While his request for captaincy was being processed, Bierce joined General Hazen in the summer of 1866 as an engineering attaché in a military expedition through the Indiana territory to inspect Western military posts. Eventually becoming fed up with the corruption surrounding the cotton shipments, Bierce resigned his Treasury post and returned to Indiana to apply for a captaincy in the United States Army.

Shortly after the Civil War ended, Bierce took a position as a Federal Treasury agent in Selma, Alabama overseeing the shipment of cotton. Bierce would later recollect often in his writings about the head wound, stating at one point, that his head had “broken like a walnut.” Eventually, through a combination of the head wound and a resentment toward the death and destruction of the American Civil War, the cynical side of Bierce would emerge that would become his claim to fame as a writer.ĭeemed unfit to continue fighting, Bierce was mustered out of the military in Huntsville, Alabama in January of 1865. It was during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain that Bierce was wounded in the head by a Confederate sniper and evacuated to a military hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Initially enlisted in the 9th Regiment as a private, Bierce would rise to the rank of sergeant before finally being promoted to the rank of brevet captain and topographical officer under the command of General William Babcock Hazen of Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio.ĭuring his tenure as a topographical officer, Bierce surveyed and fought in some of the greatest battles of the Civil War: Battle of Shiloh, Battle of Stones River, Battle of Chickamauga, Battle of Missionary Ridge, Battle of Pickett’s Mill, and Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. His interest in the military led him to enlist in Company C of the 9th Regiment, Indiana Volunteers in April of 1861 shortly after the outbreak of the American Civil War. In 1859, at the age of seventeen, Bierce attended the Kentucky Military Institute for a period of one year before dropping out.

The youngest of ten siblings of Marcus Aurelius and Laura Sherwood Bierce, he did not have a strong bond with his father and mother while growing up and left his family in 1857 to become a printer’s devil for The Northern Indianan newspaper in Warsaw, Indiana for short period of time before eventually returning to Ohio to live with his uncle, Lucius Verus Bierce. Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was born on Jin Meigs County, Ohio.

Can Such Things Be? by Ambrose Bierce