The Mockingbird's Ballad

"Pond Spring", Joseph and Daniella's plantation, procured by her father from her husband's family by the hardest after years of haggling, became the center of an agricultural and transportation community along the Tennessee River in Lawrence County, Alabama. Some 2,000 acres would be served by cotton gin, stores, depot, churches, schools - all developed by or because of Pond Spring and the Wheeler's guidance. Eventually the estate would include 18,000 acres in several plantations located in three states - Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi.

The siren of politics had sung its alluring tune and the planter/lawyer's odyssey had taken a new direction. He ventured into the stormy sea of American politics. Alabama's political life had roughly come through the turmoil of Civil War and Reconstruction and stood at a crossroads. The carpetbagger, scalawag, and black freeman domination was weakened and vulnerable. New political alignments were taking shape: the re-enfranchised courthouse boys, fire eaters, brigadiers, silk hat, and planter aristocracy - "Bourbons" - crowd; the long-standing independent Jacksonian yeoman farmer, small business, hill country, anti-Montgomery, Richmond, Washington - "Wool Hat" folk'; younger "New South" boomers from various old families, both wealthy and otherwise, who saw prosperity as foremost; the weakening Republicans favored by Washington patronage, made up of the politically active blacks and immigrant Unionist white citizens; and a new growing progressive agrarian contingency who sought an alliance of the latter groups against the "big mules" of the former crowd - "Lords of the Lost Cause and the Land" - The Bourbons. The Bourbon's thought the others, who they termed the Radicals, were spawns of Satan set to destroy their social and economic garden. Into this skirmish - soon to be war - rode the former chief of cavalry of the Army of Tennessee, "Fightin' Joe" Wheeler. Never a rabid ideologue, Joseph Wheeler, while loyal to his adopted class, took the lead in moderating the reactionary qualities of the Bourbons. He took the grievances and ideals of the Independents seriously and pragmatically reckoned with the aspirations of the exploited rural whites and "New South" pro-business pushers of the emerging gilded age. Not an active and enlightened reformer on race issues, he, never the less, dealt with the plight of the abandoned black countrymen with less rock-rib discrimination than most white southern politicians. Bitterness and hatred were not aspects of his character in war or peace, but work and accomplishment were.

As the underachiever in cavalry tactics at West Point had done twenty-five years earlier, the political novice applied himself and mastered this new trade with the same determination and success. The sitting congressman, ex-Colonel William M. Lowe, wounded Confederate veteran of Bull Run and native Huntsville lawyer, had united the Independents, a sizeable segment of the black diminishing electorate and Agrarians to get elected in the first post-Reconstruction election of 1878. He was a bright, credentialed, effective forty-year politician whose star was rising. His dreams were of an alliance of "little mules" to out number and out pull the big mules. His hopes were that such a working team would govern and carry him to the US Senate. "Fightin' Joe" entered the field against Col. Lowe.