Most Civil War figures, no matter how large they loom, tend to “fade from the pages of history afterward,” says Maury Nicely, an employment-labor attorney and general business litigator at Evans Harrison Hackett.
Not so for the subject of Nicely’s fourth book, “Forging a New South: The Life of General John T. Wilder,” which debuted in April.
Despite years of research and 520 published pages, Nicely is still amazed by the gall of the brazen young Wilder, who Aug. 21, 1863, ordered his Union soldiers to open fire on Chattanooga, damaging buildings, destroying steamboats and injuring civilians. “And eight years later,” says Nicely, “he’s elected mayor of Chattanooga.”
Postwar Wilder also became a staunch Reconstructionist, helping rebuild the region he’d tried to destroy. (And yes, Wilder Tower at Chickamauga Battlefield is named after him.)
“In a lot of ways, he’s like the Forrest Gump of post-Civil War Tennessee,” Nicely quips. “He’s just everywhere and he anticipated things that happened 50 years later. When you talk about a lot of Civil War figures, there’s not much that they did after the Civil War. He has a second act.”
For Nicely, writing may not be a second act – he’s consistently done it throughout his 26-year legal career – but it is undoubtedly a second calling. “My parents always said that, when I was growing up, if I asked them for a toy, I might not get it. But if I asked for a book, I would get it.”
Local history has always been in his blood, too.
“You can’t grow up in Chattanooga and not be steeped in history,” he says. “It just seeps from the streets, from the Native Indian mounds to the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the Civil War and TVA.”
The seed for Nicely’s first book, “Chattanooga Walking Tour & Historic Guide,” published in 2002, was planted when, during one of their many travels, he said to his wife, “You know, Chattanooga has every bit as much history as these places. We don’t have a great guidebook where you can find all that stuff. I’m going to make one.”
It would take about three weeks to complete, he estimated. It took three years. “I was a little naive with that one,” he admits.
In 2011, he followed up with “East Tennessee Walking Tour & Historic Guide” after adopting a more realistic timeline and visiting a number of cities in the region, scouting for details he’d overlooked as a casual tourist.
A fascination with the 1964 Chattanooga criminal trial of labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa, who was charged with jury tampering, spurred Nicely to write his third book. Published in 2019, “Hoffa in Tennessee: The Chattanooga Trial That Brought Down an Icon” focuses on the type of courtroom intricacies with which Nicely is already familiar in his day job and, unlike his guidebooks, required numerous interviews with critical sources who have since died.
But, says Nicely, “Wilder was the hardest book by far because everybody’s dead. There were a lot of news reports about Wilder. He was a fairly famous person. But Civil War readers are very discerning, so you feel this great pressure to make sure you get everything right.”
It took Nicely 12 years to write, mostly on nights and weekends, although he occasionally took a day off to consult historical records in an out-of-town archive. “Forging a New South” appeals to both Civil War buffs – even those who already know a lot about Wilder – and readers who are intrigued by the influences that shaped Chattanooga, Nicely says.
Take, for example, the fact that in the mid-1860s, the Union Army built a manufacturing facility here to repair iron rails damaged in the war. After the conflict, Wilder and his financial backers bought the factory and it became the city’s largest employer, hiring 25% of its working population.
“Wilder was a huge proponent of reconciliation,” Nicely says. “Whenever he founded businesses, he had Union veterans that he would partner with, and a lot of the capital came from the North. But he always brought in former Confederates, as well. He attended the dedication of the Confederate monument (in the Confederate cemetery near the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) and then, in the years after that, it was defaced a few times. Wilder and several other Northerners raised money to build a fence around the monument to protect it. So he was very involved in healing the wounds of war.”
Long before that, Wilder was coming up with creative ideas to gain an advantage over his opponents, like starting a mounted infantry and purchasing repeating rifles for his soldiers, which turned them into “a very dangerous unit because they were cutting edge,” Nicely says. Wilder later became a staunch advocate of damming the Tennessee River, 50 years before the Tennessee Valley Authority was formed.
“He loved to found new businesses, to found cities and mines and mills and hotels. And then he would move on,” Nicely says. “He didn’t like the day-to-day drudgery of running a business. He was an innovator.”
One of the things that surprised Nicely the most during his research was that Wilder’s 1886 Congressional campaign against a former Confederate, an event barely mentioned in the only other biography written about Wilder, was actually “very ugly. It treated him very badly. He lost the election because Hamilton County (residents) didn’t show up at the polls. And he said, ‘It’s the only time that Wilder’s brigade has ever been beat.’”
Soon after, Wilder pulled up stakes and moved from Chattanooga to Knoxville, his pride apparently bruised by the loss.
So how do lawsuits and books compare when it comes to finishing one? “Winning a lawsuit is a great feeling,” Nicely says. “When a lawsuit is over, there’s almost a feeling of relief, particularly for the client, that they’ve now resolved this, they can move on in closure. I represent a lot of companies and, for companies, it means that now you can focus on business and not litigation.
“There’s nothing in the world like finishing a book,” he adds. “You’ve worked on this project from just an idea you had and then you spent so much time on it. I just got my copies of this book and when you open that box, you see the real thing there, it’s a very great feeling.”
Even so, he has no desire to read it again in its hardback form. “It was always funny to me, if you ever see interviews with actors, they’ll say something like, ‘Well, I’ve never seen any of my movies.’ And I always thought that’s ridiculous. But then you kind of think about it. What’s important is the next project, right?”