Lew Wallace was born in Indiana in 1827, the son of a West Point graduate who became governor and cut him off at 16 for neglecting school. Fascinated by the French Zouaves, he modeled his militia on them, and in 1861 he raised the 11th Indiana. At Fort Donelson he sent reinforcements and counterattacked without orders while Grant was away, which made him the Union’s youngest major general at 34. At Shiloh in April 1862, a transcribed order from Grant sent him down the Shunpike Road toward a Union right that had already been driven back; his countermarch through mud brought his division in around 6:30 p.m., and Grant and Henry Halleck made him the scapegoat.

Wallace spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name. He organized the defense of Cincinnati with civilian Squirrel Hunters, delayed Jubal Early at Monocacy, sat on the Lincoln assassination and Henry Wirz commissions, and became governor of New Mexico Territory, where in 1879 he offered Billy the Kid a pardon for testimony that a local prosecutor then ignored. In 1880 he published Ben-Hur, whose falsely accused hero mirrors his own story, and later served as U.S. minister to the Ottoman Empire.

• He fought well on Shiloh’s second day, flanking the Confederates and keeping his own casualties low.
• At Cincinnati he lashed coal barges into a pontoon bridge across the Ohio River in under 48 hours.
• Sultan Abdul Hamid II asked him to stay on and represent Ottoman interests in Europe, and he declined.
• Ben-Hur passed Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the best-selling American novel of the 19th century.
• His moated study in Crawfordsville let him fish from the basement windows, and at 71 he tried to enlist as a private for the Spanish-American War.