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Lew Wallace
Lew Wallace had never wanted to be Governor. But President Rutherford B. Hayes gave him a choice. Take the $2,600 a year job and restore law and order to Lincoln County or fill a better-paying, 
diplomatic post in faraway Bolivia.
Wallace, age 51, chose Santa Fe. He became New Mexico's 11th Territorial Governor on September 30, 1878. Wallace already had the political pedigree. His lawyer father had become Indiana's Governor; and his uncle Idaho's and Washington's Governor. Both had become U.S. Congressmen afterward. His brother-in-law had become Indiana's Governor, and even Wallace had held office once as an Indiana State Senator.
But he had sought a prestigious diplomatic post, and had spent his post-Civil War years building his connections. He had known Abe Lincoln when both had been young Midwest attorneys. Wallace had served under Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War (and had become, at age 34, the youngest Major General in the Union army). He was a no-nonsense, law-and-order juror who had helped convict the Lincoln conspirators and the Confederate commandant of the Andersonville prison camp.
Born on April 10, 1827, in Brookville, Ind., to David and Esther Test French Wallace, he was raised in Covington, Ind. David, a stern father, was a West Point graduate. His mother, who loved to read to her son, died at age 27 of tuberculosis when Wallace was seven. As a young student he loved to read and write, hated math, and was mediocre in school. At age 16, Wallace became a court clerk who learned the hard way how little the job paid. Eventually he became an attorney (a profession he grew to hate).
In 1852, Wallace had married Susan Arnold Elston, the daughter of a politically powerful family, in Crawfordsville, Ind. Their only child, Henry, was born the next year. Decades later, recollecting on what would be the Wallaces' 53-year "chivalrous" marriage, he described himself as romantic and impulsive. Susan was the practical and calculating one. "She…held my hand in defeat, and rejoiced in my triumphs," Wallace wrote, and "she could scold terribly."
A daydreamer since childhood, he loved to read books; his black eyes and keen mind devoured them. A prodigious writer, he corresponded widely and kept diaries and journals. A self-taught artist (he was a talented pen-and-ink illustrator), Wallace was also a musician (a violinist), an inventor (eventually filing eight patents), and a novice author (his first novel was published in 1873). In retrospect, New Mexico got a Renaissance Man.
Standing 5' 9" tall, his once-thin waist portly in middle age and his salt-and-pepper hair thinning above a thick shock of graying mustache and beard, the avuncular, bespectacled Wallace proved an engaging, charming conversationalist. Folks found him courteous, well-mannered, and polite. Outwardly he radiated the public impression of an unflappable, diplomatic politician. Only to his wife and close friends did he admit to frustration, anger, and boredom.
President Hayes knew that Wallace would bring a lot to the table. During his 32 months in New Mexico, Gov. Wallace, an ambitious, energetic doer his entire life, proved to be a multitasker.
Four days after he had replaced Samuel Axtell, Gov. Wallace asked for a report on the conditions in Lincoln County. Two days later, on Oct. 5, 1878, the U.S. Marshal's report, corroborated by a letter from Associate Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court Warren H. Bristol, prompted him to wire President Hayes that same day to have martial law declared in the county. Although Hayes's proclamation fell short, Gov. Wallace leveraged it to issue amnesty on Nov. 13, "…and a general pardon for misdemeanors and offenses committed…" in Lincoln County, retroactive to Feb. 1, 1878. The amnesty excluded all those who were already under criminal indictment.
Gov. Wallace's proclamation induced an immediate, albeit uneasy peace. Some men left New Mexico Territory, while others went straight. In the meantime, he fell into a familiar routine: govern by day; prepare for the February 2, 1879, arrival of his wife and son from Indiana; and read and write by night. The amnesty lasted until Susan McSween's troublesome lawyer, Huston Chapman, was gunned down in Lincoln on February 18, 1879.
Gov. Wallace arrived in Lincoln on March 5, 1879. The Chapman murder suspects (hired guns Jesse Evans and William Campbell, and Lincoln merchant James Dolan) were soon arrested and jailed. On March 8, he got nettlesome Lt. Col. Dudley suspended from command of nearby Ft. Stanton. On March 11, he gave Dudley's temporary replacement the names of 37 men who were wanted for murder. On March 15, he authorized a 53-man peacekeeping force known as the Lincoln County Militia to help round up suspects.
During his six-week stay in Lincoln, Gov. Wallace also worked out a deal with the Kid, who had offered to turn state's evidence against Chapman's murderers in return for a pardon. In a June 2, 1902, Indianapolis World newspaper interview, he recollected his version of that clandestine March 17 meeting, ending with his admission, "Testify before the grand jury and the trial court and convict the murderer of Chapman, and I will let you go scot free with a pardon in your pocket for all your misdeeds."
Gov. Wallace's short relationship with the Kid in Lincoln, while courteous, was strictly a tradeout. But since they were staying next door to one another (he was at Jose Montano's place, and the Kid and pal Tom O'Folliard were under house arrest at Juan Patron's), they were neighbors.
"The Kid", Gov. Wallace wrote in a March 29 letter, "…is an object of tender regard. I heard singing and music the other night; going to the door, I found the minstrels of the village actually serenading the fellow in his prison."
Another time, Gov. Wallace recalled how one day Billy had complied with Wallace's request for a demonstration of the Kid's marksmanship. "After he had shown me what he could do -- and it was remarkably good shooting with both the rifle and the revolver -- I complimented him and coupled with my praise the questions, Billy, isn't there some trick to your shooting? How do you do it? Well, General, he replied, there is a trick to it. When I was a boy, I noticed that a man in pointing to anything he wished to observe, used his index finger. With long use, the man unconsciously learned to point with exact aim. I decided to follow suit with my shooting. When I lift my revolver, I ask myself, Point with your finger, and unconsciously it makes the aim certain. There is no failure. I pull the trigger and the bullet goes true to its mark. That's the trick, I suppose, to my shooting."
On April 14, the grand jury convened in Lincoln. After some 200 indictments were handed down, and then many witnesses, fearing for their lives, failed to sign affidavits to testify, Gov. Wallace realized his cleanup campaign had run into a wall. After listening to Billy plead not guilty to the murders of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady and Buckshot Roberts, Judge Bristol set the Kid's trial date for July. He also raked Gov. Wallace over the coals for offering the Kid a pardon, and shifted Billy's trial venue from friendly Lincoln to distant La Mesilla. Gov. Wallace returned to Santa Fe on April 18.
In May, after five days' of grueling testimony at Dudley's Court of Inquiry at Ft. Stanton, as Gov. Wallace prepared to depart for Santa Fe again, he said goodbye to the Kid. Susan, who had accompanied her husband, recalled the moment. Billy "…a gentlemanly appearing fellow," shook hands with the Governor…"and said, I hope you have a sentinel in camp. To which Lew answered, I always have, and was never surprised in my life."
Back in Santa Fe, Gov. Wallace followed the proceedings, disgusted. On May 28, Billy testified at Ft. Stanton, but the board of inquiry, after several weeks of testimony, acquitted Dudley on July 5. Later, at a civil trial in La Mesilla, Dudley was acquitted again of the July, 1878, murder of Susan McSween's husband and the torching of their Lincoln home.
By then, a disillusioned Kid had already slipped away. Back on June 17, he had startled his guards at the Patron home by slipping out of his handcuffs, telling them, "Boys, I'm tired. Tell the Governor I'm tired." Then, walking across the street to saddled mounts, Billy and Tom rode away.
The Kid had no pardon in his pocket. He headed northeast to his second home, Old Ft. Sumner, and soon spurned Judge Bristol's change of venue trial. Billy couldn't stay out of trouble; unemployed except for whatever he won at gambling, he escalated his horse stealing and cattle rustling activities over the next 16 months. From the Pecos River Valley into the Texas Panhandle, the Kid soon became a nagging bur under the saddle. He also was implicated in the shooting death of a deputy in Lincoln County in November, 1880.
Meanwhile, during Susan and Henry Wallace's nine months in New Mexico, Lew and his wife had discovered a cache of Spanish colonial, Mexican, and Territorial documents crammed into a rodent-infested, mildew-smelling adobe building that was falling apart behind the Palace of the Governors. They rescued them, hired a curator to catalog and preserve them, and were eventually recognized for having saved the core of what would become the state archives.
Gov. Wallace had long before begun the process of alerting Congress to the historical importance of the dilapidated Palace of the Governors, and had laid the foundation for its eventual recognition, restoration and preservation. While in New Mexico, Susan, also an author, began work on a book that became Land of the Pueblos (1889). Her husband illustrated it.
In March, 1880, Gov. Wallace's second novel, a seven-year Biblical epic, was finished. That April, he took the manuscript to New York. There Harper & Brothers gave him a 10 percent royalty, entitled it Ben Hur: A Tale of The Christ, and published 5,000 copies on Nov. 12, 1880.
There was one final gavotte with Billy. On Dec. 13, 1880, Gov. Wallace authorized a $500 reward for the Kid's capture. Pat Garrett's posse took Billy prisoner 10 days later. From Dec. 27, 1880, to March 28, 1881, the Kid was a prisoner in the Santa Fe jail. While there he had sent Gov. Wallace four letters to come see him. Each time he sought the promised pardon. Gov. Wallace, whose office and quarters were just four blocks away, never responded. It was too late. Change was already in the wind. There had been the Feb., 1879 arrival of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad in New Mexico, and the Feb., 1880, completion of a 16-mile spur line from the railroad's Lamy depot to Santa Fe. On March 4, 1881, President James A. Garfield had been inaugurated. Five days later, Gov. Wallace, his eyes set on a diplomatic post, submitted his letter of resignation.
On April 13, 1881, after the Kid had been found guilty in La Mesilla of murdering Sheriff Brady, a Mesilla News reporter asked Billy about Wallace's March 17, 1879, offer of pardon. The Kid replied, "Considering the active part Governor Wallace took on our side and the friendly relations…between him and me, and the promise he made me, I think he ought to pardon me. When I was arrested for that murder…he let me out and gave me the freedom of the town, and let me go about with my arms. When I got ready to go (from Lincoln in June, 1879), I left. Think it hard I should be the only one to suffer the extreme penalty of the law."
A little over a week later, Gov. Wallace responded indirectly to the Kid's remarks. "He appears to look to you to save his neck," the Las Vegas Gazette reporter began. "Yes," replied Gov. Wallace, "but I can't see how a fellow like him should expect any clemency from me." The Kid, a cattle rustler, horse thief, and convicted murderer, was done.
On May 30, 1881, as Santa Fe had begun to welcome its first gaslights and telephones, Wallace eagerly boarded a Crawfordsville-bound train and left. Soon afterward, the Wallaces departed Indiana for his diplomatic post as U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire. On July 14, the day the Kid was shot and killed in Old Ft. Sumner, the Wallaces were in Paris, France, enjoying the nighttime fireworks celebrating Bastille Day.
In 1885, near the end of Wallace's four years in Constantinople, Ben Hur's sales began to soar. By then, the book had already transformed him from an agnostic to a Christian. Now it would begin to make Wallace a celebrity author of international renown. His life would never be the same.
"Touching…whether Ben Hur was written in the Old Palace of Santa Fe," Wallace reponded in a May, 1890, letter, "…it was finished there. That is, the MS (manuscript) was completed at the time of the appointment to the governorship of New Mexico…down to the sixth book of the volume, and I carried it with me. When in the city, my habit was to shut myself after night in the bedroom back of the executive office proper, and write 'til after 12 o'clock. The sixth, seventh, and eighth books were the results, and the room has ever since been associated in my mind with the Crucifixion. The retirement, impenetrable to incoming sound, was a profound as a cavern's."
Americans would best remember him as the author of Ben Hur. The royalties from that book, the best-selling novel of the 19th Century -- and a $500,000 advance for his next book, The Prince of India (published in 1893) -- would bring Wallace enormous wealth. In 1900, he watched, fascinated, as sales of Ben Hur (which he regarded as his "…best performance") reached one million copies. It would be translated into 20 languages and never go out of print. That same year, it became a smash hit on Broadway, its eventual 21-year run of 2,500 performances entertaining an estimated one million theatergoers. After having taken a look at the huge sets before opening night, Wallace was reported to have remarked, "My God! Did I set all this in motion?"
Eventually Hollywood cranked out a couple of silent films (the 1907 one-reeler featured a young William S. Hart, a silent-film Western star-to-be, as the original Massala; the 1925 remake starred Ramon Navarro in the title role).
In 1945, the New York Times would report that Ben Hur had sold 2.5 million copies since 1880, while humorist Mark Twain's popular 1876 novel, Tom Sawyer, ranked second, having sold one million copies.
In 1959, Hollywood finally got it right. Its third Ben Hur, guided by acclaimed director William Wyler and starring Charleton Heston in the role of Judah Ben Hur, was a lavish spectacular. In 1960, the hit film won 11 of the 12 Oscars handed out at the Academy Awards.
In 1895, Wallace would add a final adornment to his resume, that of the self-taught architect who would design his own $30,000 Greek-, Roman-, and Byzantine-influenced study/library behind his Crawfordsville home.
When he succumbed to stomach cancer, Wallace had been toiling on his massive autobiography. He had only gotten as far as the July, 1864, Civil War battle of Monocacy, Md. Ironically that's where he had tried to redeem himself after Grant had vilified him two years earlier for the staggering Union losses at the battle of Shiloh, Tenn.
Wallace had begged Grant over the years to vindicate him. There had been an opportunity when the ex-President had visited Santa Fe in July, 1880. He had tried one last time as the dying Grant was finishing his voluminous Civil War autobiography, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, in 1886. Grant didn't.
Along the Monocacy River, 35 miles northwest of the Lincoln White House, Major Gen. Wallace (who had been restored to command only after President Lincoln's intervention) had taken the initiative and had rushed out of Baltimore, throwing his 2,500 untested reserves (reinforced by 5,000 men from Grant's siege of Petersburgh, Va.) into a day-long dogfight against Confederate Gen. Jubal Early's 14,000 battle-hardened troops. The engagement had bought time and delayed Early's march on the lightly defended nation's capital. Two days later, Early's weary force, seeing the bristling Union defense of Washington just three miles north of the Lincoln White House, withdrew.
Whatever insights Wallace could have shared about his March, 1879, deal with Billy the Kid (and anything else about the Lincoln County War) died with him in Crawfordsville on Feb. 15, 1905. His first-person, unfinished manuscript, covering the first 37 years of his life, became volume one. Susan and a family friend, author Mary Hannah Krout, collaborated on volume two. Cobbling together Wallace's extensive correspondence, diaries, journals, and the articles about and by him, they covered his final 41 years. Harper & Brothers published Lew Wallace: An Autobiography in 1906.
Wallace and his wife (who died on October 1, 1907) were buried in Crawfordsville's Oak Hill Cemetery. A 30-foot-tall granite obelisk marks their graves. Wallace's backyard studio/library (near the same giant beech tree beneath which he had once sat, in a rocker with a lapboard across the arms, and had written the first five books of Ben Hur) has been open to the public since 1941 as the Gen. Lew Wallace Study & Museum.
"Every calculation based on experience elsewhere fails in New Mexico," Wallace once lamented. Maybe he had been thinking of his honeymoon period, his first month or so in New Mexico Territory when he could've gone straight to Lincoln while everybody was in awe of him, and gotten everything done right. But his vivid descriptions of the landscape of the Holy Land in Ben Hur: A Tale of The Christ reflected what he had ultimately discovered about scenic New Mexico. "Beauty," he once declared, "is in the eye of the beholder."
Sources:
Dickey, Roland F., "Lew Wallace: One of 'Them Literary Fellers'", New Mexico Magazine, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Santa Fe: New Mexico Economic Development & Tourism Department, Jan., 1985).
Grant, Ulysses S., Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Vol. I & II (New York: Da Capo Press, 1952).
Horn, Calvin, "Soldier Statesman," New Mexico Magazine, Vol. 40, No. 10 (Santa Fe: New Mexico Department of Development, Oct., 1962).
Jones, Oakah L., Lew Wallace: Hoosier Governor of Territorial New Mexico, 1878-81, New Mexico Historical Review, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985).
McKee, Irving, "Ben Hur" Wallace: The Life of General Lew Wallace (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1947).
Morsberger, Robert E. & Katherine M., Lew Wallace: Militant Romantic (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1980).
Stoes, K. D., "A Cake for General Wallace," New Mexico Magazine, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Santa Fe: New Mexico Department of Development, 1957).Wallace, Lew, Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Vol. I & II (New York & London: Harper & Brothers, 1906).
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