Ambrose Bierce and the Civil War

A LTHOUGH THE CHARGE ONCE HAD VALIDITY, it cannot be said now 26that Ambrose Bierce has been ignored by biographers. Beginning in the late twenties (I929 was a landmark year in Bierce scholarship), such chroniclers as Adolphe DeCastro, Carey McWilliams, Walter Neale, and Napier Wilt attempted, with varying success, to cast light into the dark corners of his life;' more recently, Fatout, O'Connor, and Grenander have set a similar task for themselves.2 Yet Bierce's personality was so complex and his career so checkered, that many of those corners stand unilluminated or poorly so. The most persistently puzzling episode, of course, continues to be his controversial disappearance in Mexico, but there remain as well other areas of biographical contention. One such concerns Bierce's whereabouts and activities during the last three months of the Civil War, mid-January to mid-April, i865. Most critics believe that Bierce, suffering the lingering effects of a head wound inflicted at Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, in June of I864, resigned and was mustered out of the gth Indiana Infantry at Huntsville, Alabama, in January of i865, and that he then relocated in Selma as a civilian employee of the Treasury Department, working for the duration of the war and into the summer as an agent involved in commandeering contraband property, mostly cotton.3 According to the author of the first significant, full-length biography of Bierce, Carey McWilliams, however, and M. E. Grenander, who published the most recent study, he was not discharged in Alabama at all but instead transferred in January to South Carolina, where he

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