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The Ethics of Moral Resistance: Ambrose Bierce and General William B. Hazen

WHEN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR erupted in 1861, Ambrose Bierce enlisted in the Ninth Indiana Infantry, and while performing his service with the Union Army, he acquired a distinguishable record having fought in major battles such as Shiloh, Pickett's Mill, Chickamauga, and Kennesaw Mountain. Resigning from service after sustaining a bullet wound to his head, Bierce eventually turned to writing, where his war experiences provided him with an abundance of material for his fiction and nonfiction. Bierce's Civil War writing contests traditional, inherited rhetoric romanticizing the Civil War, favoring instead a devotion to realism that captures the most horrific and darkest faces of battle which reduce men to animalistic, disposable tools of a martial machine. Bierce's work unveils illusions associated with glory and heroism, revealing a rather dehumanizing depiction of Union and Confederate soldiers. In response, Bierce's literary compositions challenge martial culture and pedagogy that train soldiers to dehumanize enemy and friendly militants. My purpose in this discussion is to present how Bierce believes honor may be maintained by soldiers through means of moral resistance to unethical military orders. Bierce's approach toward ethics of moral resistance within a military context is worthy of consideration, because raising awareness on this issue assists in narrowing the gap between a civilian's comprehension of war and a veteran's understanding of his or her experiences. As an author, one of Bierce's primary intentions in composing his tales and autobiographical accounts was to highlight the diametrically opposing perceptions that soldiers and civilians hold toward war. Bierce believed that civilians suffered a fundamental miscomprehension of war that was influenced by romantic and abstract notions of valor, while soldiers were more objectively aware of war's bitter realista, a perspective carved from their "baptism by fire." Examining soldiers' opposition to military authority and the ethics that drive moral resistance is important, because exposing the levels of dissent that exist in the military offers civilian audiences a more informed understanding of the complicated realities that soldiers late. Enlightening a possibly indifferent or desensitized American public on the legacy and ongoing movement of military resistance may spark political reform regarding the use of military personnel and resources. Largely neglected by Ambrose Bierce's literary critics is the impression General William B. Hazen's mentorship had upon Bierce's writing. A comparative analysis has never been conducted linking Hazen's The School and the Army in Germany and France (1872) to the shaping of Bierce's work. Moreover, only cursory studies have surfaced identifying comparative relationships between Bierce's literary compositions and Hazen's A Narrative of Military Service (1885). Hence, this analysis will concentrate on assessing these limitations in scholarship to present a study regarding Hazen's considerable impact upon Bierce's writing. This bio-critical analysis of Bierce and his writing posits that Hazen's martial disciplinary philosophies had a direct correlation upon Bierce's battlefield performance, as described in Bierce's autobiographical sketches, and the character portraits he composes in his short fiction. Bierce's Civil War experiences, his pupil/mentor relationship with his commanding officer, General Hazen, and the influence of Hazen's disciplinary ethics on Bierce's writing will be central to this discussion. This analysis suggests that Hazen's disciplinary model presented a residual impact upon Bierce's war record and shaped Bierce's treatment of martial power relations found in his fiction and autobiographical pieces. Furthermore, I contend that while Hazen's model is certainly congruent with the tenets of martial idealism, the most distinctive element of Hazen's disciplinary ideology is the demonstration of ethically motivated resistance to blind subordination. …