Posted on by rjonakait

Lew’s Judah (continued)

By the end of the Civil War, Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur, had regained such respect that President Andrew Johnson appointed him to the military tribunal that would try the seven men and one woman accused of plotting to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. All eight were convicted. The tribunal sentenced four of them to prison terms, and the other four, including Mary Surratt, to death by hanging. Five of the nine military commissioners later recommended clemency for Surratt. Wallace, the only lawyer on the commission, was not one of them. The president did not grant the reprieve, and Mary Surratt was hanged. (See the posting on ajsdad.blog of May 6, 2020: “The Hanging in the Museum.”)

Six weeks after the Lincoln assassination trial concluded, Wallace was appointed to preside over another military tribunal, this one to try Confederate Captain Henry Wirz, the commandant of the notorious Andersonville prisoner of war camp in Georgia. Wirz, too, was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was hanged on November 10, 1865.

Digression: In high school, I became aware of the horrors of that Confederate camp when, seven years after it won the Pulitzer Prize, I read MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville. After I got used to Kantor’s punctuation—no quotation marks, later adopted by Cormac McCarthy and others—I found it to be a powerful book. Only later did I learn that some thought it age-inappropriate for secondary school readers and tried to have it banned from high schools. (See the posting on ajsdad.blog of June15, 2023, and June 19, 2023: “It Was So Age-Inappropriate What I Read.”) Perhaps the language bothered some; the novel is filled with profanities, which is not surprising because Andersonville portrays the inhumanities of the prisoner of war camp. It is not so much an antiwar book but one detailing human degradation. Henry Wirz, who suffered injuries during the war, is portrayed as a still sick man trying to do his best in controlling the horrors in an impossible situation. The military commission, if it was in the book, was merely a coda to the heart of the lengthy book about the construction and operation of the camp. The book may have introduced me to Lew Wallace, but I don’t remember him from the novel.

Wallace’s life took a strange turn after his service on the military tribunals. Apparently invited by Benito Juárez, he went to Mexico to become a major general in the Mexican Army. Juárez was elected to the Mexican presidency in 1861. Shortly thereafter with Mexico facing a major financial crisis, he repudiated foreign debt prompting French Emperor Napoleon III to seek the overthrow of the Mexican government. France invaded and installed Maximilian as emperor of Mexico. The United States at least nominally supported Juárez but, occupied with the Civil War, gave him little support. Even so, Juárez returned to the Mexican Presidency in 1867, and Wallace was off to support him. It is not clear what happened in Mexico, but Wallace soon returned to the U.S. deeply in debt.

He settled again in Crawfordsville, Indiana, to practice law, which he detested. Wallace published his first book in 1873, a historical novel, The Fair God, about Cortez’s conquest of Mexico. Wallace, however, was not the only author in the family. His wife, Susan Arnold Elston Wallace, published six books, two of which were illustrated by Wallace. Her most notable literary work was an 1858 poem titled, “The Patter of Little Feet,” which gave us the phrase.

It is not surprising that Wallace illustrated his wife’s books. They were a close couple, and he, among his many facets, was a talented artist. During the Lincoln assassination trial, he sketched all the defendants, except for Mary Surratt, whose face was nearly always veiled during the proceedings. Shortly after his failed Mexican excursion, Wallace used the drawings as a basis for a painting, usually called “The Conspirators,” which depicts those convicted except for Surratt. The large canvas, roughly five feet by five feet, now hangs in the General Lew Wallace Study and Museum in Crawfordsville.

Lew Wallace’s first novel sold well and perhaps this success inspired him to begin his work on Ben-Hur. He had not been to the Holy Land but did extensive research at the Library of Congress for the new book. Writing, however, was not then a full-time occupation, so when asked in 1878, he accepted a new appointment as Governor of the New Mexico territory.

Santa Fe may have seemed like the perfect place to finish his manuscript, which he did but with some major distractions. After engaging in Civil War battles, judging those charged in Lincoln’s assassination, dealing with the horrors of Andersonville, and seeking to defend the Mexican republic, the sparsely settled New Mexico could have been a haven made for writing. Instead, Wallace encountered the Lincoln County War and the almost mythical Billy the Kid.

The Lincoln County War started in 1878, the year Wallace came to New Mexico, and ended in the year he left, 1881. This is the only “war” I know of that started with a dispute over dry goods businesses and, of course, since this was the Old West, cattle. When a member of one faction was murdered, retaliatory murders ensued climaxing in a five-day gun battle in 1880. The most famous of the participating gunfighters was Henry McCarty, aka William H. Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, who, legends say, killed twenty-one men before he was killed at the age of twenty-one.

In the midst of the Lincoln County War, Bonney wrote Governor Lew Wallace offering his testimony about one of the murders in exchange for amnesty. Billy and the Governor met a few days later, and Wallace promised the gunslinger clemency for the testimony. To guarantee his safety, Bonney agreed to be arrested and placed in jail. Bonney testified, but the local district attorney refused to free him. Wallace felt double-crossed by the DA, and Billy the Kid by Wallace. Two months later Billy escaped from jail and vowed revenge on Wallace. Bullets were later fired into Wallace’s home, but no one knows whether Bonney was the shooter. Wallace, however, posted a $500 bounty for Bonney’s capture, and Sheriff Pat Garrett captured Billy and three others. Billy the Kid sent Wallace at least four letters seeking release, which the governor ignored. Bonney was convicted of murder and sentenced to hanging, but again he escaped, killing two men in the process. Wallace posted another $500 bounty, and three months later, Pat Garrett shot and killed Billy the Kid.

(concluded July 31)

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The Hanging in the Museum

I hope that the Newseum opens again. The interactive museum dedicated to the history of news gathering and communications closed its building, which has since been sold, in Washington, D.C. and says it is looking for a new site. The Washington facility had many theaters and galleries, but it had one major flaw for a museum in D.C.

Many Washington museums and institutions are owned by the federal government and have free admission. For someone like me who likes museums but has a limited attention span in them, this is great because I can pop into the National Gallery or the National Portrait Museum for a half hour, get something out of my visit, and move onto something else in Washington.

New York, too, has many museums. A couple of them are federally supported and are free, but most are not and charge admission fees, often steep ones. If I have to pay $20 to walk in, I feel as though I should spend several hours inside, which is often longer than I can concentrate. As a result, I don’t go to New York museums as often as I ought.

 The Newseum is private and understandably charged adults an admission fee. I guess this was not sufficient or the competition with other Washington’s museums was too much. The Newseum ran a deficit, and apparently concluded it had to move out of D.C.

At least on my only visit a few years ago, however, the Newseum held my attention for quite a while. It had many permanent exhibits. I saw lots of television clips of famous news events that I remembered although few of the many visiting school kids seemed to have an inkling of much of this history.

When I was there, the Newseum also had a fascinating special exhibit on the news of Lincoln’s assassination. A New York Herald reporter in Washington almost immediately learned of the shooting and started sending reports back to New York by telegraph, and the museum had copies of the special editions that the Herald immediately published. I may have thought that news moved relatively slowly in 1865, but the Herald turned out seven special editions starting with that fatal night and through the afternoon of the next day. Readers in New York could read about the Washington events in New York only a few hours after they had happened, including the confirmation of Lincoln’s death.

          However, I did get a little testy at this exhibit. A man, presumably a teacher or chaperone, was with four teenage boys. He pointed out to them a picture of a group of hooded people hanging by their necks from a scaffold, a photograph taken in July 1865, showing the execution of John Wilkes Booth and others involved in the conspiracy. With a smirk, the man told the kids, “That that is how we ought to do executions now.” He paused and continued, “Now it is all antiseptic with needles. We should see the executions.”

I don’t usually intercede in other people’s conversation, but I did in this one. I told the boys, “That might be so, but it is widely thought that one of those executed was innocent.” I knew I was overstating the case. The trial, held before a military tribunal of nine men, was not a model of fairness and decorum, but a fairer statement would have been that many people have significant doubts about the guilt of Mary Surratt who was one of those hanged and the first woman executed by the United States. While Surratt ran a boardinghouse where some of the conspirators met, the evidence that she was part of the conspiracy was not nearly as strong as it was against the others. She, however, was a Confederate supporter, and the Union army court easily — perhaps too easily — found her to be a member of the plot. Even so, five of the nine judges petitioned President Johnson for clemency for her. As the picture graphically showed, it was not granted. And historians since have debated the justness of her hanging.Even though I knew that I was ignoring historic subtleties, I still spoke about her possible innocence. I thought that those schoolkids should hear something besides the bloodthirstiness of the man trying to be cool. And perhaps at least one of them might try to find out more about Mary Surratt.But as I walked away, I realized that more than just the fate of Surratt bothered me. Whenever I see a picture of an American hanging, I always think of all the many photographs I have seen documenting America’s shameful history of public lynchings.