Wallace’s Zouaves and the Hoosier Who Wrote Ben-Hur

Lew Wallace was thirty-three years old in April 1861. He was a lawyer in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a town of about three thousand people in Montgomery County, west of Indianapolis. He had served in the Mexican War as a young man, had been elected to the Indiana State Senate, and had spent the late 1850s drilling a militia unit of his own design called the Montgomery Guards. When Fort Sumter fell in mid-April 1861, Governor Oliver P. Morton named Wallace the state’s adjutant general. Within days Wallace had raised more than double the six regiments Lincoln had requested from Indiana. Then he resigned the staff job and asked Morton for a regiment of his own.

April 1861 — the regiment Wallace built

What Morton gave him was the 11th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, organized at Indianapolis on April 25, 1861, for a three-month term of service. Wallace was elected its colonel. The 11th Indiana was not a typical regiment. It was a Zouave regiment, drilled in the showy and demanding tactics of the French North African colonial troops who had given the Zouave name its currency in mid-19th-century Europe and the United States.

Wallace had been preparing a regiment like this for years. He had organized the Montgomery Guards at Crawfordsville in 1856, and by 1859–1860 he had adopted a Zouave uniform for them. When the war came he poured the Crawfordsville drill into the new state regiment. The 11th Indiana would not look or move like other Hoosier units. It would advance in loose-skirmisher order, drop to one knee on command, load and fire on its back, sprint, dodge, halt, and fire from cover. The drill was deliberately theatrical and deliberately deadly.

The Zouave uniform — in Wallace’s own words

What the 11th Indiana actually wore in April 1861 was not the French-North-African red baggy trousers and tasseled fez the word “Zouave” usually summons. Wallace, in the autobiography he published the year before he died, described the uniform he had chosen for his regiment plainly and at first hand:

That gray-jeans-and-French-cap uniform — with a small disk of red on the cap and a blue flannel shirt — was Wallace’s answer to two pressures at once. The Confederate Army was also wearing gray in 1861. Union troops in the Western Theater would not be reliably issued blue federal uniforms for several months. Wallace gave his Hoosiers something close to what they could get at the dry-goods store, with one bright signature piece. The regiment looked nothing like the popular illustrations of Zouaves in the period press. It looked like Indiana farmboys wearing the cap of a French infantry corporal.

On May 8, 1861, in Indianapolis, the ladies of Indianapolis and Terre Haute presented the regiment with two stands of regimental colors. A Mrs. Cady, by name, embroidered the eagle on the regimental flag. The presentation was the kind of public, civic, embroidered ceremony that small American cities had been making for their volunteer militia for fifty years. Then the regiment went to war.

Romney to Vicksburg — the regiment’s combat record

The 11th Indiana’s first engagement came on June 11, 1861, at Romney in western Virginia, in the campaigning that would eventually carve West Virginia out of Virginia’s Confederate-aligned counties. The regiment performed well. Wallace was promoted to brigadier general in September 1861. The 11th Indiana reorganized as a three-year regiment at the end of August 1861 under a new colonel, but the regiment’s identity stayed Wallace’s.

In February 1862 the 11th Indiana fought at Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River in Tennessee, where Wallace, now a division commander, broke a Confederate counterattack and helped Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant secure the surrender that gave the Union its first major Western victory and Grant his nickname. The regiment marched on to Shiloh, then through the Vicksburg campaign in 1863. It was at all the hard places the western Union army went.

Shiloh — and the controversy that followed Wallace for years

On April 6, 1862, the Confederate Army of the Mississippi under Albert Sidney Johnston surprised Grant’s camps at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River and drove them back through woods, peach orchards, and a sunken road that became famous as the Hornet’s Nest. The first day at Shiloh would be the bloodiest day in American history to that point. Grant’s army was nearly destroyed.

That morning, Grant ordered Wallace, then commanding the Union army’s third division at Crump’s Landing some five miles downriver, to bring his division to the battlefield in support of William Tecumseh Sherman’s line at Shiloh Church. Wallace took a route his men later defended as the only one that made sense, found Confederates where Sherman’s line was supposed to be, countermarched, and arrived at the Union camp around seven o’clock in the evening, after almost all of the day’s catastrophic fighting was over.

Grant was furious. He blamed Wallace publicly and privately for the near-loss of the first day. Wallace insisted that Grant’s order had been ambiguous — he had taken the route he understood the order to specify, and the original written order had been lost. Modern reassessments are kinder: Wallace’s men covered roughly fifteen miles in six and a half hours, a respectable march pace for the period and terrain. But Grant’s public anger settled the question for the rest of the war. Wallace spent the next two years sidelined, ordered to garrison duty in Cincinnati and Baltimore, kept away from the front lines that would have let him put the controversy down. He defended his Shiloh route, in print and in correspondence, for the next four decades.

Monocacy — and the redemption Grant put in writing

The chance to put the controversy down came on July 9, 1864, on a creek-bank in Maryland a few miles southeast of Frederick. Wallace, now a major general commanding the Middle Department from his Baltimore headquarters, had pieced together a force of roughly six thousand men — some regulars, mostly emergency militia and units pulled from rear-area garrison duty. He marched them to the Monocacy River to meet a Confederate force outnumbering him roughly two-to-one under Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early. Early’s objective was Washington, D.C., which the war had stripped of regulars to feed Grant’s campaign in Virginia. The capital’s defenses were thin enough that a determined Confederate corps could plausibly walk in.

Wallace lost the battle. His outnumbered force was driven from the field by late afternoon. But the fight had cost Early most of a day — a day in which Union reinforcements that Grant had detached from his Virginia army reached the Washington defenses and dug in. By the time Early arrived in front of the capital’s forts on July 11, the line was held. The Confederate raid turned back.

Two decades later, Grant sat down to write his Personal Memoirs in the last year of his life. He was dying of throat cancer. He wrote the book to provide for his family after his death, and he wrote it with care. The Wallace passage was one of the places where he chose to revise the record. The line that resulted is one of the most generous redemptions any commander wrote of any subordinate in the Civil War:

A defeat that was a greater benefit than a victory. The man who had blamed Wallace for Shiloh wrote that line about him, on purpose, while dying. Wallace’s decades of self-defense were over.

Crawfordsville and Ben-Hur

Wallace mustered out of the army on November 30, 1865. He returned to Crawfordsville. He served as governor of New Mexico Territory from 1878 to 1881 — the period during which he corresponded with Billy the Kid, then a young outlaw seeking a pardon Wallace would not finally grant. He served as United States minister to the Ottoman Empire from 1881 to 1885. And on November 12, 1880, while still governor in Santa Fe, he published a novel he had begun in 1873.

The novel was called Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Harper & Brothers in New York released it without much expectation. The publisher’s response, as preserved in standard Ben-Hur publishing histories (the present author has not verified the exchange against the primary Harper Brothers archives or the Wallace papers), described the manuscript as a remarkable work and a bold experiment to make Christ a literary figure, a project the firm noted had been “often tried and always failed” before. The book sold 400,000 copies by 1889. By 1900 it had surpassed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to become the bestselling American novel of the 19th century. By 1912 it had sold a million copies. Late-19th-century surveys of American public library borrowing — including William Howard Brett’s work at the Cleveland Public Library and other contemporaneous studies cited in standard Wallace and Ben-Hur publishing histories — consistently ranked Ben-Hur as the most-borrowed contemporary novel in the United States by a wide margin. The novel was made into a stage play that ran for decades and into a 1925 silent film, then again into the 1959 film with Charlton Heston that won eleven Academy Awards.

Wallace died in Crawfordsville on February 15, 1905, age seventy-seven. He had outlived Grant by twenty years. The Ben-Hur Study he built behind his Crawfordsville house in 1898 — the room he wrote in after his Indianapolis-and-Washington years were done — still stands as the General Lew Wallace Study and Museum. The Indiana State Senate paid for his statue in National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol in 1910.

What a Hoosier life carried

The shape of Wallace’s war is the shape of a state. He raised a regiment because Indiana asked him to. He led it well at Romney and Donelson, lost most of a day at Shiloh on a march he never stopped defending, was sidelined for two years, came back to a creek-bank in Maryland with a smaller force than his enemy had and held the line long enough for somebody else to save the capital. The man who had blamed him for Shiloh wrote, two decades later, that the defeat had been a greater benefit than a victory. Then he came home to Crawfordsville and wrote the book that put Christ on a chariot and shipped a million copies.

The series this post opens is now called Hoosier Union History. The previous entries that did not fit that name stay in the catalog as Hoosier-context pieces; the entries that did fit it carry the through-line forward from here. Post 8, when it comes, will stay on Indiana ground.

Sources

• Lew Wallace, Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906). Standard primary autobiography. Source of the Zouave-uniform description quoted above; reproduced here through standard secondary literature on the 11th Indiana, with full text digitized at Internet Archive.
• Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1885–1886). Volume II contains the Monocacy passage and Grant’s reassessment of Wallace. Quoted through standard biographical and historical literature on Wallace; the present author has not verified the exact page reference against the primary edition.
• 11th Indiana Infantry Regiment, regimental history. Indiana War Memorials Battle Flag Collection, “Lew Wallace and the Indiana Zouaves, 11th Indiana Regiment Infantry,” in.gov/iwm/battle-flag-collection, accessed 2026-05-16; corroborated against the regiment’s entry at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11th_Indiana_Infantry_Regiment.
• Indiana Historical Bureau, “Lew Wallace,” Hoosier Voices Now Civil War 150th project, in.gov/history, accessed 2026-05-16.
• American Battlefield Trust, “Monocacy: The Battle That Saved Washington,” battlefields.org/learn/articles/monocacy, accessed 2026-05-16.
• Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ publication and sales figures: Harper & Brothers correspondence and standard publishing-history references, including the 1900 surpass-Uncle-Tom’s-Cabin milestone and the 1912 one-million-copies count. Wikipedia entry for Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ consulted as the 2026-05-16 entry point; underlying citations include 19th-century library-loan studies and 20th-century publishing histories.
• This series, Entries 1 through 6.6, available at the blog index.