Most of the men in the Amity and Glenwood areas, including the Wisener's, had no interest in fighting in the Civil War. Many surviving letters and other documents from people who lived in the area point to this fact. We're not sure if the Wisener's joined the Confederate Army because they wanted to or were forced to. I suspect the latter. But what we do know is that most of the men from that area escaped from their Confederate units as soon as they could. Many of them made their way home and did not wish to return to the fighting. Some of the men even went so far as to hide in the woods from army scouts who would scour the area for AWOL soldiers. An elderly aunt in my family had in her possession the family trunk which the women in the family would fill with food, then place the trunk in the woods where the hiding men could find it to have something to eat. Also, two elderly men in this Wisener family were hung when they wouldn't tell where the boys were hiding. Later, many of these men in hiding, after being threatened with death if found, finally made their way to Benton, Arkansas, which by then was under Union control, and joined the Union Army. I suspect they knew they had to pick one side or the other in the War, and for some reason, almost none of them picked the Confederate side.
These truths about the Civil War era upset many people who would rather believe in the romanticized version of the Civil War, but as we often know, real life is much more complicated and messy than the childhood stories which are sometimes easier to believe.
I've also heard the stories that Jeptha was a Native American, or raised by them, but I've never found any real evidence to support this fact. It would be odd if Jeptha was a Native American since he and all the other Wisner's were White, and their Wisener ancestors in Alabama and Georgia were all White. I suspect that this, too, might be one of those fanciful stories that somehow got started and was never refuted with factual evidence.