A steady stream of royalty checks freed Wallace from the practice of law (“that most detestable of occupations,” he called it) and from his creditors. By the time Wallace returned from Constantinople four years later, Ben-Hur had become Harper & Brothers’ top-selling title. interests, to gather material for a new novel. The novel so impressed President Garfield that he offered Wallace the position of minister plenipotentiary to the Ottoman Empire (annual salary: a princely $7,500) and encouraged him, when not attending to U.S. But Ben-Hur opened the doors of opportunity. His correspondence is full of enthusiastic accounts of railroad investments and mining prospects that never pan out he patented unprofitable improvements to railway ties, automatic fans, and the fishing rod. Wallace himself had struggled financially through much of his life. He soon tired of the Kid’s homicidal antics, however, and put a $500 bounty on his head. Initially charmed by the young gunslinger, Wallace once asked him for a demonstration of his marksmanship and was impressed by his handling of both six-shooter and rifle. The duties of office included putting down a range war in Lincoln County among the combatants was William H. Hayes, he was rewarded with the governorship of the New Mexico territory. For his role in delivering the White House to Rutherford B. During the disputed election of 1876, the Republican Party sent Wallace to oversee the original Florida recount.

A lawyer by training, he served on the tribunal that tried the Lincoln assassination conspirators and presided over the one that convicted Henry Wirz, the commandant of the notorious prison camp at Andersonville, Ga., and the only Confederate executed for war crimes.

Wallace had a Zelig-like knack for insinuating himself into the defining moments of his day. Few men participated so completely in the postbellum American experience. Yet Wallace’s unlikely journey from disgraced general to celebrated author is as thrilling as any story of his era, and his fame in his own lifetime surpassed that of all but a handful of his comrades in arms.

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