1812 veteran, General William Hull. When his mother died in 1842, the six-year-old diminutive boy went to live with aunts in Connecticut and New York. He went to school there until entering West Point in the summer of 1854. He was seventeen and barely over 5 feet 2 inches tall and he weighed only 105 pounds when he walked up the hill from the Hudson River landing to the thirty-year-old United States Military Academy.
"Fightin'Joe" resigned from the US Army and joined the Confederate Army. His older brother, William, helped him get a commission as First Lieutenant in the Georgia forces in February of 1861. He won favorable attention at his initial posting at Pensacola, Florida from General Braxton Bragg and Confederate politician, Secretary of War and General Leroy Pope Walker. He was made a full Colonel at age 25 and given command of the 19th Alabama Infantry Regiment. He and they distinguished themselves at the Battle of Shiloh in west Tennessee April 6 - 7, 1862. Given also the 25th and 26th Alabama and the 4th Mississippi, he conducted rear guard operations during the Confederate retreat from Shiloh to Corinth and then to Tupelo, Mississippi. He received praise for that activity. Colonel Wheeler, after this noticeable and daring leadership, was assigned by Bragg to command three cavalry regiments in late August 1862.
Leading cavalry raids into Tennessee and Kentucky in late 1862, he gained a good reputation for very effective duties, covering the front and flanks of the infantry and artillery, intelligence gathering, raiding from surprise and delaying actions against enemy advances. Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Hunt Morgan were in his command. He had less success in keeping these two, especially maverick Bedford Forrest, in his chain of command. After graduation, he chose to attend additional instruction at the army's Cavalry School in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania.
The cavalry student had come a long way since those grueling classes four years ago. Little "Fightin'Joe" was very quickly becoming the real thing - an excellent commander, attentive subordinate officer and energetic, resourceful warrior. His troops were rough, unruly and rag tag. Not the best disciplined crowd and maybe the worst; they fought and fought hard for their bantam chief.
A creative tactician, his tree felling to delay Union advances gained he and his men the designation "The Lumberjack Cavalry". He also further developed the use of the lighter armed, with short carbines and pistols and limited use of sword, more flexible mounted infantry. Wheeler was the first to use it extensively in the United States. He was appointed Brigadier General and Chief of Cavalry for the Army of Mississippi in October of 1862 and would later assume that position in a reorganized army structure for the Army of Tennessee. His troopers earned another nickname, "The Horse Marines", for their destruction of a Union gunboat and four transports on the Cumberland River north of Nashville, Tennessee in February 1863. He was promoted to Major General in May 1863. Wheeler, that summer, published a manual entitled, Cavalry Tactics, which proved very valuable in simplifying and systematizing cavalry operations. It was widely adopted by cavalry commanders.