Digitized collection of general’s letters gives public access to Civil War history

Letters from Union Gen. John T. Wilder to his wife during the Civil War reveal a husband antsy about being away from home, a soldier feeling a bit put upon, an entrepreneur looking for mineral prospects and an American incredulous at the destruction he has seen.

Historians don’t have to go the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Lupton Library and wait for the 145-year-old letters to be dug out of the stacks to read such detail.

The letters, a collection given to the then-University of Chattanooga by Gen. Wilder’s daughter in 1960, are now available online in the Special Collections section of the library’s Web site (www.lib.utc.edu).

“For folks who have little more than a passing knowledge, a familiarity with who Wilder is, here’s a chance to look at Wilder’s words, at his handwriting in its original form, in his original hand. Here’s a way to see the original thing,” said Jim Ogden, historian of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park.

Steven Cox, an assistant professor and university archivist at UTC, manages the library’s special collections and recently completed the project of digitizing the collection of Wilder letters.

The purposes of digitizing parts of the collection, he said, are to preserve them and to make them available for online display.

When the material is online, Mr. Cox said, historians and researchers don’t “have to go back to the original letters.”

The letters collection, he said, covers about 60 pages and is divided among military correspondence during the war, correspondence with his wife during the war and postwar letters and documents.

Gen. Wilder, according to Mr. Cox, has “sort of been overlooked as to his significance in the Civil War.” While he did not participate in the battles for Chattanooga, he did lead a brigade in the Battle of Chickamauga, Mr. Cox said. In that battle, Mr. Cox said, Gen. Wilder’s was the only Union brigade to stand its ground throughout.

The New York native also was a keen military strategist, he said. He was among the first to recognize the advantage of the Spencer repeating rifle versus the single muzzle loading rifle, he said.

The papers, Mr. Ogden said, add to the knowledge of Gen. Wilder and his place in the war.

While he was thought to have been on Stringer’s Ridge for the shelling of Chattanooga on Aug. 21, 1863, he said, he had actually taken a couple of weeks off to return to Indiana after his home burned.

The letters also reveal that Gen. Wilder recognized the mining potential in southeast Tennessee and had sent home samples of coal and iron.

“The mineral resources had not been exploited,” Mr. Ogden said, “and he certainly had the financial wherewithal to exploit them.”

A year after the end of the war, Gen. Wilder moved to Chattanooga, became mayor of the city five years later and later represented Tennessee as commissioner to the World’s Fair in Vienna.

Later, he was involved in the creation of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park — its tallest monument bears his name — and served as its commissioner.

“He had a very interesting life,” Mr. Cox said.

The letters collection already had typed transcriptions, so a scanner with optical character recognition was used to convert the letters into text about five years ago, he said.

The text was then put into a Microsoft Word document and eventually uploaded onto the Special Collection site, which was created last fall.

Digital storage saves handling and copying of such letters, Mr. Cox said. Even one copier scan, he said, gives the equivalent light exposure of leaving the letter out in the sun.

“I don’t want to subject them to that,” Mr. Cox said.