Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War: One Man’s Morbid Vision

Ambrose Bierce would probably have been happier if he had never been born. Failing that, he would certainly have been more happy if he had not survived the Civil War; or, if he had, he would have been far happier if he had never left the Army at the war’s end. Instead, almost against his will, he went on to become one of the sharpest American humorists who ever put pen to page. Today Bierce ranks second only to Samuel Clemens as a sarcastic chronicler of the quaint, the ridiculous and the downright idiotic in American life. In fact, Bierce’s short stories about his Civil War service were like literary cousins to the books Clemens wrote about his youth on the Mississippi. But the cousins were extremely distant ones; whereas Clemens remembered his time as a riverboat man with rich fondness, Bierce remembered the Civil War with bleakness, and the humor of his stories, unlike Clemens’, was twisted and grotesque rather than simply funny. The Civil War blasted Bierce’s youth, and his recollections of the war turned up full of routine stupidities, wasted braveries and empty illusions. And perhaps for just that reason, Bierce’s memories of the Civil War rang truer than the memoirs of corps commanders and supply clerks.

His angular name, Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce, was part of a family tradition. His father was named Marcus Aurelius Bierce, his uncle was Lucius Verus Bierce, and all of the Bierce brothers and sisters were equipped with names beginning with ‘A’ (Ambrose himself had been named for the obscure hero of an obscure 18th-century play). That, unfortunately, was where their father’s ingenuity exhausted itself, for Marcus Aurelius Bierce was otherwise a poor dreamer-farmer. The only thing he excelled at producing was children, Ambrose being the 10th, born on June 24, 1842, in the Western Reserve of Ohio. The Bierces’ family life was no country idyll, and apparently young Ambrose did everything he could to make it harder. He rebelled frequently and was frequently whipped. He rejected the old-time religion of his family and grew up’suspicious, introverted, and resistant to authority.’ Much of this he later blamed on his parents’ inattentiveness. There were, it seemed, too many competing egos in the form of brothers and sisters for Marcus Aurelius to shine any paternal warmth down to Ambrose, and Ambrose never forgave him for it.

Therefore, the boy got away from his family as early as he could. The Bierces had moved to Warsaw, Ind., in 1848, and in 1856 Ambrose got himself apprenticed to the editor of an abolitionist newspaper and moved into the editor’s home. Two years later, he quit his apprenticeship and was taken in hand by uncle Lucius Verus, who thought he would do the boy a favor by entering him into the Kentucky Military Institute. Ambrose wanted no more favors from his relations than he absolutely had to accept, and in two years he was back in Indiana, where he became a ‘waiter and general handy man’ in a store in Elkhart. In April 1861, the war broke out, and five days after Fort Sumter surrendered to South Carolina forces, Bierce enlisted in Elkhart’s own Company C, 9th Indiana Volunteers.

Bierce remembered himself as a crusading idealist, probably the only time in his life he would admit to being such. ‘At one time in my green and salad days,’ he wrote 36 years later, ‘I was sufficiently zealous for Freedom to engage in a four years’ battle for its promotion. There were other issues involved; but they did not count for much with me.’ But instead of crusading for ideals, Bierce and the 9th Indiana got a month of drill, and then a summons to western Virginia as part of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s expedition to wrest the pro-Union western Virginia counties away from the rest of Confederate Virginia.

Not until June 3 did Private A.G. Bierce and the rest of the regiment get their first whiff of military glory at Philippi, where Bierce noted that their chief accomplishment had been to shoot off a Confederate’s leg. That was enough for the 9th to take it as a victory, and ‘we gave ourselves, the aristocracy of service, no end of military airs; some of us even going to the extreme of keeping our jackets buttoned and our hair combed.’ On July 10, Bierce was bold enough to try his hand at personal heroics. In a skirmish at Girard Hill he rescued a wounded comrade, Private Dyson Boothroyd, from ‘within fifteen paces of the enemy’s breastworks.’ Although Boothroyd quite ungratefully died, Bierce was written up in the Indianapolis newspapers and, as he confessed, was ‘vain enough to be rather proud.’

By the end of July, the war was not any closer to being over than in April, and the 9th’s enlistment time was nearly up. After seeing some last-minute action at Rich Mountain and Carrick’s Ford, they returned to Indianapolis and a tumultuous welcome. Bierce had never had a tumultuous welcome from anyone, and he enjoyed the swaggering so much that when the regiment was reorganized in August as a two-years’ regiment, he reenlisted and was promoted to sergeant, and then to sergeant major. Bierce and the regiment were then shipped back to western Virginia, but by then most of the action there had ended, and the 9th’s colonel guaranteed their peace of mind by having ‘the forethought to see that we lay well out of range of the small-arms’ of the enemy. Only once did ugliness intrude on them. After a skirmish at Camp Allegheny in December, Bierce ‘passed something — some things — lying by the wayside.’ He recalled, ‘during another wait, we examined them, curiously lifting the blankets from their yellow-clay faces. How repulsive they looked with their blood-smears, their blank staring eyes, their teeth uncovered by contraction of the lips.’ Bierce and his green recruits marched away in fearful silence. They had not known before that men died that way, and Sergeant Bierce was about to behold that sort of dying on a far more awful scale.

In February 1862, the 9th Indiana was transferred to Nashville, where it was brigaded under Colonel William B. Hazen. Hazen was the first real professional soldier Bierce had ever come into close contact with, and Hazen entranced him. A hard-boiled officer with a sharp tongue for superiors and subordinates alike, Hazen spun a gruff, fatherly spell over the young Bierce, who warmed up to good fathering. Hazen was also a skilled tactician and drillmaster, and he happily beat the freewheeling Hoosiers into something like military shape. Surprisingly, the beating only endeared him more to Bierce. The colonel became ‘my commander and my friend, my master in the art of war,’ and Bierce noted gleefully that ‘his memory is a terror to every unworthy soul in the service.’