never really recovered from what he felt was his scapegoating, while the superior in question, Ulysses S. Grant, went on to become Commanding General of the Union Army and then President of the United States. Wallace spent the next few decades trying to clear his name.
Bored by law, let down by the military, Wallace turned to politics when he returned from the war. In 1878 he was made Governor of New Mexico, a dangerous territory in the grip of violent outlaws – among them Billy the Kid – as well as corrupt officials. His subsequent four-year stint as US ambassador to the troubled Ottoman Empire was tame by comparison. But by far the most remarkable aspect of this chaotic period in Wallace’s life was that he found the time to put pen to paper; he researched and wrote for seven years, and the result was Ben-Hur.
Spiritual Awakening
Wallace wrote Ben-Hur mainly by candlelight, in the dead of night, after a full day’s work trying to restore order to New Mexico. It was a labour of love: he hand-delivered his hand-written manuscript to a publisher in New York and it was accepted for publication in 1880.
For all its scholarship and epic backdrop, Ben-Hur is essentially a rags-to-riches tale of redemption, a story of self-made fortune and honour, which chimed perfectly in a country that was riding the wave of the Gilded Age at the same time as experiencing a significant religious revival. Any nerves Wallace’s publisher had about the sacrilege of depicting Jesus Christ in fiction proved to be unfounded: Wallace had been meticulously sensitive with his source material, scouring the King James Bible for approved dialogue (‘every word He uttered should be a literal quotation from one of His sainted biographers’) and reading almost nothing but books and maps about the Holy Land, including ‘a German publication showing the towns and villages, all sacred places, the heights, the depressions, the passes, trails, and distances’.
Ben-Hur was the project that finally turned an idle student and apathetic Christian into a scholar of religious texts, and Wallace had an extraordinary encounter with an atheist to thank for it. In 1876, aboard a train to Indianapolis, he recognised the prominent orator and fellow Shiloh veteran Robert Ingersoll, and the two men got into a long and friendly debate about religion. ‘He vomited forth ideas and arguments like an intellectual volcano,’ Wallace later wrote, ‘the whole question of the Bible, of the immortality of the soul, of the divinity of God, and of heaven and hell.’ The result of all this must have shocked Ingersoll: Wallace, feeling utterly ‘ashamed’ of his own ignorance, determined ‘to study the whole matter, if only for the gratification there might be in having convictions of one kind or another’. He studied so thoroughly that when he finally visited Jerusalem in the early 1880s he was able to ‘find no reason for making a single change in the text of the book’.
Redemption
Initial sales of Ben-Hur were as slow as might be expected for a relatively unknown fifty-three-year-old novelist. (Wallace’s first historical novel, The Fair God, had appeared in 1873.) But Wallace had friends and fans in high places: President James A. Garfield loved it and even Ulysses S. Grant is said to have read it from cover to cover without pause. Pope Leo XIII gave it his official blessing.
Ben-Hur sold almost half a million copies in its first ten years and then kept going, overtaking even Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to become the highest-selling American novel of the nineteenth century. Where that novel had anecdotally helped spark the Civil War, Ben-Hur helped pull the country back together, finding almost as many fans in the southern states (among them Confederate leader Jefferson Davis) as it did in the North. The nationwide hit novel became a touring hit play in 1899.
Wallace died at home in Indiana in 1905, never to know that the play would ultimately reach an international audience of 20 million in its twenty-two-year run, or become one of the most iconic (and most garlanded) films ever made; but without a doubt he died knowing he had put ‘Shiloh and its slanders’ behind him. He had found his elusive purpose in life.
To the wife of my youth who still abides with me
Contents
Chapter II—Meeting of the Wise Men
Chapter III—The Athenian Speaks—Faith
Chapter IV—Speech of the Hindu—Love
Chapter V—The Egyptian’s Story—Good Works
Chapter VII—Typical Characters at the Joppa Gate
Chapter VIII—Joseph and Mary Going to Bethlehem
Chapter IX—The Cave at Bethlehem
Chapter X—The Light in the Sky
Chapter XII—The Wise Men Arrive at Jerusalem
Chapter XIII—The Witnesses Before Herod
Chapter XIV—The Wise Men Find the Child
