Spiritualized warfare

Ambrose Bierce became a man during the Civil War. He enlisted before he was 20 and saw action from the very beginning. He fought at the battle of Shiloh in 1862 and was wounded in the head two years later. After the conflict, Bierce traded his musket for a pen and wrote some of the most biting satire of the age.

In his humorous Devil's Diction­ary, in which he sought to expose selfishness and egotism, Bierce fixated on a concept that was particularly important to his era: Providence. He defined appetite, for instance, as "an instinct thoughtfully im­planted by Providence as a solution to the labor problem." When it came time to define providential, Bierce explained it as "unexpectedly and conspicuously beneficial to the person so describing it."

What Bierce treated with disdain was both a poignant problem and a sustaining hope for those he camped with and shot at during the Civil War. Some of Bierce's comrades may have smirked at his playfulness with Providence, but two new books reveal that Providence was the principal way most Americans made sense of the devastating whirlwinds of war. As the nation fell apart, as brother killed brother, as pastors preached politics and as politicians struggled with spirituality, they turned to God and God's activities to comprehend their worlds.