[27][30][31] Wallace, a staunch supporter of the Union, became a member of the Republican party,[27] and began his full-time military career soon after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861.

[40] During the fierce Confederate assault on February 15, and with Grant's absence from the battlefield, Wallace acted on his own initiative to send Cruft's brigade to reinforce the beleaguered division of Brig.

What was to become a long-standing controversy developed around the contents of Wallace's written orders on April 6, the 3rd Division's movements on the first day of battle, and its late arrival on the field.

Wallace's orders were to guard the Union's rear and to cover the road leading west to Bethel Station, Tennessee, where railroad lines led to Corinth, Mississippi, 20 miles (32 km) to the south.

Grant, who heard the early morning artillery fire, took a steamboat upriver from his headquarters at Savannah, Tennessee, briefly stopping at Crump's Landing, where he gave Wallace orders to wait, but be ready to move in any direction.

Rather than realigning his troops, so that the rear guard would be in the front, Wallace countermarched his column to maintain their original order, keeping his artillery in position to support the Union infantry on the field.

[72] After the Confederates left the battlefield, Wallace's division went the farthest south of the Union forces, but he pulled his troops back before going into camp that evening.

[73] At first, the battle was viewed by the North as a victory; however, on April 23, after civilians began hearing news of the surprise and resulting high number of casualties, the Lincoln administration asked the Union army for further explanation.

[74] Grant, who was accused of poor leadership at Shiloh, and his superior, Halleck, tried to place the blame on Wallace by asserting that his failure to follow orders and the delay in moving up his division on April 6 had nearly cost the Union the battle.

As late as 1884, when Grant wrote an article on Shiloh for The Century Magazine that appeared in its February 1885 issue, he maintained that Wallace had taken the wrong road on the first day of battle.

[80][82] Grant's article in the February 1885 issue of Century became the basis of his chapter on Shiloh in his memoirs, which were published in 1886, and influenced many later accounts of Wallace's actions on the first day of battle.

Boyle ordered Wallace to take his regiment to Lexington, take command of the hastily created Army of Kentucky, and march to the relief of the men at Cumberland Gap.

Nelson altered Wallace's defensive plan, and engaged Smith's Confederate Army of Kentucky at the Battle of Richmond on August 30, and was soundly defeated.

Wallace ordered martial law, set a strict curfew, closed all businesses, and began putting male citizens to work on rifle pits, felling trees for makeshift abatis and clear fields of fire, and improving the 1861 earthwork defenses.

[90] On July 9, a combined Union force of approximately 5,800 men under Wallace's command (mostly hundred-days' men from VIII Corps) and a division under James B. Ricketts from VI Corps encountered Confederate troops at Monocacy Junction between 9 and 10 a.m.[91] Although Wallace was uncertain whether Baltimore or Washington, D.C., was the Confederate objective, he knew his troops would have to delay the advance until Union reinforcements arrived.

On July 28, after officials learned how Wallace's efforts at Monocacy helped save Washington D.C. from capture, he was reinstated as commander of VIII Corps.

[95] In Grant's memoirs, he praised Wallace's delaying tactics at Monocacy: If Early had been but one day earlier, he might have entered the capital before the arrival of the reinforcements I had sent. ...

General Wallace contributed on this occasion by the defeat of the troops under him, a greater benefit to the cause than often falls to the lot of a commander of an equal force to render by means of a victory.

Before returning to Baltimore, Wallace also met with Mexican military leaders to discuss the U.S. government's unofficial efforts to aid in expelling Maximilian's French occupation forces from Mexico.

[98] In mid-August 1865, Wallace was appointed head of an eight-member military commission that investigated the conduct of Henry Wirz, the Confederate commandant in charge of the South's Andersonville prison camp.

[105] His next assignment came in March 1881, when Republican president James A. Garfield appointed Wallace to an overseas diplomatic post in Constantinople as U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire.

[106] Wallace arrived in Santa Fe on September 29, 1878, to begin his service as governor of the New Mexico Territory during a time of lawless violence and political corruption.

[114] On December 31, 2010, on his last day in office, then-Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico declined a pardon request from Bonney's supporters, citing a "lack of conclusiveness and the historical ambiguity" over Wallace's promise of amnesty.

The editorial caused the Havatzelet to be suspended and its editor Israel Dov Frumkin to be imprisoned for forty-five days by order from Constantinople, directed to the pasha of the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem.

The incident that led to the editorial was the dismissal, made at Wallace's request, of Joseph Kriger, the Jewish secretary and interpreter to the pasha of Jerusalem.

[124] Wallace wrote the manuscript for Ben-Hur, his second and best-known novel, during his spare time at Crawfordsville, and completed it in Santa Fe, while serving as the territorial governor of New Mexico.

The book's main character, Judah Ben-Hur, accidentally causes injury to a high-ranking Roman commander, for which he and his family suffer tribulations and calumny.

[138] He also wrote a biography of President Benjamin Harrison, a fellow Hoosier and Civil War general, and The Wooing of Malkatoon (1898), a narrative poem.

[150] Despite Wallace's career in law and politics, combined with years of military and diplomatic service, he achieved his greatest fame as a novelist, most notably for his best-selling biblical tale, Ben-Hur.

USL Indianapolis-based team The Indy Eleven pays homage to the 11th Regiment of Indiana Volunteers, which fought for the Union Army during the Civil War.