Episode 7: Arlington Enters the 20th Century AKA Fighting Joe Wheeler - Confederate General, American General

The USS Maine was commissioned in 1895, depending on which source you read, is described as an armored cruiser or a second-class battleship. Either way, she represented a leap forward in modern warship design based on the latest ship-building techniques coming out of Europe.

The Maine in Havana Harbor before the Explosion

On February 15, 1898, at 9:40 pm, a catastrophic explosion occurred on the Maine. At the time, the Spanish were implicated in the explosion. Over the years, there have been several other investigations and while the exact cause of the explosion is still debated, it is widely believed the Spanish had nothing to do with it. Regardless of the cause, the outcome remained the same: 266 of her crew of 355 were killed and two months later the United States was at war with Spain.

The Maine sunk in Havana Harbor

The mast from the Maine was recovered in 1915 and is now the centerpiece for the Maine Memorial in Arlington's Section 24. It was being renovated when I was last there to take pictures, so the third picture is from www.arlingtoncemetery.mil

Immediately after the explosion, 61-year-old Alabama Representative and former Confederate Lieutenant General Joseph "Fighting Joe" Wheeler offered his services to President McKinley and the US Army. Though McKinley, himself a Civil War veteran, tried to avoid war, he eventually accepted Wheeler help and appointed him one of only fifteen major generals in the US Army at the time.

Wheeler as a Confederate general in the 1860s

Wheeler (front) as a US major general in Tampa, FL in 1898 just before deploying to Spain with the staff of the 1st US Volunteer Regiment "Rough Riders" including its commander Colonel Leonard Wood (center) and executive officer Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt (right) 

After hostilities ended in Cuba, Wheeler sailed to the Philippines where he commanded the First Brigade in Arthur MacArthur's Second Division during the Philippine Insurrection until  January 1900. He then returned to the United States, was mustered out of the volunteer service, and commissioned a brigadier general in the regular army, reentering the service he had resigned from 39 years earlier. He went on to command the Department of the Lakes which oversaw military posts in the midwestern United States until his retirement on September 10, 1900.

After a long illness, Wheeler died in Brooklyn, NY on January 25, 1906, at the age of 69. Because of his service later in life, is one of the only Confederate officers buried in Arlington and maybe the only one outside of the later-established Confederate Section. This diminutive officer lies under one of the tallest obelisks in the cemetery in Section 2, Grave 1089.