A nocturnal train ride with former Civil War subordinate Capt. Robert Ingersol caused Gen. Lew Wallace to begin his intense study for a book that would end up being Ben Hur, which in turn would make the Civil War general and New Mexico Territorial Governor a wealthy man.
Ingersol was an atheist and Wallace was more or less an indifferent agnostic at the time. About the train ride, he's later state:
It is possible to fix the hour and place of the first thought of a book precisely enough; that was a night in 1876. I had been listening to discussion which involved such elemental points as God, heaven, life hereafter, Jesus Christ, and His divinity. Trudging on in the dark, alone except as one’s thoughts may be company, good or bad, a sense of the importance of the theme struck me for the first time with a force both singular and persistent. “My ignorance of it was painfully a spot of deeper darkness in the darkness. I was ashamed of myself, and make haste now to declare that the mortification of pride I then endured, or if it be preferred, the punishment of spirit, ended in a resolution to study the whole matter, if only for the gratification there might be in having convictions of one kind or another.
Research for the book caused Wallace to deepen a Christian faith he'd been indifferent to, although he never joined any one Protestant sect.
Wallace is an interesting figure. He first entered military service during the Mexican War. He met and married his wife, the daughter of his Mexican War commander, shortly after the war. Like Wallace, she was a writer and was published before he was. Between the Mexican War and Civil War he practiced law. He only briefly practiced law after the war.
He and his wife Susan only had one child, which was unusual for the time.
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