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.
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机译：许多内战历史学家都认为乔·惠勒是同盟军最被高估的将军。他们认为，正如爱德华·隆加尔（Edward G. Longacre）在其2006年的著作《最后的士兵》中所写的那样，惠勒是一个无能的战术家，是一位“未能激励或训练他的部队的指挥官……他的野心驱动了同样无能为力的支持。上级领导（例如，布拉克斯顿·布拉格）在西方剧院中的表现要弱于同盟，而不是先进。 Longacre承认，这些批评有一些优点，但也有些夸张。在惠勒的任何评估中都不能忽视的是，他在抵御威廉·谢尔曼少将的1864年3月出海和1865年的卡罗来纳战役中所扮演的角色。谢尔曼（Sherman）并不想低估惠勒（Wheeler）及其经验丰富的小型骑兵军，他想确保自己的骑兵指挥官布里格（Brig）。 Judson Kilpatrick将军也没有。希尔帕特里克（Kilpatrick）和惠勒（Wheeler）之间的认真对决实际上是早在几年前就开始的，当时两人是西点军校的学员，这场比赛将持续数月，并且在谢尔曼（Sherman）于1864年末穿越乔治亚州和1865年初穿越卡罗莱纳州时提供了有趣的边秀。
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