Lew Wallace

Name	Lew Wallace
Office	11th Territorial Governor of New Mexico
Term start	1878
Term end	1881
Preceded	Samuel Beach Axtell
Succeeded	Lionel Allen Sheldon
Office2	United States Minister to the Ottoman Empire
Term start2	1881
Term end2	1885
Preceded2	James Longstreet
Succeeded2	Samuel S. Cox
Birth place	Brookville, Indiana
Death place	Crawfordsville, Indiana
Restingplace	Oak Hill Cemetery, Crawfordsville, Indiana
Party	Republican
Allegiance	United States of America
Serviceyears	1846–47, 1861–65
Rank	Major General
Commands	11th Indiana Infantry
Battles	American Civil War

Lewis "Lew" Wallace (April 10, 1827 February 15, 1905) was an American lawyer, governor, Union general in the American Civil War, politician and author, best remembered for his historical novel .

Early life and career

Wallace was born in Brookville, Indiana, to David Wallace and Esther French Test Wallace. His father was a graduate of the United States Military Academy and served as lieutenant governor and Indiana Governor; his stepmother, Zerelda Gray Sanders Wallace, was a prominent suffragist and temperance advocate. When Wallace's father was elected as lieutenant governor of Indiana, he moved his family to Covington, Indiana. Wallace's autobiography contains many descriptive stories of this boyhood in Covington, including the account of the death of his mother in 1834. In 1836, at the age of nine, he joined his brother in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where he briefly attended Wabash Preparatory School. Afterward he joined his father in Indianapolis.

Wallace was studying law at the start of the Mexican-American War in 1846. He raised a company of militia and was elected a second lieutenant in the 1st Indiana Infantry regiment. He rose to the position of regimental adjutant and the rank of first lieutenant, serving in the army of Zachary Taylor, although he personally did not participate in combat. After hostilities he was mustered out of the volunteer service on June 15, 1847. He was admitted to the bar in 1849. In 1851 he was elected prosecuting attorney of the First Congressional District of Indiana.

Shiloh

Wallace's most controversial command came at the Battle of Shiloh, where he continued as the 3rd Division commander under Grant. Wallace's division had been left in reserve. The 3rd Brigade commanded by Col. Charles Whittlesey was at Stoney Lonesome near Adamsville, Tennessee. Col. Morgan L. Smith's 1st Brigade and Col. John M. Thayer's Second Brigade were both located at Crump's Landing, five miles north of Pittsburg Landing, to the rear of the Union line. At about 6 a.m. on April 6, 1862, when Grant's army was surprised and virtually routed by the sudden appearance of the Confederate States Army under Albert Sidney Johnston, Grant sent orders for Wallace to move his division up to support the division of Brig. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman located at Shiloh Church.

Here, the controversy begins. Wallace claimed that Grant's orders were unsigned, hastily written, and overly vague. There were two main routes by which Wallace could move his unit to the front, and Grant (according to Wallace) did not specify which one he should take. Wallace chose to take the "upper" path, which was much less used and considered in better condition, and which would lead him to reinforce the "right" side of Sherman's last known (initial) position at Shiloh Church. Grant later claimed that he had specified that Wallace take the "lower" path (River Road), although circumstantial evidence suggests that Grant had forgotten that more than one path even existed.

Wallace arrived almost at the end of his march only to find that Sherman had been forced back, and was no longer where Wallace thought he was. Moreover, Sherman had been pushed back so far that Wallace now found himself in the rear of the advancing Southern troops. Nevertheless, a messenger from Grant arrived at 11:30 a.m. with word that Grant was wondering where Wallace was and why he had not arrived near Pittsburg Landing, where the Union was now making its stand. Wallace was confused. He felt sure he could launch a viable attack from where he was and hit the Confederates in the rear. Nevertheless, he decided to countermarch his troops back along the same route and via a circuitous path direct to the bridge crossing Snake and Owl Creeks. Rather than realigning his troops so that the rear guard would be in the front, Wallace chose to countermarch his column; he argued that his artillery would have been greatly out of position to support the infantry when it would arrive on the field.

Wallace marched back to the mid-point on the "upper" road. He then proceeded to march over a new third path that would intersect with the lower road to join the army on the field, but the road had been left in terrible conditions by recent rainstorms and previous Union marches. Progress was extremely slow, marching and countermarching a total of 15 miles in six and a half hours. Wallace finally arrived at Grant's position at about 7 p.m., at a time when the fighting was practically over. Grant was not pleased. Nevertheless, the Union came back to win the battle the following day. Wallace's division held the extreme right of the Union line and was the first to attack on April 7.

At first, there was little fallout from this. Wallace was the youngest general of his rank in the army and was something of a "golden boy." Soon, however, civilians in the North began to hear the news of the horrible casualties at Shiloh, and the Army needed explanations. Both Grant and his superior, Halleck, placed the blame squarely on Wallace, saying that his incompetence in moving up the reserves had nearly cost them the battle. Sherman, for his part, remained mute on the issue. Wallace was removed from his command in June and reassigned to the much less glamorous duty commanding the defense of Cincinnati in the Department of the Ohio during Braxton Bragg's incursion into Kentucky.

Later service

Wallace's most notable service came in July 1864, at the Battle of Monocacy, part of the Valley Campaigns of 1864. Although the some 5,800-man force under his command (mostly hundred-days' men amalgamated from the VIII Corps) and the division of James B. Ricketts from VI Corps was defeated by Confederate General Jubal A. Early, who had some 15,000 troops, Wallace was able to delay Early's advance toward Washington, D.C. for an entire day, to the point that the city defenses had time to organize and repel Early, who arrived at Fort Stevens in Washington at around noon on July 11, two days after defeating Wallace at Monocacy, the northernmost Confederate victory of the war.

General Grant relieved Wallace of his command after learning of the defeat of Monocacy, but re-instated him two weeks later. Grant's memoirs praised Wallace's delaying tactics at Monocacy: "If Early had been but one day earlier, he might have entered the capital before the arrival of the reinforcements I had sent. ... General Wallace contributed on this occasion by the defeat of the troops under him, a greater benefit to the cause than often falls to the lot of a commander of an equal force to render by means of a victory." Personally, Wallace was devastated by the loss of his reputation as a result of Shiloh. He worked desperately all his life to change public opinion about his role in the battle, going so far as to literally beg Grant to "set things right" in Grant's memoirs. Grant, however, like many of the others Wallace importuned, refused to change his opinion.

Post-war career

Later in the war, Wallace directed the U.S. government's secret efforts to aide Mexico in expelling the French occupation forces which had seized control of their country in 1864. He participated in the military commission trial of the Lincoln assassination conspirators, as well as the court-martial of Henry Wirz, the commandant in charge of the South's Andersonville prison camp.

While serving as governor, Wallace completed the novel that made him famous: (1880). It grew to be the best-selling American novel of the 19th century. The book has never been out of print and has been filmed four times. Historian Victor Davis Hanson argued that the novel was based heavily on Wallace's own life, particularly his experiences at Shiloh and the damage it did to his reputation. There are some striking similarities: the book's main character, Judah Ben-Hur, accidentally causes injury to a high-ranking commander, for which he and his family suffer no end of tribulations and calumny.

The General Lew Wallace Study in Crawfordsville, Indiana, was built from 1895 to 1898. It was near Wallace's residence, and he designed it himself. It is now a museum open to the public.

Wallace died, likely from cancer, in Crawfordsville and is buried there in Oak Hill Cemetery. A marble statue of him dressed in a military uniform by sculptor Andrew O'Connor was placed in the National Statuary Hall Collection by the state of Indiana in 1910 and is currently located in the west side of the National Statuary Hall.

Works

The Fair God; or, The Last of the 'Tzins: A Tale of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company), 1873.

Commodus: An Historical Play ([Crawfordsville, IN?]: privately published by the author), 1876. (revised and reissued again in the same year)

(New York: Harper & Brothers), 1880.

The Boyhood of Christ (New York: Harper & Brothers), 1888.

Life of Gen. Ben Harrison (bound with Life of Hon. Levi P. Morton, by George Alfred Townsend), (Cleveland: N. G. Hamilton & Co., Publishers), 1888.

''Life of Gen. Ben Harrison (Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, Publishers), 1888.

Life and Public Services of Hon. Benjamin Harrison, President of the U.S. With a Concise Biographical Sketch of Hon. Whitelaw Reid, Ex-Minister to France [by Murat Halstad] (Philadelphia: Edgewood Publishing Co.), 1892.

The Prince of India; or, Why Constantinople Fell (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers), 1893. 2 volumes

The Wooing of Malkatoon [and] Commodus (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers), 1898.

Lew Wallace: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers), 1906. 2 volumes

See also

List of American Civil War generals

José María Jesús Carbajal

Notes

References

Further reading

External links

Wallace's obituary 16 February 1905. ''New York Times (pdf format).

Lew Wallace Archive, overview with detailed bibliography of his works

General Lew Wallace Study & Museum, Crawfordsville

Wallace's time-line at General Lew Wallace Museum

Category:American novelists Category:Indiana State Senators Category:Governors of New Mexico Territory Category:American military personnel of the Mexican–American War Category:American historical novelists Category:Writers from Indiana Category:American people of Scottish descent Category:Union Army generals Category:United States Army generals Category:1827 births Category:1905 deaths Category:Franklin County, Indiana Category:People of Indiana in the American Civil War Category:United States ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire Category:People from Indiana in the Mexican–American War Category:Cancer deaths in Indiana Category:People from Franklin County, Indiana Category:Deaths from stomach cancer Category:Christian novelists