Ripples of Battle

by Victor Davis Hanson

  In 1868 he stumped for Grant’s election and two years later was poised to enter politics as a Republican loyalist congressman from Indiana. Unexpectedly, he lost the election of 1870, in part due to his reluctance even to reply to Democratic attacks on his record at Shiloh. Throughout the 1870s several of Grant’s enemies—rightly critical of his scandal-ridden presidency—returned to Shiloh to attack the President in print. In response, Grant dug his heels in as pro-Republican Washington newspapers instead turned their invective on Wallace as a way of absolving the President. Such would be the sad turn of events until Grant’s death: private assurances to Wallace that Grant himself had erred or at least felt that there was no culpability on Wallace’s part, juxtaposed with Grant’s public defense of Shiloh by blaming Wallace and others. This ambiguous relationship with Grant would characterize Wallace’s efforts for the twenty-three years after Shiloh until Grant’s death in 1885: a doomed and often sad passive-aggressive effort to win over the President.

  When Grant was assigned to write of Shiloh for the influential Century Magazine, which was running stories on the war’s famous battles—later to become the authoritative Battles and Leaders of the Civil War—Wallace wrote him at length. At one point he simply begged for exoneration. As he put it, Grant should put to rest “the anxieties natural to one who has been so bitterly and continuously criticized in the connection.” He further reminded Grant, “The terrible reflections in your endorsement of my official report of the battle, and elsewhere, go to the world wholly unqualified. It is not possible to exaggerate the misfortune thus entailed upon me.”

  Twenty years after the battle, as Grant ailed, Wallace made a final, even more desperate written request for a formal absolution:

  Finally, general, did you ever ask yourself what motive I could have had to play you falsely that day. It couldn’t have been personal malice. Only a few weeks before I had been promoted Major-General on your recommendation. It couldn’t have been cowardice. You had seen me under fire at Donelson, and twice the second day at Pittsburg Landing you found me with my division under fire. It couldn’t have been lack of resolution. I certainly showed no failing of that kin at Monocacy Junction. The fact is, I was the victim of a mistake.

  Wallace then pressed his case by visiting the near-bankrupt and dying Grant in the fall of 1884; in the company of Mark Twain, Mrs. Grant exclaimed of her illustrious company, “There’s many a woman in this land that would like to be in my place and be able to tell her children that she once stood elbow to elbow between two such great authors as Mark Twain and General Wallace.” To no avail—the enfeebled Grant, tired of Wallace’s constant nagging of the last quarter century, in both the Century article and his posthumously published memoirs, wrote in the text:

  General Wallace did not arrive in time to take part in the first day’s fight. General Wallace has claimed that the order delivered to him by Captain Baxter was simply to join the right of the army, and that the road over which he marched would have taken him to the road from Pittsburg to Purdy where it crosses Owl Creek on the right of Sherman but this is not where I had ordered him nor where I wanted him to go. I never could see and do not know why any order was necessary further than to direct him to come to Pittsburg Landing without specifying by what route.

  Wallace sought other allies where he could find them—too often other disgraced officers like Col. Charles P. Stone, who had been blamed for the Federal fiasco at Ball’s Bluff and imprisoned for 189 days, or General Buell, who was faulted for the Union disaster at Perryville in late 1862 and forced to retire the next year. With friends like these, Wallace hardly needed enemies like Halleck and Grant. Wallace also turned to the public and spoke constantly to civic groups and military reunions alike, often giving spirited defenses of Shiloh and blasting Halleck: “The only one of all our Generals who never even saw a battle. . . . Chief of a nameless and unknown staff.”

  After Grant’s death, the general’s old enemies were more apt to come forward and use Wallace as a club to beat their now dead nemesis. General Buell, for example, authored a version of Shiloh for the Century Magazine series that savagely attacked Grant’s characterization of Wallace, concluding of his performance that there “must be added that a presumption of honest endeavor at Shiloh on the 7th, and on no other occasion have his [Wallace’s] zeal and courage been impugned.” In the oddest twist of all, the widow of Gen. W.H.L. Wallace (no relation), killed on the first day of Shiloh, had sent the dying Grant a letter recovered from her husband’s body, concerning communications between him and Lew Wallace before the battle. The letter proved that the two General Wallaces had made prior arrangements to use the Shunpike route to reinforce each other should trouble arise. Apparently Grant had no idea that his own independent subordinates had crafted an effective tactic to unite via an inland road should the Confederates attack either Union landing on the river.

  That newfound piece of evidence prompted Grant to have his publisher at the last minute add a small footnote to the text of his memoirs:

  This [the letter of W.H.L. Wallace] modifies very materially what I have said, and what has been said by others, of the conduct of General Lewis Wallace at the battle of Shiloh. It shows that he naturally, with no more experience than he had at the time in the profession of arms, would take the particular road that he did start upon in the absence of orders to move by a different road. If the position of our front had not changed, the road which Wallace took would have been somewhat shorter to our right than the River road.

  Wallace himself visited the battlefield almost every year. In 1903, just two years before his death, he made a final journey to inspect the official commemoration and monuments, urging changes in the manner in which his march was presented in the official guide and tourist literature. Earlier he had vehemently lobbied the Shiloh National Military Park Commission to adopt all his own maps and reports as the basis for the park guide sold to visitors. But for all of Wallace’s frantic efforts in his last years to set the record straight to generations of Americans, his diplomatic and government posts in themselves never allowed him either the power, much less the money, to regain his good name.

  Instead, it would be his writing career, not high government service or political patronage, that would restore his reputation to the American public in a way that all his impassioned briefs and pamphlets, his obsequious letters and visits to Grant, and his continual tours of Shiloh could not. Because of, rather than despite, his gift for dramatic romance, his occasional exaggeration and exuberance, and his wide experience, Lew Wallace could write what people wished to read. His disaster at Shiloh had spurred the disconsolate Wallace to vent through writing. And he was not just to write, but to publish what he had written—and to publish with the intent that thousands of Americans would read what he wrote and at last know who he really was!

  Wallace turned out to be quite prolific, publishing dozens of poems, articles, plays, and novels, among them two moderately successful epics, The Fair God (1873), which retold the historian William Prescott’s story of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and The Prince of India (1893), a swashbuckling account surrounding the conquest of Constantinople. But Lew Wallace today is not associated with either novel, which are now rarely read, or even with his ambiguous role at Shiloh. Rather he is known solely as the author of Ben-Hur—and thus the creator of the entire Ben-Hur popular phenomenon that has swept America for the past 120 years since the novel’s first appearance in 1880.

  What was the exact connection between Shiloh and Ben-Hur? There were, of course, the superficial influences of the battle upon the novelist Wallace. The fighting experiences of Shiloh’s second day proved critical in the writing of Ben-Hur’s martial and equestrian excellence. Many characters in the novel mirror Wallace’s own interests in battle tactics, the intricacies and jealousies of military command, and the thrill of leading men into combat:

  No one performed his part as well as Ben-Hur, whose training served him admirably; for, not merely he knew to
strike and guard; his long arm, perfect action, and incomparable strength helped him, also, to success in every encounter. He was at the same time fighting-man and leader. The club he wielded was of goodly length and weighty, so he had need to strike a man but once. He seemed, moreover to have eyes for each combat of his friends, and the faculty of being at the right moment exactly where he was most needed. In his fighting cry were inspiration for his party and alarm for his enemies.

  Wallace may have written of the leper colonies endured by Ben-Hur’s mother and sister out of his own horror of briefly running a detainee center after his removal from command, and then serving on the board of inquiry over the horrendous conditions in the Confederate prison at Andersonville. And by his own admission Wallace claimed that a debate with an old Shiloh acquaintance, the agnostic Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, prompted him to explore the idea of presenting through Ben-Hur a counterdefense of Christianity. President Garfield, another veteran of Shiloh, wrote Wallace an ecstatic fan letter of thanks, which had the effect of markedly increasing sales: “With this beautiful and reverent book you have lightened the burden of my daily life—and renewed our acquaintance which began at Shiloh.” A facsimile of that letter was wisely used as a frontispiece to the famous 1892 “Garfield” edition of Ben-Hur, which became the most successful and expensive two-volume set of any novel in nineteenth-century America.

  Far more important, in some sense the entire plot of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ eerily resembles much of Wallace’s own sad odyssey following that disaster of April 6, 1862. For all its subplots revolving around Christ, Ben-Hur is mostly the saga of a young, brilliant Jewish hero whose adult life is devoted to seeking revenge for an injustice done him and his family—by no less than a friend who knew better and would benefit from his duplicity.

  Judah Ben-Hur, a prosperous Jewish aristocrat, while watching from his veranda a triumphal procession below, accidentally loosens a roof tile that nearly kills Gratus, the Roman procurator of Judea. In response, the evil Roman official Messala conspires to turn the misfortune into an “assassination” attempt, thereby condemning Judah Ben-Hur to the galleys, and his mother and sister to the dungeons. At one low point, Ben-Hur philosophizes, “Death was preferable to shame; and believe me, I pray, it is so yet.” Before his final acceptance of Christ, Ben-Hur is presented as a volatile and crestfallen hero, desperate at any cost to regain his lost reputation. “The face gave back nothing to mar its youthful comeliness—nothing of accusation or sullenness or menace, only the signs which a great sorrow long borne imprints as time mellows the surface of pictures.”

  Because of this blow of fate (the loose roof tile turns out every bit as disastrous to Ben-Hur as the missed road was to Wallace, and the ancient Gratus, like the contemporary Grant, was nearly ruined by the innocent accident of a young protagonist), the hero suffers a series of horrors and indignities until he proves his mettle in a sea battle and so regains his freedom. Wealth—he becomes one of the richest men in the Roman Empire—and fame follow. And at last he triumphs over all his enemies and gets his revenge on his rival Messala—only at the climax of his ordeal to accept the power of Christ through witnessing the Crucifixion. The novel ends with Ben-Hur’s determination to devote his life and treasure to Christianity, by rejecting the power and authority of Rome. Throughout the narrative, Rome’s ruling elites appear arrogant, predatory, conniving, and imperialistic—in many ways analogous to Wallace’s own experience with high American officials in the aftermath of Shiloh. The tale illustrates that despite jealousy and the machinations of an evil rival like a Messala (or Halleck), innate talent and goodness can eventually provide enough fame and money to settle old scores—with war and politics being the arena of reckoning.

  Far more important, however, Ben-Hur was not just an allegory of Shiloh and its principal characters; Wallace’s own sense of injustice following the battle may well also have been the larger catalyst for his writing career. He reiterated often the direct connection between his efforts to succeed with Ben-Hur and the need to wipe clean the Shiloh stain. Even after the conclusion of Wallace’s successful tenure as minister to the Ottoman Empire and when sales of Ben-Hur were reaching unbelievable levels, Wallace could still write in 1885 that his wildly successful fiction had almost eclipsed the setback of Shiloh: “I have letters from publishers on both sides of the sea, and so, may the end of life be swift or slow, I may be found at this work. Into such pleasant life but one hurt—the old wound at Shiloh.”

  An exasperated Wallace also wrote his wife in 1885 that the fame of Ben-Hur had almost trumped the ignominy of Shiloh: “Shiloh and its slanders! Will the world ever acquit me of them? If I were guilty I would not feel them so keenly. Ending by finding solace in Ben-Hur, I can bear it.” He added, “I have a reputation in another sphere sufficient to keep me afloat.”

  At least writing and the accompanying fortune and fame of a best-seller might allow Wallace to have his own study and hence some relief “to play the violin at midnight if I chose. A detached room away from the world and its worries. A place for my old age to rest in and grow reminiscent, fighting the battles of youth over again.” Yet, even in 1900, thirty-eight years after the battle, Wallace could still lament, “That awful mystery known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing comes home more directly than to most of those engaged in it. O, the lies, the lies that were told to make me the scapegoat to bear off the criminal mistakes of others. . . . Think of what I suffered.”

  For all his theatrics, in some sense Wallace was reacting to real rather than merely perceived animosity. In 1888, for example, a Milwaukee newspaper maliciously wrote of rumors surrounding a possible offer to Wallace of a cabinet position in the Harrison administration, “Wallace may be a good literary man, but it wants a soldier for secretary of war who can get his men into a fight five miles away without marching all day.”

  Wallace constantly used his fame as the author of Ben-Hur to reopen the old wounds of Shiloh. Well into the twentieth century and in his seventies he requested that the Society of the Army of the Tennessee reexamine the forty-year-old controversy of the Shunpike march; he sought to obtain a military commission during the Spanish-American War that might bring him final military renown to absolve the old charges; and he persisted in sending copies of his acclaimed fiction to aged officers like Generals Garfield, Grant, Howard, Hayes, and Sherman, so that they might in turn finish their memoirs with favorable assessments of Wallace’s march at Shiloh.

  But if the obsession with Shiloh helped prompt Wallace’s literary career and shaped the very plot of Ben-Hur, did the novel itself have any lasting effect on American culture? Quite a lot, in fact. Ben-Hur turned out to be the most popular work of fiction written in nineteenth-century America; indeed, its aggregate sales were not surpassed until the success of Gone With the Wind in the late 1930s. While elite critics and intellectuals often scoffed at the novel’s Victorian pretense, cardboard characters, stilted prose, and thinly veiled allusions to Wallace’s own life, the turn-of-the-century public adored Ben-Hur and made its author one of the most famous men in America. Lew Wallace found the celebrity status of a Stephen King or John Grisham—a hundred years earlier.

  After a slow start in 1880 (its first year of publication), Ben-Hur’s popularity soon spread by word of mouth. By 1883 it was selling 750 copies a month, by 1886, 4,500. The American publishing industry had never seen anything like it. In just nine years the novel had sold 400,000 copies in thirty-six editions, and surpassed the phenomenal totals of Uncle Tom’s Cabin! It was also by far the most requested book in America’s public libraries.

  A mere ten years after the appearance of Ben-Hur, Lew Wallace was the most successful novelist in the history of America. But the novel would turn out to sell even more rapidly in the next half-century of its publication. A million copies were published by 1911; the next year alone Sears, Roebuck printed another million copies to sell at thirty-nine cents each in the largest single-year print edition in American history. The last offic
ial recorded sales figures in the 1940s put the total copies purchased at somewhere between two and three million; in fact, the true total was probably millions higher. By 1936, Ben-Hur had earned the greatest financial returns of any single novel in American history.

  Americans were fascinated by Wallace’s exotic descriptions of the Holy Land, the singular mission of Ben-Hur to exact revenge, the multicultural milieu of ancient Rome and Jerusalem, and, of course, the message of divine salvation through faith. Even as the Boston Brahmins of the literary elite—James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and William Dean Howells—snubbed Wallace and scoffed at the amateur’s clumsy efforts at fiction, the American public bought the book in droves. For many, it became the first—and only—novel they ever read. Whether Wallace realized it or not, godly and self-made Americans identified with Ben-Hur’s singular quest for revenge and redemption. Hundreds more readers wrote to Wallace that the novel had in fact convinced them to convert to Christianity. In that regard, Ben-Hur marked a radical change in American letters, as millions of Americans for the first time felt that reading fiction was neither sacrilegious nor the sole esoteric pursuit of intellectuals, but was rightly intended for the secular enjoyment and edification of common people. Lew Wallace, as it turned out, introduced more Americans to reading than any other author of the nineteenth century. He in essence had invented popular American fiction—and behind it all was the spur of Shiloh.

  The plays and movie versions to follow reached millions more. The stage production alone—requiring thirty tons of machinery with horses and chariots on a treadmill—was performed six thousand times before 20 million Americans, touring almost every major city in the United States during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In short, the play was the most successful in American history, and to this day has drawn a greater aggregate audience than any dramatic presentation of an American author. It gained rave endorsements from Billy Sunday to William Jennings Bryan. Thousands of derivative books, songs, toys, and ads followed, the popular avalanche only to be surpassed by the (four) motion picture versions to come. Hollywood had seen nothing like the December 1925 release of the long-awaited film starring Ramon Navarro as Ben-Hur, with gigantic sets for the galley battle and chariot race that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And while the silent movie set a record of expenditures at over $4 million, it also proved the most lucrative moneymaker in Hollywood’s then brief history—earning over $9 million in its first two years.