To Wallace nothing was further from the truth. The first day of Shiloh had been a complete frustration. He had been ordered far too late to advance to the battlefield. Grant’s written orders were unintelligible, poorly copied, and unsigned. A succession of messengers brought contradictory and often inaccurate reports of the fighting. His poor men had been forced to march in a near-circle over fourteen miles in a wild goose chase to arrive late at a battlefield a mere six miles away. His army arrived wet, cold, and in the dark—an object of derision rather than celebration.
Grant apparently had no idea that just days before the battle his own division commanders had communicated with each other via the Shunpike and planned to use that route if mutual reinforcements were necessary. Due to Grant’s ignorance of the Shunpike, Wallace’s division had now marched nearly seven hours and covered over fourteen miles in the worst of conditions—and was still not in line against the Confederates. Even if Grant had wanted him at Pittsburg Landing, Wallace had nevertheless managed hours earlier to approach the opposite end of the battlefield, and was almost close enough to engage the enemy’s rear when ordered instead to withdraw, retrace his route, and march closely parallel to the river. Had he been allowed to continue, he might have crossed over the Owl Creek bridge and theoretically could have appeared behind the Confederate Army with 7,000 fresh troops, slowing their assault before the collapse of the Union resistance at the Hornet’s Nest. In any case, when he finally arrived at Grant’s confused command post at Pittsburg Landing, Wallace was determined to forget the day’s fiasco and make amends the next morning.
At 6:30 A.M., Wallace’s 3rd Division counterattacked with the rest of the Union army—his fresh 7,000 soldiers and General Buell’s 20,000-man Army of the Ohio meant that Grant’s army had suddenly doubled in size. Indeed, it now outnumbered the tired Confederates by two to one. Wallace performed adequately on the second day, although his troops were not pitted against the main resistance, suffering only 41 killed and 251 wounded in the steady Union counterattack.
On the evening of the seventh, with the retreat of the Confederate Army, Wallace, as he had at Fort Donelson, once more proclaimed himself a near hero. After all, he and Buell had purportedly turned the tide, lost few men, and chased the rebels off the battlefield. The mixup the day before was quickly forgotten: the now victorious Union Army no doubt would rapidly chase General Beauregard’s defeated army back to Corinth, destroy what was left of it, and then storm the city, opening all of Mississippi to the advance of a huge force of nearly 100,000 troops. There would be enough laurels for all involved. Wallace was sure that his own timely reinforcement at Shiloh meant that his division would play a prominent part in the final kill. Two days after battle he was near ecstatic, and wrote his wife, “My whole command behaved like heroes, never yielding an inch.”
At first, a relieved nation bought it and agreed that Wallace’s appearance on the second day had indeed helped turn the tide. He was featured in national magazines like Leslie’s and Harper’s Weekly, which prompted floods of congratulatory letters and gifts from his friends and admirers back home. It was Fort Donelson all over again for the dashing young general. Wallace made no effort to hide his pride, predicting a quick pursuit and, with the destruction of the fleeing Confederates, an early end to the Civil War itself. Yet four days after the battle ended, a strange sequence of events began to unfold that would destroy Wallace’s career. And within weeks of Shiloh the purported hero would find himself in disgrace and removed of major command!
Wallace’s disaster perhaps began on April 12, with the arrival of the punctilious General Halleck. The latter removed Grant from active control of the Army of the Tennessee, apparently on the grounds that Grant had been negligently surprised at Shiloh. As the new commanding officer of all Western forces, the bookish Halleck was at last ready to lead from the field. Now that the terrible battle was over, he would personally manage the final Union pursuit of the defeated.
Yet Halleck proved disastrous for the Union effort and ruinous for Wallace himself. At first, the plodding Halleck disingenuously boasted that he had been the mastermind of the entire Western campaign and tried to take credit for the strategic victory of Shiloh. Then he faulted Grant for the high casualties of April 6, only to waste weeks in moving his ponderous army a mere thirty miles to Corinth—to find the Confederate Army long gone and the city largely deserted. What was won at Shiloh by Grant was thrown away by Halleck in the days that followed.
Demanding that his generals erect breastworks and fortifications each night, the jittery Halleck often made less than a mile’s progress a day—a slow-moving Albert Sidney Johnston had covered the same distance from Corinth to Shiloh in the April rains in little more than three days. Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar had often marched their armies of the preindustrial age thirty miles in less than ten hours. In contrast, Halleck’s progress was almost comical, as his huge confident army timidly crept toward a demoralized and numerically inferior beaten force.
The dawdling Union pursuit, the escape of the defeated Confederate Army, the inexplicable removal of a popular Grant, the mounting criticism of the dilatory Halleck, the final tallying of the horrific Union losses at Shiloh—12,217 casualties with over 1,700 killed—all set the stage for months of controversy and mutual recriminations as Shiloh was reexamined as no American battle before. The press and the War Department in Washington seemed to forget that Shiloh was a tactical victory and a strategic bonanza; instead, both demanded heads for the appalling losses and the escape of the defeated Confederates. Shiloh would have been seen as nothing novel by summer 1864; but in spring 1862 the very idea of well over 10,000 casualties in a single engagement was appalling to the Northern populace and demanded punitive measures. Had Halleck destroyed the vulnerable retreating Confederates, the mistakes of April 6 would have been forgotten; instead, the Northern public gradually was told that its youth had been butchered without a sure victory or indeed much discernable change in the immediate strategic picture in the West at large.
Worse still for Wallace, the mounting tension between Halleck and Grant would soon make his own position nearly untenable. After Halleck’s laggard generalship eventually led to his transfer back east, Grant by midsummer was returned to command of the Western theater—with the endorsement of Lincoln (“I can’t spare this man, he fights”). Although Grant had survived Halleck’s efforts to sabotage his career, he was nevertheless still shocked by the fury of public criticism of his conduct at Shiloh among the Northern press and politicians. Especially galling were the often wild charges that he had been absent from the battlefield when the shooting started, may well have been drunk, was completely surprised, had ordered no entrenchments, and thus was responsible for the first day’s shocking casualties.
In reaction, slowly Grant directed his wrath onto Wallace and subtly began to suggest a scenario that might account for the near fiasco of the first day: had his orders only been followed by Wallace, the Union losses were entirely avoidable. Seven thousand reinforcements, as he had planned, would have arrived by 2 to 3 P.M. at the latest. Their surprise appearance would have stopped the Confederate onslaught cold. The Hornet’s Nest would not have fallen. General Buell’s help would not have been necessary. If any general was responsible for the shocking butchery, perhaps it was the young, amateur, and flamboyant Lew Wallace, not himself.
Three other events conspired to aid Grant’s defense. First, Halleck, who had come off the worse in his duplicitous efforts to besmear Grant, was wary of tangling further with the hero of Fort Donelson—and was only too happy to join in to deflect Grant’s wrath from himself onto Wallace. Thus he would henceforth prove deaf to all of Wallace’s appeals for an inquiry into the battle. So too, Sherman, the newfound hero of Shiloh, was not eager to enter the controversy. He also had been surprised the first day and had no wish to reexamine the issue of culpability in any great detail. Moreover, he was now a friend of Grant’s and owed his resurrection in part to Grant’s support; in turn, Sherman had been instrumental in persuading Grant not to quit after Halleck took command of his army in the battle’s aftermath. Neither Halleck nor Sherman then had any desire to defend the mercurial Wallace against a national hero. Wallace somehow had found himself without a friend: of the three most powerful men in the Union Army, two were openly hostile, and one at best neutral.
Third and most grievously, Wallace’s own obstreperous character and reckless talk now cemented his demise. In his official report after the battle, Wallace was careful to defend his actions, but in a way that only made Grant look worse, especially through his emphasis that he was not ordered to the battlefield until 11:30 A.M. By whatever route he took, Wallace reasonably pointed out, Grant’s initial delay ensured that seven thousand men would miss the critical first eight hours of the fighting. And even if he had taken a route different from what Grant purportedly ordered, his own march was nearly completed and had resulted in placing his army unknown at the enemy’s rear—and perhaps poised for a critical counterattack that might have saved the Union forces.
Grant was furious over Wallace’s implications, and especially any public suggestions that Wallace had played a key role in the victory when he had missed the tough fighting the first day and lost hardly any men the second. Contradicting his first official report written on April 9 that had praised Generals McClernand and Wallace—both “had maintained their places with credit to themselves and the cause”—most of Grant’s numerous later accounts of the battle painted a damning portrait of Wallace’s incompetence. In fact, Grant claimed that he had ordered Wallace to move at 11 A.M., not 11:30—and not once but three times! While his official orders were not written but copied by a messenger, his own staff could “vouch” that he had expressly commanded the use of the river route. Furthermore, common sense should have convinced anyone that a Union general in earshot of the fighting should not have marched in circles for seven hours to cover a mere six miles. Grant’s final account of the battle, reiterated in his memoirs two decades later, would prove Wallace’s undoing.
Wallace’s shrill counterefforts only made things worse. Earlier during the Donelson campaign he had attacked Gen. Charles F. Smith, Grant’s now-martyred mentor, and took undue credit for the victory. Now in Shiloh’s aftermath, he once again complained publicly that General McClernand, his equal in rank, was wrongly given priority of future action. Worse still, he harped to aides of General Halleck that their commander’s slowness in pursuing the Confederates threatened to throw away the victory gained at Shiloh—astute though unwise criticism that got back to the hypersensitive Halleck within hours. Wallace soon gained a reputation for troublemaking and second-guessing his West Point betters. Before he knew it, by late June, a mere three months after Shiloh, Wallace found himself back home in Indiana and without a division.
He turned frantic. Desperate to get back into the war, shamed by the sudden reversal of fortune, and near paranoid about the mere suggestion that he was in any way culpable for the hundreds of Union dead on Shiloh’s first day, Wallace now became obsessed with clearing his name. He went first to the papers. But his old friends at the New York Tribune and the Cincinnati Gazette either declined to get involved or offered only meager defenses of a Wallace now out of favor with the powers that be.
He mailed further accounts to Halleck and the War Department in Washington, replete with maps and detailed exegesis. Halleck, ever the intriguer, simply showed them to a furious Grant, who was further irate and responded with more affidavits from his loyal subordinates “proving” Wallace’s negligence. Wallace in turn applied to Secretary of War Stanton for a formal court of inquiry. He finally approached Sherman, who at least spoke on his behalf to Grant, but to no avail. Yet Sherman ended up giving Wallace the best advice yet: forget the matter, keep quiet, and hope that an increasingly famous Grant would be magnanimous enough to give him a second chance.
Wallace dropped the formal inquiry but ignored the rest of Sherman’s advice, and seemed to think that the momentous events now unfolding in the war were secondary to a proper audit of a battle long past and better put to rest. He now enlisted surrogate apologists in the popular press, as he himself wrote tirelessly for the next ten years to reporters, editors, biographers, and historians in hopes of restoring the proper picture of Shiloh—one sensitive to his own dilemma with Grant and absolving him of any responsibility for the Union dead. He even published a short treatise, “General Wallace’s Military Record,” in which he claimed with some exaggeration that Grant himself had always found Wallace “blameless.” Unfortunately, Wallace could not help but add that “If my march to the battlefield as I began it had not been countermanded, we would have done more than win a victory the first day—we would have captured a large part of the Confederate Army.”
That admission—a boast that in theory might well have been true—undermined Wallace’s position in various ways. He now shifted from defense to the attack: Grant’s first order that was garbled by subordinates was not the real problem, but rather his subsequent and quite clear commands to reverse Wallace midroute on the Shunpike. The effect was to allege that the soon-to-be President of the United States had thrown away a decisive Union victory. Second, Wallace’s brag in turn weakened his earlier defense that he took the Shunpike from a natural desire to join Sherman’s last reported position. Now post facto he seemed to be suggesting that all along he might have taken the overland route not merely to bolster the Union line, but rather deliberately to hit the Rebels unexpectedly from the rear. Was Wallace, then, insubordinate the entire time in quests of glory?
Third, few students of the battle would believe that a single division of less than 7,000 men could have stopped the Confederate advance that was sweeping toward Pittsburg Landing—especially when on the second day of the battle all of Buell’s 20,000, and Wallace’s 3rd Division, joined with Grant’s battered forces, took hours to push the Confederates back without shattering their cohesion or ruining their army. Moreover, Confederates later claimed that they knew of Wallace’s arrival and were prepared to bar his passage over the remaining bridges. In any case, Wallace’s zeal to clear his name more often had the opposite effect of antagonizing far more powerful rivals who were not about to accept any culpability for Shiloh. At the same time he was showing a certain shrillness if not inconsistency in his own purportedly principled defense—all at a time of Grant’s rising power and a general American desire to forget the horrific losses of the recent war.
Gen. Lew Wallace never recovered from the ignominy of Shiloh nor regained Grant’s confidence. “I could manage him if he had less rank,” Grant wrote back in rebuke of Halleck’s inquiry about bringing Wallace back to frontline command. Although Wallace would later play a key role in the defense of Cincinnati, assume the influential military command of Maryland, help defend Washington from Jubal Early’s raid of July 1864 at the critical battle of Monocacy, and serve on commissions investigating everything from Lincoln’s assassination to the Confederate prison wardens at Andersonville, he could not and would not let go of Shiloh. Before April 6 he had been a rising star and a savior of Union lives; after the battle he was unfairly discredited and blamed for thousands of dead Americans. Others could forget Shiloh, but Lew Wallace would not.
We shall never know exactly what happened the first day at Shiloh. But the preponderance of evidence, both written records and drawn from later interviews, in fact favors much of Wallace’s account. Most likely, Grant sent an unclear order through an aide without specifying the exact route of advance. He was also probably ignorant of the Shunpike route, and then became so immersed in the chaos of the Union disaster that he felt no need—and had no time—for specifics. The more reflective and occasionally fussy Wallace at the rear logically assumed that he was to take the shorter inland road to arrive at Sherman’s right. Perhaps he also entertained private hopes that his sudden appearance on his “secret” road might surprise the Confederates and gain him renown. In any case, Grant should have ordered Wallace to march much earlier in the day and should have given him precise written orders about the direction and purpose of his mission. His aides should have allowed Wallace’s veteran division in transit to enter the battlefield from the Shunpike and hit the Confederates from the rear.
All that being said, neither general had accurate information during the confused melee of the first hours at Shiloh, and there were plenty of far greater blunders on both sides during the battle that affected the eventual outcome every bit as much as Wallace’s late arrival on the first evening. Grant, remember, was over ten miles away from his army when it was attacked. He had ordered no entrenchments or even rudimentary precautions, and had allowed an army of forty thousand Confederates to get within rifle shot of his forces without being noticed. And, far worse, Halleck had allowed an entire defeated army to flee.
Lew Wallace would live for another forty-three years after Shiloh. He became heavily involved in Mexican politics, served as a territorial governor of New Mexico, and was appointed by President Garfield, another Shiloh veteran, as United States minister to the Ottoman court at Constantinople. Yet throughout his long and near storybook career—he dealt on numerous occasions with Billy the Kid, the Apache renegade Victorio, and Abdul-Hamid II, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire—Wallace continued his obsession with Shiloh, all the more desperately so as his chief nemesis, Ulysses S. Grant, grew in stature from General of the Army to President of the United States. In some sense, Lew Wallace’s entire life between 1862 and 1906 is a chronicle of his efforts to pursue the ghost of the Shunpike.
After Wallace’s victory at the battle of Monocacy that helped save Washington, D.C., he found himself for a time on somewhat better terms with Grant. The latter even purportedly admitted to him in August 1864, “If I had known then what I know now, I would have ordered you where you were marching when stopped”—a belated admission that Wallace would often repeat but could not corroborate. But for all Grant’s talk of bringing Wallace back to frontline action with the Army of the Potomac, Wallace was more or less ostracized and left alone back in Baltimore until the war ended, a general without an army. Shiloh was simply too large an albatross.
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 official 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.
William Wyler’s monumental 1959 remake with Charlton Heston as Ben-Hur (and another 365 speaking roles) was even more successful—nominated for twelve Academy Awards, winning eleven (including Best Picture and Best Actor). The panoramic film grossed over $40 million its first year alone; its primetime television debut in February 1971 (shown over four nights) achieved the highest rating of any movie presented on television up to that time. The Hollywood extravaganzas in turn reignited book sales nearly sixty years after Wallace’s death. By 1960, Ben-Hur had appeared in over sixty English-language editions—and is selling well in its third century of publication.
Ben-Hur radically affected American popular culture. Everything from bicycles and cigars to toys and drinks—and even towns—were named Ben-Hur. Chariot racing became an American folk spectacle at rodeos and fairs. The modern idea that historical epics—Quo Vadis, Spartacus, or Gone With the Wind—can appeal widely to supposedly ahistorical Americans we owe largely to the popularizer Lew Wallace. But more important, Wallace’s novel began the strange nexus in American life, for good or ill, between literature, motion pictures, advertising, and popular culture. The novel led to the stage and then to the movies, but in the process it spun out entire ancillary industries of songs, skits, ads, clothes, and fan clubs, ensuring that within fifty years of its publication, nearly every American had heard the word “Ben-Hur” without necessarily ever reading the book.
In that sense, Ben-Hur prefigures the world of The Ten Commandments to Gladiator (the latter’s movie script is hauntingly similar to Wallace’s own play Commodus) and established the now predictable evolution of successful novel to movie blockbuster to advertising gold mine to permanent place in the popular folk tradition of America. Wallace’s brilliant adventure tale accounts for most of the larger Ben-Hur’s mystique—but not quite all. At least some of the novel’s inexplicable popularity was due to the tireless plugging of the author himself, who for two decades made it a point to tour, appear in public, give lectures and signings, oversee dramatic adaptations, answer fan letters, and promote his book with influential Americans (like Garfield, Grant, and Sherman) in a frenzied effort to become known, rich—and so perhaps at last taken seriously in wiping away the stain of Shiloh.
While America had long honored its gifted men of letters like Longfellow or Twain, the Wallace phenomenon was something entirely different. Wallace’s apotheosis presaged the twentieth century in its transmogrification of the acclaimed writer to popular icon, a literary celebrity whose fame rested not with book reviews in literary journals, but entirely as a result of popular readership and sales figures—and mostly oblivious to the opinion of intellectuals, academics, and other novelists. At his death Wallace had become a national folk hero, one mobbed by the American public, called on tour for an endless series of Ben-Hur lectures, hounded by devoted fan clubs, and canonized by politicians (his likeness sits in Statuary Hall in the Capitol building in Washington).
Such were the strange wages of the missed road on April 6, 1862. If today most Americans are ignorant of Lew Wallace, it is equally true—and perhaps just as regrettable—that they are far more likely to know something of his Ben-Hur than anything at all of the battle of Shiloh. “My God!” Wallace remarked in 1899 when first examining the stage sets to Ben-Hur. “Did I set all this in motion?” He did—but Shiloh had as well.
Night: The Klansman
As Sherman braved fire to reform his perimeter, as Albert Sidney Johnston was bleeding to death in the early afternoon of the first day of the battle, and as Lew Wallace was reversing course and returning to the river route to Pittsburg Landing, Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest joined his cavalry regiment in the furious Confederate assault against the surrounded Union troops in the Hornet’s Nest. Prior to his late entry into the melee, Forrest had become increasingly restless with his assigned minor supporting role. Shiloh was certainly not the colonel’s type of war. He much preferred fluid skirmishing between rapidly moving mounted columns of intrepid rangers. Instead, the morning’s fighting had turned into a static, ugly infantry slugfest. At Shiloh numbers and firepower, not cunning and audacity, were more likely to bring success amid deep mud, thickets, and ravines.
When the shooting had started, the lowly and mostly unknown Colonel Forrest had been given the ignominious task of protecting the Confederate flank at Lick Creek—largely a safe assignment to the rear and at the periphery of the battlefield. For the first five hours of fighting Forrest waited patiently, obedient to his orders to watch the right flank should any Union reservists come up the river to land at Hamburg and turn the Confederates’ rear. Finally, Forrest had had enough of his inaction. He remarked to his men, “Boys, do you hear that rattle of musketry and the roar of artillery?” When they shouted, “Yes, yes,” he bellowed in reply, “Do you know what it means? It means that our friends and brothers are falling by hundreds at the hands of the enemy and we are here guarding a damned creek. We did not enter the service for such work, and the reputation of the regiment does not justify our commanding officer in leaving us here while we are needed elsewhere. Let’s go and help them. What do you say?”
When his men roared back in the affirmative, Colonel Forrest rode into the first major pitched battle of his career. Before that decision to disregard orders and gallop toward the firing, Forrest had been relatively ignored among the Southern high command. His sound advice either to defend the garrison or break out en masse was ignored at Fort Donelson, whose timid commanders instead surrendered thousands of valuable soldiers to Grant. Forrest also had no formal, much less military, education. In fact, he was nearly illiterate. He had not been sought out by the new Confederate government, but instead had raised his own brigade of Tennessee horsemen and supplied them with his own weapons. Most likely, his own shady past in slave trading made him suspect among the aristocratic Southern officer corps.
Yet his dramatic entry into the Hornet’s Nest would mark the first of three remarkable acts at Shiloh, which over the next twenty-four hours would magically transform the Memphis slave trader into the legendary icon Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. Just as Sherman’s near-death experiences at Shiloh would resurrect his professional life with untold misery to come for the South, and as Wallace’s missed route would lead to the creation of the cultural phenomenon of Ben-Hur, so too Forrest’s day at Shiloh would prove the catalyst for a remarkable military career that had consequences for the entire nation well beyond his Civil War years.
Nothing could have offered a more drastic change of landscape from his previous sentry duty. Forrest’s cavalrymen now went from the quiet of Lick Creek into the inferno of the Hornet’s Nest. Major General Cheatham’s efforts, like most of the previous Confederate piecemeal attacks against the frenzied and surrounded Northerners, had been repulsed with heavy losses. Desperate Union artillerymen firing from the protection of the sunken road continued to rain canister across the approaching Southerners. When Forrest rode up, hundreds of Confederates were reeling backward from another failed charge. The rambunctious Forrest could not find any superior to order him forward. He was instead forced to rely on his own initiative. “I will charge under my own orders,” he told General Cheatham. His nearly five hundred men abruptly galloped into the fire, making their way to within fifty yards of the Union lines before faltering in muddy ground and rough thickets. Yet Forrest’s audacity had emboldened another effort from the exhausted Cheatham’s infantrymen. The latter sensed that the Union circle was at last shrinking ever smaller and on the verge of collapsing altogether. Cheatham’s own subsequent charge, joined in anew by Forrest’s men, helped crack the Union circle.
For the next three hours Forrest helped in finishing off the Hornet’s Nest and pursuing hundreds of Prentiss’s men who fled toward the refuge of the Tennessee River. And after General Prentiss surrendered the remaining two thousand trapped men in the late afternoon, Forrest pressed his way still forward with other scattered forces to the cliffs above Pittsburg Landing, marking the high-water mark of the Confederate advance of the first day of Shiloh. It was a spectacular sight! Below, thousands of Union soldiers were rushing to the river in panic, gunboats steaming up to provide some desperate support for thousands more milling around—even as some fifty batteries rushed into position to form a last-ditch perimeter before Grant’s entire shattered command was pushed into the river.
Time was now critical. The rambunctious Forrest was adamant that there was only a window of a few minutes to crush the dazed Northerners before darkness—and before reinforcements from across the river, and the increasing fire of dozens of Union cannon, would put an end to the Confederate advance. But by the time Forrest’s request to storm Pittsburg Landing was forwarded to Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk, it was nearly dark, and the advanced Confederate companies on the ridge were coming under steady artillery assault.
Still, as he retreated for the night to safer ground, Forrest was even more convinced that the landing had to be assaulted sometime that very evening, before reinforcements swelled the Union army at sunrise. At the very outset, Albert Sidney Johnston and his generals had envisioned crushing Grant’s army through a flank attack on the right aimed at the Union base at Pittsburg Landing, a sudden stroke designed to finish the Army of the Tennessee before it united with the Army of the Ohio. Now it seemed that a nondescript colonel alone of the Southern command wished to follow the original intent of the Confederate tactical and strategic plan by sweeping down to the river before Buell’s army crossed.
Unfortunately, Forrest’s request to crash into the last Union position was rejected by Polk. The general countered that the night, the exhaustion of his men, the sudden arrival of Union batteries and gunboats at the landing, and the apparent expectation of an easy final assault the next morning, all that made such a risky assault unnecessary, if not unwise. Forrest was dumbfounded—but still convinced that Union reinforcements during the night might the next day nullify all of the Confederate gains. Below—even as Grant was meeting Sherman to assure him of a victorious counterattack the next morning, as Lew Wallace finally pulled in from Crump’s Landing with his fresh division, as rumors began to spread that the corpse brought out of the Hornet’s Nest was not a Colonel “Jackson,” but none other than the supreme commander, Albert Sidney Johnston himself, and as the tempestuous General Buell ferried his massive 20,000-man Army of the Ohio across the Tennessee River—an exasperated Nathan Bedford Forrest began to stalk the shadows in desperation.
Events that night would prove his worst fears correct. As the exhausted Confederate Army slept or scrounged among the captured opulent Union camps, and as its stupefied command retired for the evening, Forrest began to reconnoiter the Union lines. What he discovered was frightening. His patrols, many disguised in blue Union overcoats, in early evening brought back disturbing news. The Army of the Ohio was not miles away—as faulty Confederate intelligence had claimed during the morning. In fact, it was now crossing the Tennessee and pouring thousands of men into the Union camp at Pittsburg Landing!
Whole fresh regiments were streaming into Grant’s demoralized and beaten army while the confident though exhausted Southerners slept. General Prentiss, captured with the collapse of the Hornet’s Nest, was prescient, not boasting, when he had matter-of-factly related to his captors that the Union Army would return in renewed fury on early Monday morning. The South unfortunately was now fighting a rare man in Ulysses S. Grant. Far from being stunned by the near collapse of his army, the Union commander was not licking his considerable wounds, but eager to launch an offensive before sunrise of the second day of battle.
Forrest, however, found no one to share his amazing intelligence coup. His immediate superior, Brigade Gen. James R. Chalmers, was of no help. While sympathetic, Chalmers possessed insufficient rank to call out the troops. He had no idea where Generals Hardee, Bragg, and Beauregard were anyway. Forrest remarked to Chalmers, “You are the first general I have found who knows where his men are!” The barely literate Colonel Forrest’s warning went unheeded:
I have been way down along the river-bank, close to the enemy. I could see the lights on the steamboats and hear distinctively the orders given in the disembarkation of the troops. They are receiving reinforcements by the thousands, and if this army does not move and attack them between now and daylight, and before other reinforcements arrive, it will be whipped like hell before ten o’clock tomorrow.
Chalmers later reported that when Forrest at last hunted down the Confederate leadership and presented the same disturbing news to Generals Breckinridge and Hardee, “the unlettered colonel was told to go back to his regiment.” In any case, it was now too late—nearly 3 A.M., with a renewed Union attack less than three hours away. The supposedly crushed Grant, not the victorious Beauregard, was eager to renew hostilities. Forrest’s second legendary feat at Shiloh—roaming the battlefield into the early morning Cassandra-like in making desperate pleas to rouse the Confederates to preempt the Union counterattack—like his earlier charge into the Hornet’s Nest, would later raise the obscure colonel to heroic status within the army. Yet both experiences also soured him on the competence and bravery of the far better bred and educated Southern high command.
The next morning, events transpired precisely as Forrest had feared. Grant’s surviving army was joined by Buell and Wallace. A combined force of well over 40,000 Union soldiers—well over half of them fresh—now poured into the Confederate lines, steadily driving them back beyond the original demarcation lines of the prior morning. All ground won on Sunday was lost in Monday’s first hours. A dispirited Forrest spent the morning rounding up stragglers, protecting infantry from flank attacks, and occasionally dismounting to join in sporadic Confederate counterattacks. But by noon, less than 15,000 remaining able-bodied Confederates were now on the verge of being demolished by the Union juggernaut.
Wisely, Beauregard at last ordered a general retreat, as artillery and cavalry—Forrest’s regiment especially was preeminent—disguised the withdrawal with vigorous skirmishing. By Monday afternoon, what was left of the Southern army was at last safely detached and on its way back to Corinth, Mississippi. It took hours for the bewildered advancing Union army to grasp that its tenacious enemy was in fact retreating rather than readying for yet another murderous counterassault. By Monday evening, both sides were disengaged. The battle of Shiloh was over.
Or almost over. When Grant at last realized that his enemy was shattered and retreating, on Tuesday morning he ordered the redoubtable Sherman to pursue the demoralized Southerners. About four miles distant from his original headquarters at Shiloh Church, Sherman at last came upon the Confederate rear guard at a former logging camp called Fallen Timbers. Here Forrest seems to have left the world of Confederate gallantry and entered the realm of heroic myth where gods traverse the battlefield slaying with impunity mere mortals. We have a fairly accurate account of what happened next, inasmuch as both Union and Confederate witnesses—among them William Tecumseh Sherman—agree on most of the events.
Sherman caught up with the rear guard of the Confederate Army sometime on the morning of Tuesday, April 8. The terrain—muddy and covered with rotten timber—favored Sherman’s infantrymen. They vastly outnumbered Forrest’s skeleton rearguard force of some 150 cavalrymen aided by a motley assortment of 200 rangers from various scattered companies. Inexplicably, Forrest ordered his ragtag band to charge directly against the advancing Union infantry, who now numbered over 400 and were supported by another 200 cavalry—and in turn bolstered by an entire brigade in reserve.
Sherman in his memoirs matter-of-factly chronicled the sudden collapse of his men:
The enemy’s cavalry came down boldly at a charge, led by General Forrest in person, breaking through our line of skirmishers; when the regiment of infantry, without cause, broke, threw away their muskets, and fled. The ground was admirably adapted for a defense of infantry against cavalry, being miry and covered with fallen timber. . . .