Lew Wallace — Ben-Hur (1880 Harper First), the Palace of the Governors Santa Fe & the Billy the Kid Amnesty Meeting

By Josh Eldred · New Mexico Literacy Project · May 13, 2026 · ~6,500 words

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

On November 12, 1880, Harper & Brothers in New York published a 552-page historical novel about a young Jewish nobleman in the Roman Judea of the first century, completed by its author the year before in an adobe room at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ would become the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century, surpass Uncle Tom's Cabin around 1900, hold the all-time American bestseller crown until Gone With the Wind eclipsed it in 1936, surge back to the top after William Wyler's 1959 MGM film won eleven Academy Awards, and remain in continuous print into the twenty-first century. Its author, Major General Lew Wallace, was simultaneously the eleventh Territorial Governor of New Mexico, having been appointed in September 1878 by President Rutherford B. Hayes to clean up the Lincoln County War. Five months before Ben-Hur's publication, on March 17, 1879, Wallace had met secretly with Billy the Kid in the village of Lincoln, New Mexico to negotiate the conditional pardon that Wallace would ultimately fail to deliver. This is the collector's reference.

From Brookville to Crawfordsville to Santa Fe: A Life

Lewis "Lew" Wallace (April 10, 1827 — February 15, 1905, closed pool) was born in Brookville, Indiana, the second of four sons of David Wallace, a West Point graduate, lawyer, and future sixth governor of Indiana (1837-1840), and Esther French Test Wallace. Young Lew was a poor student, a habitual truant, an enthusiastic reader of romances and adventure stories, and a sketch artist with a real visual gift. He read law in his father's Indianapolis office, was admitted to the Indiana bar, and at age nineteen mustered in on June 19, 1846 as a second lieutenant with the Marion Volunteers (1st Indiana Infantry) for the Mexican-American War. He never saw combat in Mexico, but the experience of the army and of the borderlands shaped the rest of his life.

On May 6, 1852, Wallace married Susan Arnold Elston (December 25, 1830 — October 1, 1907) of Crawfordsville, Indiana — a poet and essayist in her own right, the daughter of Major Isaac Elston, and Wallace's intellectual partner for the rest of his life. Their only child, Henry Lane Wallace, was born in 1853. The family settled in Crawfordsville, the small Wabash Valley college town where Wallace would maintain his principal residence until his death — Crawfordsville is the address of the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum today.

The Civil War caught Wallace in the prime of his early legal career. He rose rapidly to the rank of major general of US Volunteers, commanded at the Battle of Fort Donelson in February 1862 (where his quick decision in opening a breach contributed to the Union victory), was caught in the late-arrival controversy at Shiloh on April 6-7, 1862, and spent the middle years of the war effectively shelved by Henry Halleck after the Shiloh blame. His rehabilitation came at the Battle of Monocacy on July 9, 1864 — the strategic delaying action that bought time for Washington to be reinforced against Jubal Early's raid. After the war Wallace served on the military commission that tried the Lincoln assassination conspirators (May-June 1865) and presided over the Henry Wirz Andersonville trial (August-November 1865), ending the war in the unusual position of an officer who had been blamed at Shiloh, vindicated at Monocacy, and made a senior judicial figure of the Reconstruction.

Wallace returned to Crawfordsville and the law after the war, ran unsuccessfully for political office, wrote his first novel The Fair God (1873) about the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, and worked at Ben-Hur intermittently across the late 1870s in his Crawfordsville study. In September 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Wallace eleventh Territorial Governor of New Mexico, displacing the disgraced Samuel Beach Axtell. Wallace arrived in Santa Fe in late September 1878 and took up residence at the Palace of the Governors at 105 West Palace Avenue on the Santa Fe Plaza, where he would complete Ben-Hur in 1879. He served as governor until 1881, when President James A. Garfield appointed him United States Minister to the Ottoman Empire — Wallace served in Constantinople through 1885, drew on the experience for The Prince of India (1893), and Susan Wallace published her own Constantinople memoir Along the Bosphorus in 1898.

Wallace's final two decades in Crawfordsville were spent on the elaborate brick-and-limestone Study he designed and built for himself between 1895 and 1898 (cost approximately twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars in period money), on memoir writing, on Civil War commemoration, and on declining steady offers from the lecture circuit that Ben-Hur's fame produced. He died at Crawfordsville on February 15, 1905, age seventy-seven, of atrophic gastritis. He is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery, Crawfordsville. Susan Wallace survived him by two years.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ — 1880 Harper & Brothers First

Ben-Hur was Harper & Brothers, New York, copyrighted October 12, 1880, published November 12, 1880. The book is one of the most consequential American novels of the nineteenth century — best-selling American novel of the century by 1900, surpassing Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (which had held the title for nearly fifty years); held the all-time American bestseller crown until 1936, when Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind overtook it; surged back to the top after the 1959 William Wyler MGM film won eleven Academy Awards (a record that stood until Titanic tied it in 1997 and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King tied it in 2003); and has remained in continuous print across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Where Ben-Hur was written. Wallace began the book in his Crawfordsville study in the late 1870s. Most of the substantial drafting was done at Crawfordsville. The manuscript was completed at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe in 1879, during Wallace's governorship. The completion-in-Santa-Fe claim is well-documented by the General Lew Wallace Study Museum, which is explicit on this point: "Wallace wrote the majority of Ben-Hur on the study grounds [Crawfordsville]; the book was completed in New Mexico." Wallace himself describes finishing the manuscript in Santa Fe in his 1906 Autobiography. The Palace of the Governors connection is therefore genuine and important — though collectors and tourist guides sometimes overstate it as if the entire book was written there.

Points of issue for the 1880 Harper & Brothers true first edition first printing:

1. Harper & Brothers imprint on title page, New York, with the Harper colophon.
2. The date "1880" printed on the title page. This is the principal issue point that distinguishes the true first printing from all subsequent printings. Harper continued to use the same 1880 plates for years, but later printings — from approximately mid-1881 through 1884 — dropped the date from the title page. A copy without "1880" on the title page is not a first printing regardless of other features.
3. Copyright page reading "COPYRIGHT, 1880, BY LEW. WALLACE" with first-edition designation and no subsequent printing dates.
4. Original binding: 16mo format, cadet blue-gray cloth with floral decorations stamped in red, blue, and green on the front board (a vine-and-flower motif), a stamped vase of flowers on the back board, and black lettering on the spine. Some copies have minor variant cloth tones; both are first-printing variants.
5. Six-word dedication reading "To the Wife of My Youth". Beginning in 1883, Harper expanded the dedication to "To the Wife of My Youth Who Still Abides with Me." The short dedication is the first-printing form.
6. Dust jacket: essentially nonexistent for 1880 American trade books. No documented surviving 1880 Ben-Hur in publisher's dust jacket has been confirmed at the high-resolution level required for first-edition authentication. Claims of a jacketed 1880 first should be treated with extreme skepticism.
7. Page count: 552 pages plus the half-title and front matter. Terminal Harper advertisements vary across early printings but are not a primary authentication point.

Later Harper printings and the Garfield Edition. Harper kept Ben-Hur in print continuously from 1880 through 1936 (the original copyright period), issuing many printings — most without the title-page date. The 1892 Garfield Edition (Harper) was a memorial reissue tied to the assassination of President Garfield (who had appointed Wallace to Constantinople); it has distinctive front-board imprinting and is a Tier 3 collector edition. The 1959-film tie-in editions (mass-market hardcovers and paperbacks issued during the William Wyler MGM release) are common in donation pickups and are Tier 3.

The Sears Roebuck and the mass-market era. Across the 1900s through 1920s Ben-Hur was issued in a remarkable variety of mass editions — Sears Roebuck catalog editions, Grosset & Dunlap reprints, the McClurg Albuquerque-and-Cincinnati editions, religious-press editions, Sunday-school premium editions, and school-library special bindings. These editions are abundant in donation pickups and rarely have meaningful collector value; they are the legacy of Ben-Hur as the canonical American Protestant religious novel rather than as a literary first edition.

Film adaptations. The 1907 unauthorized one-reel Kalem film triggered the Supreme Court copyright case Kalem v. Harper Brothers (1911) — a foundational American copyright decision. The 1925 Fred Niblo MGM silent film starred Ramon Novarro as Ben-Hur and helped establish MGM's prestige reputation. The 1959 William Wyler MGM film starred Charlton Heston and won eleven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (Heston) — a record-tying achievement. The 2016 Timur Bekmambetov MGM-Paramount remake was a commercial failure. Tie-in editions of Ben-Hur for the 1925 and 1959 films are common in donation pickups.

Realistic 2025-2026 prices. True 1880 Harper first edition first printing — date "1880" on title page, six-word dedication, original cadet blue-gray floral cloth — in fine condition with bright gilt: low to mid four figures, depending on condition and association. Very Good copies in original cloth: upper three figures. Worn or rebound 1880 firsts: low to mid three figures. Inscribed and signed 1880 firsts with documented association: four to five figures. Later 1880 Harper printings without title-page date: typically under one hundred dollars retail. Garfield Edition 1892: fifty to two hundred dollars. Mass-market reprints, Sears Roebuck editions, and film tie-ins: typically under fifty dollars.

Inherited a library and not sure where to start? Call or text 702-496-4214 — I handle this all the time.

The Palace of the Governors and Wallace's New Mexico Years

The Palace of the Governors — at 105 West Palace Avenue on the north side of the Santa Fe Plaza — is the oldest continuously occupied public building in the United States, built circa 1610 under Spanish colonial governor Pedro de Peralta as the seat of Spanish New Mexico's territorial administration. The building survived the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, the 1692 Spanish reconquest, the 1821 Mexican independence period, the 1846 American occupation by Stephen Watts Kearny's Army of the West, and the 1862 Confederate occupation during the Civil War (Henry Sibley's invasion of New Mexico, defeated at Glorieta Pass). When Lew Wallace took up residence there in late September 1878, the Palace was approximately two hundred and sixty-eight years old and had housed roughly one hundred Spanish, Mexican, and American governors. It is today the Museum of New Mexico History Museum, a National Historic Landmark, and part of the Museum of New Mexico complex on the Plaza.

Wallace's residency at the Palace was not glamorous. The building had been deteriorating across the territorial period — adobe walls erode, roofs leak, and Wallace inherited a structure that had been neglected by the previous governor Axtell's administration. He occupied rooms on the north side of the Plaza-facing range and worked at a desk in what is now part of the Museum's exhibition space. Wallace described the Palace in his autobiography as a place of remarkable historical depth — every adobe brick three centuries older than any building he had known in Indiana.

Susan Wallace and the Spanish archive. The most consequential cultural-historical achievement of Wallace's governorship was Susan Wallace's discovery, in the Palace's storage rooms, of the surviving Spanish-era archive of three centuries of New Mexico Spanish colonial administration — land grants, court records, military reports, correspondence with the Viceroyalty of New Spain in Mexico City, ecclesiastical records of the Custodia of San Francisco de Nuevo Mexico, and the records of the Mexican Republic period from 1821 to 1846. The papers were dusty, fragile, in disordered piles, and entirely in Spanish. Lew Wallace hired a bilingual archivist to begin organizing and translating the most important documents; the work continued under subsequent governors and forms the foundation of what is now the New Mexico Records Center and Archives' Spanish Colonial holdings. Susan Wallace's articles for The Atlantic Monthly, The Independent, and The Tribune were the first popular East Coast journalism describing the Spanish documentary heritage of New Mexico, and were collected into her 1888 book The Land of the Pueblos. The Wallaces' work on the Palace archive is the founding act of New Mexico colonial-era archival preservation.

The Lincoln County War, the Amnesty Proclamation, and Billy the Kid

Wallace inherited the Lincoln County War from Governor Axtell. The war (1878-1881) was a violent commercial-and-political conflict in Lincoln County, southeastern New Mexico, between two competing mercantile factions: the established Murphy-Dolan store ("The House") backed by the Santa Fe Ring of territorial political insiders, and the upstart Tunstall-McSween partnership backed by Englishman John Tunstall and lawyer Alexander McSween. The war's most famous episode was the five-day Battle of Lincoln in July 1878, which ended with the McSween house being burned, McSween killed, and the Tunstall-McSween faction — including their gunhand William H. Bonney ("Billy the Kid") — scattering into the surrounding country. The war was effectively over as a military conflict by the time Wallace arrived in Santa Fe in late September 1878, but the surviving combatants and the killings continued through 1879 and beyond.

The November 13, 1878 amnesty proclamation. Wallace issued a general amnesty proclamation on November 13, 1878, offering pardons to most participants in the Lincoln County War. The proclamation was deliberately limited — it excluded individuals already under indictment by the territorial courts. The exclusion swept up most of the surviving Tunstall-McSween fighters who had killings on their record, including Billy the Kid. The amnesty was therefore as much a political signal — that Wallace would not pursue blanket Lincoln County prosecutions — as a working pardon document.

The Houston Chapman murder and the Kid's witness role. On February 18, 1879, in Lincoln, the Albuquerque lawyer Houston Chapman — who had been hired by Susan McSween to investigate her husband's killing — was murdered in front of witnesses by a Murphy-Dolan-faction party. Billy the Kid was among the witnesses. The witnesses agreed to a temporary alliance with Billy to escape the immediate Murphy-Dolan threat, and Billy then approached Wallace through an intermediary offering to testify against the Chapman killers in exchange for amnesty.

The March 17, 1879 secret meeting at Squire Wilson's house. Wallace traveled to Lincoln in March 1879 to investigate the Chapman murder personally. He lodged at the José Montaño Store, the principal Lincoln boarding establishment. He arranged through Squire Wilson — the Lincoln County Justice of the Peace and a known Tunstall-McSween sympathizer — to meet Billy at Wilson's house, not at the Montaño Store. On the evening of March 17, 1879, Billy walked into Squire Wilson's house carrying a Winchester rifle and a Colt revolver. Wallace and the Kid talked for approximately forty-five minutes. Wallace offered Billy a conditional pardon in exchange for grand jury testimony against the Chapman killers and the other Lincoln County murderers. At Billy's request, the deal was expanded to include his friend Tom O'Folliard. Billy agreed; Wallace wrote out the terms; the Kid signed and walked back out into the night.

A common misstatement places the meeting at the José Montaño Store. The Montaño Store was Wallace's lodging; the meeting was at Squire Wilson's house. The distinction matters because Wilson's house was a private residence Wallace could enter without alerting Murphy-Dolan observers, while the Montaño Store was the most surveilled building in Lincoln at the time.

The collapse of the deal. Billy testified before the grand jury over a roughly two-month span; approximately fifty indictments were returned against various Lincoln County War participants. The system worked exactly as Wallace had designed it. The failure came on the prosecution side: District Attorney William L. Rynerson — a Murphy-Dolan-faction ally based in Doña Ana County — refused to drop the charges already pending against Billy and refused to pursue the indictments Billy had enabled. Wallace, lacking the political base in New Mexico to overrule Rynerson, did not deliver the promised pardon. Billy escaped custody in mid-1879, returned to the cattle-rustling and revenge-killing economy of southeastern New Mexico, and was ultimately killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett at Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881. Wallace had left for Constantinople by then.

The surviving Wallace-Bonney correspondence. Three letters from Billy to Wallace (March 1879 through March 1881) survive — the correspondence is split between the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum in Crawfordsville and the New Mexico Records Center and Archives in Santa Fe. Billy's handwriting is surprisingly elegant; the letters are some of the most-reproduced primary documents in American outlaw history. They are also among the most-valuable letter sets in the American autograph market when complete; the William H. Bonney signature is among the rarest American outlaw signatures.

The Civil War Record: Shiloh, Monocacy, and the Lincoln & Wirz Tribunals

Shiloh, April 6-7, 1862. The Shiloh controversy is the central wound of Wallace's Civil War record. Wallace commanded the Third Division of the Army of the Tennessee, encamped near Crump's Landing on the Tennessee River about six miles north of the main Union position at Pittsburg Landing. When Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston launched the surprise attack on Grant's army on the morning of April 6, Grant ordered Wallace to bring his division forward. The orders were verbal, given through an aide around 11:00 to 11:30 a.m., and the written confirmation was lost during the chaos of the battle. Wallace marched the "wrong road" — actually the road he had been instructed to take, which approached the battlefield from the north rather than the east — discovered the route would put him behind Confederate lines, and countermarched. His division covered approximately fifteen miles in six and a half hours but arrived at Pittsburg Landing after dark on April 6, after the first day's fighting had ended. Wallace's division participated in the successful Union counterattack on April 7 that recovered the field. Grant blamed Wallace publicly for the delay; on April 30, 1862, General Henry Halleck reorganized the western army and placed Wallace's and John McClernand's divisions effectively in reserve. Wallace spent the next two years on rear-area assignments and writing memoranda defending his Shiloh conduct. The 1906 Autobiography contains an extended Shiloh defense; the issue was partially resolved by Grant's own later Personal Memoirs (1885), which softened the original blame.

Battle of Monocacy, July 9, 1864. Confederate General Jubal A. Early's Army of the Valley — approximately fourteen thousand veterans — moved north through the Shenandoah Valley in June 1864 to threaten Washington, D.C. while Grant's main force was tied down in front of Petersburg. Wallace, commanding the Middle Department from Baltimore, scrambled together approximately two thousand three hundred men — a mix of regulars and Hundred Days regiments with limited combat experience — and positioned them along the Monocacy River south of Frederick, Maryland directly in Early's path. The battle of July 9, 1864 was a tactical Confederate victory: Early's veterans drove Wallace's force back across the river. But Wallace had held the position for most of the day, costing Early approximately a full day of his march on Washington. That day was enough for Grant to detach the VI Corps from Petersburg and rush it by steamer to Washington. By the time Early reached the Washington defenses on July 11-12, the VI Corps was in place at Fort Stevens; Early withdrew. Casualties at Monocacy were approximately one thousand three hundred Union and seven hundred Confederate. Monocacy is sometimes called the northernmost Confederate victory of the war; it is more accurately the strategic Union win that saved Washington from being briefly captured during the 1864 campaign. Grant's Memoirs credit Wallace explicitly.

The Lincoln assassination commission, May-June 1865. Wallace was one of nine members of the military commission appointed by President Andrew Johnson to try the eight surviving Lincoln assassination conspirators after John Wilkes Booth himself was killed during the manhunt. Wallace was the only lawyer on the tribunal — a significant fact in a trial where the defense repeatedly raised the constitutional question of whether civilian conspirators could be tried by military commission. The verdicts were rendered June 30, 1865. Four conspirators — Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt — were hanged at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary in Washington on July 7, 1865. Wallace's contemporaneous courtroom sketches of the conspirators (Wallace was a competent draftsman) are some of the best-known visual documents of the trial; a number survive at the Smithsonian and the Lew Wallace Study.

The Henry Wirz trial, August-November 1865. Following the assassination commission, Wallace was assigned to preside over the military commission trying Captain Henry Wirz, the Swiss-born former commandant of the Confederate Andersonville Prison Camp in Georgia. Andersonville had killed approximately thirteen thousand Union prisoners of war between February 1864 and the end of the war from starvation, exposure, and disease. Wirz was tried for war crimes — the trial ran from August through November 1865 — and was convicted. He was hanged at the Old Capitol Prison in Washington at 10:32 a.m. on November 10, 1865, the only Confederate official executed for war crimes after the Civil War. The Wirz trial established important precedent for the war-crimes principle that command responsibility for the treatment of prisoners is not transferred to subordinates by the chain of command — a principle that would be cited at the Nuremberg trials eighty years later.

The Broader Bibliography: The Fair God, Prince of India, Autobiography

The Fair God; or, The Last of the 'Tzins (James R. Osgood & Company, Boston, 1873 first edition). Wallace's first novel — a substantial historical romance of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, drawn from William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843). Wallace had begun the manuscript around 1843 when he was sixteen and had revised it across thirty years. The Osgood first runs 586 pages, in publisher's cloth. First-year sales of approximately seven thousand copies were respectable but modest by post-Ben-Hur standards. The Fair God remained a steady seller through the 1880s as Ben-Hur fame pulled readers back to Wallace's earlier work. Tier 2 collector market — fine firsts in original cloth in the low to mid three figures, signed copies meaningfully higher.

The Boyhood of Christ (first serialized in Harper's New Monthly Magazine for Christmas 1886; standalone Harper & Brothers volume 1888). A short Christmas novella expanding on the infancy narrative material in Ben-Hur. The 1888 Harper first is a modest collector market; the Christmas-magazine serialization is a notable item for Harper periodical collectors.

The Prince of India; or, Why Constantinople Fell (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1893 first edition, two volumes). The novel grew out of Wallace's 1881-1885 Constantinople posting. Wallace had become fascinated by the legend of the Wandering Jew and the 1453 Ottoman conquest of Byzantine Constantinople; the two-volume Prince of India braids the legend, the historical conquest, and a romantic plot involving the imagined character of the Wandering Jew advising Sultan Mehmed II. Two volumes, 502 + 578 pages, dark blue cloth stamped in red, gold, and silver. The book did not match Ben-Hur's sales but sold respectably in the 1890s. Tier 2 collector market — fine two-volume firsts in matching cloth in the low to mid three figures.

The Wooing of Malkatoon; Commodus (Harper & Brothers, 1898 first edition). A single volume containing two long narrative poems — Malkatoon on the founding Ottoman ruler Othman (drawing again on Wallace's Constantinople years), Commodus on the dissolute Roman emperor. Modest collector market; primarily of interest to complete Wallace bibliographies.

Lew Wallace: An Autobiography (Harper & Brothers, 1906 first edition, two volumes, posthumous). Wallace had been working on the autobiography intermittently across his Crawfordsville years and had completed approximately the first volume's worth of material at his death in February 1905. Susan Wallace completed the manuscript with the assistance of Mary Hannah Krout, a Crawfordsville journalist and novelist who had known the Wallace family closely. The 1906 two-volume Harper first is the principal primary source for Wallace's life — it contains his extended Shiloh defense, his Monocacy account, his Lincoln assassination commission account, his governorship and Billy the Kid material, and his Constantinople ministry. Tier 2 collector market.

Susan Wallace's bibliography. The Land of the Pueblos (John B. Alden, New York, 1888 first edition, illustrated by Lew Wallace) is the principal Susan Wallace book and is meaningful in the New Mexico territorial-period travel literature, of interest alongside Erna Fergusson and other early chroniclers. Susan's articles from The Independent, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Tribune were collected in the volume. The 1888 Alden first is scarcer than Lew's Ben-Hur first and is a Tier 2 collector market in its own right. Susan also published Along the Bosphorus and Other Sketches (1898) on the Constantinople years, The Storied Sea (1883), and The Repose in Egypt: A Medley (1888).

Found old books in an estate or attic? Text me a photo at 702-496-4214 and I'll tell you what I see.

The General Lew Wallace Study & Museum, Crawfordsville

The principal Lew Wallace archive is the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum at 200 Wallace Avenue in Crawfordsville, Indiana. The Study is the elaborate brick-and-limestone writing building Wallace designed and built for himself between 1895 and 1898, at a cost of approximately twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars in period money — an extraordinary expenditure for a private writing house, reflecting Wallace's Ben-Hur royalties. The Study has Byzantine and Romanesque architectural details drawn from Wallace's Constantinople experience, a hidden book vault, a rooftop observation walk, and an interior designed around the working life of a literary man. Susan Wallace preserved the Study after Lew's 1905 death; the building opened to the public in the early twentieth century and was acquired by the City of Crawfordsville in 1941.

The Study was designated a National Historic Landmark on November 11, 1976 and received the National Medal from the Institute of Museum and Library Services in 2008 — a recognition reserved for the most distinguished American museums. The Study holds approximately twelve hundred of Wallace's personal books, his original writing furniture (including the chair in which he wrote the final pages of Ben-Hur at the Palace of the Governors and returned to Crawfordsville), his sword, his Civil War material, his courtroom sketches from the Lincoln assassination commission, manuscript material for Ben-Hur and other works, and the principal Wallace correspondence archive. The Study is open seasonally to the public and maintains a research relationship with Crawfordsville's Wabash College.

Additional Wallace papers are held at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis and the Indiana Historical Society. Manuscript material for Ben-Hur is divided across the Lew Wallace Study, the Indiana Historical Society, and Indiana University collections. The Wallace-Bonney amnesty correspondence is divided between Crawfordsville and the New Mexico Records Center and Archives in Santa Fe. Researchers pursuing a complete Wallace manuscript record will need to work across all four institutions.

Three-Tier Collector Market

Tier 1 — low to mid four figures (and higher with association). True 1880 Harper & Brothers first edition first printing Ben-Hur with the date "1880" on the title page, the six-word "To the Wife of My Youth" dedication, original cadet blue-gray cloth with floral decoration intact, and copyright page reading "COPYRIGHT, 1880, BY LEW. WALLACE". Fine copies in original cloth with bright gilt in the upper three to low four figures retail; exceptional copies in mid four figures. Inscribed Ben-Hur firsts with documented association: four to five figures. Tier 1 Wallace signed material — letters, signed books, presentation copies — is genuinely scarce on the modern market.

Tier 2 — low to mid three figures. Later 1880 Harper printings of Ben-Hur (without title-page date, with the expanded dedication, or with both); The Fair God (Osgood 1873) first in original cloth (respectable collectible value in collectible condition); The Prince of India (Harper 1893) two-volume first in matching cloth (the mid-range to upper collectible zone); The Wooing of Malkatoon; Commodus (Harper 1898) first; Lew Wallace: An Autobiography (Harper 1906) two-volume first (the mid-range collectible zone); Susan Wallace, The Land of the Pueblos (John B. Alden 1888) first (respectable collectible value scarcer than Lew's titles); Susan Wallace, Along the Bosphorus (1898) first; Susan Wallace, The Storied Sea (1883) first. Inscribed copies of any of the above command meaningful premium over unsigned.

Tier 3 — under one hundred dollars. Garfield Edition Ben-Hur (Harper 1892 memorial edition); Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalog editions of Ben-Hur; Grosset & Dunlap reprints; church-press editions; Sunday-school premium editions; 1925 Fred Niblo silent-film tie-in editions; 1959 William Wyler MGM film tie-in editions; mass-market paperback Ben-Hur across the twentieth century; academic studies and biographies; the modern Penguin Classics and Modern Library reprints. The 1880 first should never be confused with the 1892 Garfield Edition or with the substantial number of 1882-1885 Harper reprints that lack the title-page date and the original short dedication.

Identification Problems and Authentication Cautions

The reprint problem. Harper kept Ben-Hur in print continuously from 1880 through 1936 (the original copyright period), issuing dozens of printings — most without the title-page date. The cloth bindings of the 1881-1885 Harper printings closely resemble the 1880 first printing in floral motif, in color, and in stamping. Inexperienced sellers regularly list any cadet-blue or blue-gray-cloth Ben-Hur as "Ben-Hur 1880 first edition." The single most important authentication question is: does the title page bear the date "1880"? If yes, examine the copyright page for first-edition designation. If no, the copy is a later printing regardless of all other features.

The dedication-length problem. The expansion of the dedication in 1883 from "To the Wife of My Youth" to "To the Wife of My Youth Who Still Abides with Me" gives a secondary authentication check. A copy with the long dedication is post-1883 regardless of binding state. A copy with the short dedication is 1880-1883 but may still be a later 1880-plate printing — combine with the title-page-date check.

The Garfield Edition confusion. The 1892 Garfield Edition (Harper) was a memorial reissue tied to the assassination of President Garfield. It has distinctive front-board imprinting that announces the Garfield Edition explicitly; it is not the 1880 first and should never be sold as such. Garfield Edition copies are common in donation pickups and are a Tier 3 collector market.

The dust jacket question. American trade publishers in 1880 did not as a rule issue dust jackets — book buyers typically encountered books in cloth or in publisher's wrappers without protective covers. No documented surviving 1880 Ben-Hur in publisher's dust jacket has been authenticated. Any seller offering a "1880 Ben-Hur first in original dust jacket" should be challenged for high-resolution photographs and provenance documentation; the likelier explanation is a later printing in a later jacket or a sophisticated facsimile jacket.

The signature authentication problem. Lew Wallace was reasonably available as an autograph during his lifetime — he received many requests from Ben-Hur readers and routinely inscribed presentation copies for friends, officials, and church-library donations. His handwriting is distinctive (a clean nineteenth-century hand). The closed signature pool (1905) makes new "discoveries" of Wallace signatures a perennial market — reputable authentication is available through the specialist literary-first-edition houses and through the Lew Wallace Study & Museum, which maintains a Wallace signature reference file.

NMLP Intake Position

Lew Wallace books — almost always Ben-Hur in some printing — appear in NMLP donation pickups extremely regularly across the New Mexico Anglo retiree donor base. Ben-Hur was the canonical American Protestant religious novel for sixty years and survives in essentially every legacy church library, every Methodist or Baptist congregation library, every Sunday-school storage cupboard, and every multi-generational Anglo family bookcase in the state. The donor demographic is the broadest of any NMLP author donation surface: Methodist and Baptist church-library deaccessions (Trinity Methodist on Copper, First Baptist on Broadway, Central Methodist in Santa Fe, and the rural Methodist circuits across the East Mountains and the South Valley); Civil War history and reenactor estates (Wallace's military memoir credentials draw Civil War collectors); Lincoln County War and Billy the Kid collector estates (a substantial New Mexico micro-collector community focuses on Lincoln County War material); Palace of the Governors gift-shop accumulation in Santa Fe Anglo retiree libraries; and the very substantial generational pass-down of family Ben-Hur copies inherited from grandparents and great-grandparents.

Most Ben-Hur donations are later printings — the Garfield Edition, post-1880 Harper printings, Sears Roebuck mass-market editions, Grosset & Dunlap reprints, 1925 silent-film tie-in editions, 1959 William Wyler film tie-in editions. These are Tier 3 and route to APS Title I school programs, Methodist and Baptist church-library replacement programs, NM Historical Society institutional donations, and the regional research-library partnership network. True 1880 first editions with title-page date and original cadet-blue floral binding are scarce but appear — when they do, Tier 1 routes to specialist literary-first-edition dealers and auction houses (Heritage Auctions Books and Manuscripts, William Reese Company, PBA Galleries, and specialist Western Americana houses like Old West Books).

Tier 2 unsigned firsts of the broader Wallace bibliography (The Fair God, Prince of India, Autobiography, Susan Wallace's Land of the Pueblos) route through SellBooksABQ at 5445 Edith NE, Unit A in Albuquerque. Lincoln County War and Billy the Kid related Wallace material — facsimile letters, governorship-period ephemera, signed material — routes through specialist Western Americana channels. If you have Wallace editions or other New Mexico books to donate, I welcome them. Free statewide pickup — schedule your pickup or text/call 702-496-4214.

Not sure whether to sell, donate, or keep? Call or text me at 702-496-4214 — I'll walk you through it.

External References

• Wikipedia: Lew Wallace
• Wikipedia: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
• Wikipedia: Battle of Monocacy
• Wikipedia: Lincoln County War
• Wikipedia: Palace of the Governors
• General Lew Wallace Study & Museum (Crawfordsville, Indiana)
• New Mexico History Museum / Palace of the Governors

Related on This Site

• Closed Signature Pools — Lew Wallace (closed February 15, 1905), Susan Wallace (closed October 1, 1907)
• NM Spanish Colonial Historians — the Palace of the Governors archive Wallace helped preserve
• Willa Cather & Death Comes for the Archbishop — later Santa Fe literary heritage
• Mary Austin & The Land of Little Rain — later NM literary heritage anchored at Palace circle
• Manhattan Project / Los Alamos — twentieth-century New Mexico territorial-era closure