My Greatest Quarrel with Fortune

Major General Lew Wallace in the West, 1861-1862

Charles Beemer

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781631010965
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la Guerra de Secesión

Who was Lew Wallace's true foe - the Confederacy, General Halleck, General Grant, or himself?

Lew Wallace of Indiana was a self-taught extraordinary military talent. With boldness and celerity, he advanced in less than a year from the rank of colonel of the 11th Indiana to that of major general commanding the 3rd Division at Shiloh. Ultimately, his civilian, amateur military status collided headlong with the professional military culture being assiduously cultivated by Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, a cautious and difficult commander. The fallout was aggravated by Wallace's unwillingness to acknowledge the protocols that sustained the military chain of command. The primary result of the collision was that he failed to realize his most cherished ambition: leading men in battle.

Wallace grew from comparative obscurity to become a model for the civilian, amateur soldier. His participation in the Woolfolk affair in late 1861 personified the difficulties the Lincoln administration had with the army justifying, then enforcing, its official policy of conciliation. Wallace's testimony before the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War highlighted that problem anew and galvanized the opposition in his worsening relationship with Ulysses S. Grant. Author Charles G. Beemer's extensive investigation of primary sources reveals that a number of existing interpretations concerning Wallace, Grant, Halleck, Grant's aide John A. Rawlins, and the Union war effort in the West from Fort Henry to Shiloh, either need refurbishing or demand discarding.

Deliberately disobeying a direct order from Grant, Wallace thwarted the probable destruction of the Union right flank at Fort Donelson while simultaneously saving Grant's military career from oblivion. For this, he received little recognition, especially from Grant. At Shiloh, Wallace was absent from the field of battle the entire first day, and a thorough explanation of why this happened has yet to become an integral part of the Shiloh story. Predicated upon Wallace's presumed errors of judgment and alleged lack of productive activity that day, Halleck, Rawlins, and an unwitting but supportive Grant engineered a campaign of silence, thereby casting Wallace into the unofficial role of scapegoat for the failure of Union arms on the Tennessee. Wallace's unrepentant desire for exoneration clashed headlong with an aloof and ungrateful Grant, generating a controversy and a cover-up that lingers even today.

CHAPTER ONE

The Adventure Begins

Lew Wallace began his life’s journey in Brookville, a thriving agrarian and commercial community located in southeastern Indiana at the fork of the Whitewater River. The Indiana General Assembly had located a land purchasing and registration office there in 1820, which contributed significantly to the growth and prosperity of the community.¹ His Scotch-Irish grandfather, Andrew, was a successful businessman who at various times had been a surveyor, as well as the owner and operator of a general store, a book and newspaper publishing concern in Cincinnati, and most recently a tavern. His father, David, had served nearly six years in the army, including four years as a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy. He was graduated ninth of twenty-four in the class of 1821. As a newly commissioned 2nd Lieutenant, he stayed at West Point for more than a year, instructing future officers in mathematics. Resigning his commission, David returned to Brookville. He read the law and gained admission to the state bar in late 1823. In 1824, he married Esther French Test, the daughter of John Test, a leading local attorney and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Lew, the second of four children, was born on April 10, 1827.² Shortly thereafter, David embarked upon a political career under the political banner of the Whig party. After three terms in the Indiana General Assembly, Hoosiers elected him lieutenant governor in 1834 and governor in 1837.³ At birth, Lew joined a solidly respectable, educated, professional, middle-class family.

In 1825, the Indiana Legislature closed the Brookville land office and moved its lucrative activities to the capital at Indianapolis. With its departure, Brookville’s prosperity soon disappeared. So, too, did the David Wallace family. In early 1832, David moved Esther and their four sons to Covington in the western part of Indiana on the banks of the Wabash River.⁴ Little more than five years old when he arrived, Lew’s independent, searching, and self-reliant spirit flourished in Covington.⁵ In a moment of solitary reflection, Wallace distilled the essence of his spirit into a description of his first encounter with the mighty Wabash River. “It looked so wide, so deep, so like the passing of a flood going down in its majestic way to what would be a deluge when it was at last arrived. Yet it had a coaxing power. My fears were soothed, and I went, and, as it were, laid my hand on its mane; and thence we were friends. No one better than [Charles] Dickens knew what conjurers such things are to imaginative children. I became its playmate the summers through.” Whether it was the Wabash or the Kankakee, Wallace readily adopted the river as his symbol for independence and self-reliance.⁶

Wallace roamed the hills and dales, woodlands and streams surrounding the Wabash for only a few short years until David, the newly elected governor of Indiana, moved his family to Indianapolis in 1837. During his Covington years, ages five to ten, Lew experienced two highly personal encounters with death. Both, arguably, left him more independent and self-reliant than he might otherwise have been. On the journey to their new home in 1832, Lew and his younger brother John fell ill with scarlet fever. “He, poor boy, died,” was the stark epitaph Wallace entered in his Autobiography. Lew survived, perhaps only because his mother continually administered “horrible draughts of saffron tea, hot almost to [sic] scalding” to the ailing child. The one indelible memory for the five-year-old from this encounter was “the large, brown eyes of my mother swimming in tears.” Then, two years later, several months after Lew’s seventh birthday, “galloping consumption” claimed Esther, “leaving me so young that her sweet motherliness is a clearer impression on my mind than either her qualities or her appearance.” His mother’s death, significantly accented by his father’s frequent absences from the home for political reasons, created a void in parental authority for Lew. In December 1836, almost three years after Esther’s death, David presented Lew and his two brothers with a stepmother, Zerelda Gray Sanders, the daughter of Dr. John Sanders of Indianapolis. During his early years, Lew never quite provided as large a place in his heart for Zerelda as he reserved for his departed mother.⁷ For an impressionable youth, these two events and the consequences which flowed from them, broadened and deepened the mold of his unquenchable spirit of independence and self-reliance.⁸

Two adventures he embarked upon relatively early illustrate the hold this spirit of independence and self-reliance had on him. He wanted nothing to do with what most would call conventional restraints. Hence, barely thirteen, he decided on his own to take his absent father’s place “as a delegate to the great convention held at Tippecanoe battle-ground in the interest of General William Henry Harrison. That my delegacy was by self-appointment did not, as I saw it then, interfere with its attractiveness. In plainer terms, I ran away.” A few miles from Indianapolis, his companion deserted him and went home. Wallace continued by himself on the Michigan Road to LaFayette “in mortal fear lest I should be turned back by some one of the Indianapolis delegates who knew me.” He was gone for over two weeks without permission. The apparent highlight of his trip was his act of swiping a red flannel petticoat, a Democratic symbol of an alleged Harrison scandal, from atop a tavern where it flew in derision of the 1840 Whig presidential candidate. He then paraded his newly acquired trophy down the street to the “hurrahs” of the wildly enthusiastic Whigs as well as to “a storm of threats and curses” from those favoring the re-election of Martin Van Buren. Two years later, in 1842, Wallace learned that men were fighting and dying for honor and glory in the struggle for Texas independence from Mexico. He and a companion secured a flatboat and began paddling down the White River bound for New Orleans to join up. Zerelda’s father, accompanied by a local constable, apprehended the young adventurers ten miles south of Indianapolis and took them home for punishment.⁹

The master of the Wallace house neither “spared” nor “spoiled” his son when it came to discipline. “It would be unjust to my parents,” Wallace reflected in his Autobiography, “to suppose they made no effort to control me. The rod in my father’s hand was terrible for the moment.” His father’s efforts lacked that essential ingredient that made punishment both tolerable and worthwhile in the long run. Painful as it was, punishment was simply a momentary penalty, completely lacking an implied promise of better things yet to come. Wallace thought even less of the method of reprimand administered by his mother. “The punishments resorted to by my mother were annoying…. More potent were her entreaties and tears. The contrition they brought about lasted until the vitality which was the unconquerable part of my nature drove me to going again. It seemed that I must go. The Wandering Jew was not more possessed in that way; only his possession was a curse, and mine, the completest [sic] happiness. Going was life.”¹⁰

From the beginning, it was virtually impossible to reconcile Wallace’s inordinate desire to “go,” his zealous quest for “life,” and his unrestrained and independent “spirit” with a structured educational environment. Such formalities were not for him. Wallace never permitted the school house, the classroom, or the often incompetent schoolmaster to exercise dominion over him. Like many a youngster in his time and place, he reveled in the freedom of the woods and the streams. When forced to sit silently before his teacher, Wallace often refused to use his “bluestone” pencil to calculate his sums or to decline his verbs. As many hours as possible were “divided between making pictures of and fighting battles on my paper slate.” Handsome lines of heroic soldiers faced hordes of hostile Indians as imaginary battles ensued. Years later, Wallace drew a humorous picture of the restraining influence that his formal educational experiences exercised upon him. He recalled that on his very first day in school “a little girl ate my pencil, and I took my first flogging because I could not produce it.”¹¹ At the age of nine, on his own initiative, he finagled admission into the preparatory school at the newly founded Wabash College in Crawfordsville. Here he fell subject to the heavy hand of a tutor who “was one of the army of indiscriminates [sic] who think they are doing their duty in giving impossible tasks to helpless incapables, and, if they are small, punishing them.” “Discipline,” Wallace acknowledged, “had to be maintained,” just not at his expense. His tenure and formal education at Wabash lasted a little more than a month before he succumbed as “the woods and little river invited me, and I accepted and took to them.” Wallace fondly remembered that “the river was the siren with a song everlasting in my ears. I could hear it the day long. It seemed specially addressed to me, and was at no time so sweet and irresistible as when I was struggling with the multiplication tables or some abstruse rule of grammar.”¹²

In 1840, Lew and his brother William spent an academic year at Professor Samuel K. Hoshour’s Academy in Centreville, Indiana. For Wallace, even though this was yet another formalized, structured educational experience, the time spent at Hoshour’s Academy represented “the turning point of my life.” Hoshour was in one respect a typical schoolmaster. He “wielded the rod and vigorously.” Yet, he did so with “with discrimination and undeniable justice.” Wallace credited Hoshour with immediately perceiving that he had little aptitude for and even less interest in mathematics. So, “instead of beating me for it,” according to Wallace, Hoshour “humanely applied himself to cultivating a faculty he thought within my power,” reading and writing. This Hoosier schoolmaster became Wallace’s ideal since he “taught me how to educate myself up to every practical need.” Wallace’s formal education came to an end when he left Hoshour’s tutelage. All in all, he had spent less than three full academic years in any kind of a formal schoolhouse. He had not been graduated from any school at any level.¹³

While the schoolroom would never suit nor hold him, Wallace nevertheless spent a lifetime of adventure garnering knowledge. Possession of knowledge was a prerequisite to success. Upon his return from Centreville to Indianapolis, he participated in one or two literary societies. Encouraged by his own youthful zeal, he wrote his first “epic,” a short story with the curious title of “Travels of a Bed-Bug.” He soon followed with his first historical novel, written in the style and tradition of Sir Walter Scott. Later in life, Wallace described his The Man-at-Arms: a Tale of the Tenth Century, as “sophomoric” and full of “fervid sentimentalism.” On the other hand, he obviously deplored the inexplicable loss of this manuscript, calling that event “one of my standing regrets.” As if to underscore the point, he spent ten pages discussing and analyzing his “sophomoric” effort in his Autobiography.¹⁴

Lew became passionate about the fireside readings his father began to orchestrate in 1842. David designed these sessions for both Lew and William. The young men read aloud or recited Shakespearean sonnets and plays from memory. Both boys made Lord Macaulay’s Essays a family favorite. David, like Hoshour before him, required readings in Oliver Goldsmith. John Milton’s poetry was a staple. The eclectic Edinburgh Review came from abroad monthly and stimulated their minds. The three of them would sit around a winter’s fire for hours reading aloud James Fennimore Cooper and Washington Irving for pure adventure or Thucydides and George Bancroft for history. David also sharpened his sons’ ability to think and speak clearly, frequently requiring them to engage in impromptu “declamations.” These sessions served Lew as the foundation for a lifetime of learning. From that point forward, Wallace taught himself what he really wanted to know about those subjects that interested him the most—history, all things military, comedy, tragedy, poetry, adventure, the human spirit, politics, religion, writing, even horticulture, but never mathematics.¹⁵

Wallace could never spend enough hours devouring William H. Prescott’s histories of the conquests of Cortés and Pizarro. Reading and vicariously living the chivalric ideals Sir Walter Scott put to paper was a must for him. A copy of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, reciting the heroic accomplishments of the ancients, could always be found in Wallace’s possession during the war. Wallace’s travels through the world of knowledge reached their zenith in 1880 with the publication of his highly regarded novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.

Sometime in 1843, David abruptly sent Lew out into the world on his own. “Were I to die tonight,” David allegedly told his son, “your portion of my estate would not keep you for a month. I am sorry, disappointed, mortified; so, without shutting the door upon you, I am resolved that from to-day you must go out and earn your own livelihood. I shall watch your course hopefully. That is all I have to say.” Wallace claimed his father’s course of action was neither unexpected nor unjust. “There was no argument,” he wrote, “no reproach, no entreaty. The affair was merely as if one party were making the other a present; and such in fact it was—he had given me my freedom.” One might wonder whether Wallace’s immediate reaction to his father’s expulsion was as benign as it was sixty years later. Lew said he suffered little and felt no pain as his father summarily dispatched him into the world at the age of sixteen.¹⁶ Custom and tradition had not restrained him so far. These conventions would not hold him back as he became a man, a thinker, a doer, a dreamer of sorts, a restless seeker of adventure, absurdly self-confident, and highly ambitious.

In 1848, Mary Clemmer, a long-time friend of Lew’s soon-to-be wife Susan, described Wallace as being thin and tall, “nearly six feet high.” Possessed of “profuse black hair, a dark, beautiful face, correct in every line, keen black eyes deeply set,” even in a crowd, Wallace appeared as “a king of men.” More to the point, Ms. Clemmer characterized the young Wallace as “a man of conviction, earnest ...