BEN-HUR
A Tale of the Christ
Lew Wallace
William Collins
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This Collins Classics eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008124106
Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780008124113
Version: 2016-06-17
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Ben-Hur
Ben-Hur, published in 1880, is one of the bestselling novels of all time. Ambitious in scale and seven years in the making, it was the result of an extraordinary personal transformation. It has even been credited with saving a nation from reckless self-destruction. But its author, Lew Wallace, was almost the last person from whom this achievement could have been expected. Restless and lacking in direction, he spent most of his life struggling against failure, searching in vain for a sense of significance.
Early Years
Born in Indiana in 1827, Wallace was an unremarkable middle child of a prominent politician who went on to become State Governor. Already a half-hearted student, young Lew slid further into idleness following the death of his mother in 1834. A series of schools failed to inspire him and he was packed off to seek his own fortune aged just sixteen. ‘My rating at school was the worst,’ he later wrote in his memoir; but ‘looking back to the thrashings I took … I console myself thinking of the successful lives there have been with not a jot of algebra in them.’
Wallace yearned to be elsewhere doing more exciting things. He was good at drawing and writing and he loved to have adventures outdoors. Growing up in the era of American expansion and Davy Crockett, he dreamt of life on the wild frontier; what he got was a menial job in a clerk’s office. But with the outbreak of the Mexican–American War in 1846, by which point Wallace was reluctantly studying law under his father’s guidance, he finally got his first taste of the battlefield. It was a short-lived adventure but it proved decisive: even though he had little choice but to pursue life as a respectable lawyer, setting up his own practice in 1849 and marrying in 1852, he continued to dabble in military affairs, organising and commanding the local independent militia, eagerly waiting for the next war to begin.
In the Firing Line
When the Civil War between the Unionist and Confederate states broke out in April 1861, Wallace abandoned everything and rushed to the Union’s front line. He didn’t just fight; he wanted to lead. He rose quickly through the ranks, becoming a colonel by the end of April and a brigadier general by September. In March 1862, aged just thirty-four, he became the Union Army’s youngest major general. He was good at his job in these early years of the war and he knew it, frequently indulging his fantasy of running the whole show in lengthy letters home to his wife, Susan, in which he complained of ‘mismanagement’ from above. But in April 1862, just one year into the war, a strategic error caused either by Wallace’s overconfidence or his superior’s mismanagement – the debate was never conclusively resolved – was blamed for preventable loss of life at the Battle of Shiloh. Wallace’s military career 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