Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko

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Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko | The Home of Ben-Hur: Lew Wallace's Study | The Indiana Magazine of History, 104.2 | The History Cooperative

The Home of Ben-Hur: Lew Wallace's Study

Nestled in the heart of Crawfordsville, Indiana, is a monument to one of the state's most original and prized sons, General Lew Wallace. A statue of Wallace stands next to his ambitious dream: a personal study that he built near his home and designed as a "pleasurehouse for [his] soul." The building remains today as a museum that commemorates his life and legacy and teaches us about potential fulfilled and dreams achieved. To explore and honor his legacy, the General Lew Wallace Study and Museum partnered with Wabash College in November 2005 to present the Lew Wallace Symposium. Made possible through a matching grant from the Indiana Humanities Council in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities, this day- long event featured Wallace scholars from around the nation who presented their latest research on a variety of topics. Three of those presentations are featured in this special Lew Wallace issue of the IMH.¹

At an early age, Lew Wallace knew he was an independent learner, fighting classroom rules and escaping to adventures in the nearby woods at first chance. By age 16, he abandoned formal education for a series of positions, including attorney, copy clerk, and soldier. A brief enlistment with the 11th Indiana Infantry in the Mexican War shaped Wallace's passion for military life. The first article in this issue, "A Struggle for Respect: Lew Wallace's Relationships with Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman after Shiloh," touches this theme. William M. Ferraro considers Wallace's controversial actions during the Civil War battle of Shiloh, his relationships with Grant and Sherman during and after the war, and his lengthy struggle to reestablish himself in the eyes of these fellow generals.

With the conclusion of the war, Wallace served as a military judge during the 1865 Lincoln conspiracy trial and as president of the military court that convicted Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville Prison. With these final military duties fulfilled, Wallace returned to his family and a law practice in Crawfordsville, awaiting the next great role. It would be as author. He had been a writer since before the war, working on a novel about the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. The book was finally published in 1873 as The Fair God, Or, The Last of the 'Tzins: A Tale of the Conquest of Mexico and that same year he began to write Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. On the verdant acreage surrounding his Crawfordsville home, Wallace often sat in a comfortable chair under his favorite beech tree and wrote his manuscript on a lapboard. The book was finished in New Mexico Territory, where Wallace accepted appointment as territorial governor in 1878. Each night Wallace worked on Ben-Hur by candlelight, and his wife Susan fretted that the lit windows of the governor's palace in lawless Santa Fe might invite assassination attempts.

Ben-Hur was published to great acclaim in 1880, launching a phenomenon that Wallace could never have imagined. In the second article of this issue, "The Charioteer and the Christ: Ben-Hur in America from the Gilded Age to the Culture Wars," Howard Miller traces the impact of Wallace's tale on American culture by illustrating the transformation of the charioteer and Christ figures within the novel's numerous stage and screen adaptations. Wallace completed five other novels during his lifetime, but none had the lasting cultural impact of Ben-Hur.

Just after the publication of the book, Wallace accepted appointment as minister to Turkey. He spent four years in the Middle East, and returned home again to Crawfordsville, where he began writing his third historic novel, The Prince of India (1895), which tells the story of a Jew during the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

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