General Lew Wallace Study & Museum

Meet Lew Wallace: His Words Soldier \| Governor \| Author \| Ambassador \| His Words \| Genealogy "A peculiarity of the most democratic people in the world is their hunger for heroes." By all accounts, General Wallace was a Renaissance man, a talented man capable of insight and innovation. He was also a man of letters, spending his later years reading and writing while still quenching his thirst for more. He pursued his curiosity through a wide variety of topics from violin-making to spirituality, and world history to painting. Through his words, we can understand the personality and beliefs of an American hero. In regard to his father, David Wallace, a West Point Military Academy graduate and sixth Governor of Indiana. "Almost the earliest of my recollections is the gray uniform of Cadet [David] Wallace. The small tail and shining bullet-buttons of the coat captured my childish fancy. None of the good man’s after honors exalted him in my eyes like that scant garment." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 5. In regard to his mother, Esther Test Wallace, who died when he was seven. "Of the sickness and death I recall but two things distinctly – horrible draughts of saffron tea, hot almost to scalding, and the large, brown eyes of my mother swimming in tears." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 9. "Her sweet motherliness is a clearer impression on my mind than either her qualities or her appearance. Of the latter, all I can now recall are her eyes, large, sparkling, and deeply brown. They follow me yet." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 32. Regarding his stepmother, Zerelda Sanders Wallace, first president of the Indiana Women’s Christian Temperance Union and vice-president of the National Women’s Suffrage Association. "This is the proper place for me to add that the world has been as unable to resist her as I was. In all the states of the Union, in every village and city, there are good people who know and speak of her as Mother Wallace, the sweet-tongued apostle of temperance and reform." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 46. On nature... "Since that time [his sixth year] I have seen many of the famous rivers of the earth, among them the Danube, the Rhine, and the Nile; never one of them so impressed me as did the Wabash in that stolen interview. It looked so wide, so deep so like the passing of a flood going down in its own 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." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 10 His advice to educators... "To catch a boy and hold him fast one has only to set the delicate machinery of the wonder-box in him at work." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 26. "There are thousands of lads similarly overstocked with vitality; so much so that restraints of self or by others are impossible? I simply plead for discrimination, for forbearance, for teaching, for sympathy. Whoso lays his hand heavily on a boy of spirit such as I am describing is himself an offender in far greater degree than his victim." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 27-28. On learning... "I resolved to give up the dream [of being an artist]. Still it haunts me. At this day even, I cannot look at a great picture without envying its creator the delight he must have had the while it was in evolution." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 52. "My rating at school was the worst; yet, strange to say, education went on with me, for I was acquiring a habit of reading. Looking back to the thrashings I took stoically and without a whimper, I console myself thinking of the successful lives there have been with not a jot of algebra in them." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 54. "To be able to laugh at himself is pretty good evidence that one has reached the philosophic stage of life; to invite others to join him in the laugh is a final test conclusive of the fact." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 35. Dreaming of the perfect wife. "My noblest dream of life has been one of fame, but my holiest of her whom Fate shall give me for a wife. She must have high qualities to command me. In my aspirations her spirit must follow mine in my war for the world’s bubbles, not as a squaw her savage husband, but by my side, a woman’s yet an equal spirit?She is waiting for me somewhere in the cool shadows of tonight, and I wait for her. She will love me and I shall make her famous by my pen and glorious by my sword." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pgs. 198-199. On Politics and War. "In the nature of things Freedom and Slavery cannot be coexistent. I could not bring myself to defend the institution of slavery, my sympathies would side with the fugitive against his master. In all nature there was nothing more natural than the yearning for freedom." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pgs. 238-239. "May a man tell what he can do until he tries? That, I take it, is the soul of the Americanism which has made us a peculiar people, almost separatists." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 269. "My greatest personal satisfaction was due to discovery of the fact that in the confusion and feverish excitement of real battle, I could think." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 437. "I find my interest in battles rather increased than otherwise – in fact, I like the excitement, and in very truth, I never heard music as fascinating and grand as that of battle." Lew Wallace to his wife, Susan, Feb. 27, 1862. "Where I got the confidence that possessed me – sometimes there steals into the reflection a vague suspicion that the thing called courage, if a quality at all, is chiefly compounded of inexperience and ignorance." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 454. "This soldiering business sadly deadens that very good thing so carefully cultivated by Christians – humanity." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 455. "The most expeditious way for us to commit suicide that I know of, is to commit ourselves to Free Trade." Political commentary, New York, June of 1884. "The office should seek the man," "The Senate is too much like a club of very rich men." Interview for the Indianapolis Journal, December 3, 1896 Dreaming of the Study. "I want a study, a pleasure-house for my soul, where no one could hear me make speeches to myself, and play the violin at midnight if I chose. A detached room away from the world and its worries. A place for my old age to rest in and grow reminiscent, fighting the battles of youth over again." Letter to Susan from Santa Fe, Dec. 4, 1879. In regard to his beliefs. "In the beginning, before distractions overtake me, I wish to say that I believe absolutely in the Christian conception of God? I am not a member of any church or denomination, nor have I ever been. Not that churches are objectionable to me, but simply because my freedom is enjoyable, and I do not think myself good enough to be a communicant." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pgs. 1-2 "Should one ask of another, or wonder in himself, why I, who am neither minister of the Gospel, nor theologian, nor churchman, have presumed to write this book, it pleases me to answer him, respectfully – I wrote it to fix an impression distinctly in my mind. Asks he for the impression thus sought to be fixed in my mind, then I would be twice happy did he content himself with this answer – The Jesus Christ in whom I believe was, in all the stages of his life, a human being. His divinity was the Spirit within him, ‘and the Spirit was God.’" Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume I, pg. 2 "Long before I was through with my book [Ben-Hur], I became a believer in God and Christ." Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, Volume II, pg. 936. "Out of which shrewd minds might evolve one of the most powerful arguments for the divinity of Christ - evolve it, I say, for it would not do to say plainly that such was the object - viz., that mankind in its organization and ideas of all sorts was so debased as to be past salvation except by direct interposition of the Almighty." Letter from Wallace to Paul H. Hayne, Jan. 19, 1881. Thoughts during diplomatic service in Turkey… "As you know, every American is supposed to be equal to any office...but to me diplomacy was a new business and to be learned ab initio. I do not believe men are born to anything; mastery comes only by long study and practice. And I have acted on my belief in this matter and have tried to profit by the mistakes of others." Wallace to his brother, William, from Constantinople, January 10, 1882 "I am glad that I have had the opportunity to travel and learn a little of other lands, but if my life has taught me anything, it is that our own is the best, the freest, the happiest one beneath God's sunshine - worth living for and worth dying for, too, whenever the need arises." Letter to sister-in-law, Joanna M. Lane "We may as well regard the curtain rung down on this act of my life. I have tried many things in the course of the dream - the law, soldiering, politics, authorship and, lastly, diplomacy - and if I may pass judgment upon the success achieved in each, it seems now that when I sit down finally in the old man's gown and slippers, helping the cat to keep the fireplace warm, I shall look back upon Ben-Hur as my best performance, and this mission near the sultan as the next best." Wallace to Susan from Constantinople, 3 March 1885. "Am I going home to idleness? No, no. My feet and hands may be still, not so the mind – that has its aspirations yet, and it will work, for it has a law unto itself. Idleness is one thing, doing is another. What I will do must be decided when I reach home. I know what I should love to do – to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a book-worm, being which is to give off no utterances, but a man in the world of writing – one with a pen which shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not. It has come to pass that writing is activity which makes a noise like the galloping of many horses. There are pens which give the sound of locomotives, and, hearing them in the distances, society waits for them impatiently. Such a pen is what I want. Can I attain it? I believe so. It is my final ambition, anyhow, and whether I do so or not, the opportunity is partly mine, and perhaps the battle half-fought when so much is won." Wallace to Susan from Constantinople, 3 March 1885. "Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor, the wine that sustains us in the act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the grave are there no dreams."