Allegorical trip through Alabama

Writing on Feb. 15, 1911, from Washington, D.C., to his friend and protege George Sterling, Ambrose Bierce railed against the venality of bureaucrats. "If I have my way, nobody should remain in the civil service more than five years[;] at the end of that period all are disloyal."

Much of Bierce's writing, as a journalist in San Francisco and a master short-story writer, is suffused with hyperbole, sarcasm and irony. But his disdain for government bureaucrats may well have come from personal experience.

Bierce, a decorated Civil War veteran with the 9th Indiana Infantry, spent five months in the vanquished but not yet peaceful South immediately after the Civil War as an agent for the Treasury Department. His experiences became the grist for "Way Down in Alabam" (1903).

On one level, the story is a straightforward account of people he encountered and events he witnessed or in which he participated. However, it also is a phantasmagoric journey into the psyche of a cunning and resourceful creative artist.

After the war

After resigning his commission in the Union Army on Jan. 25, 1865, Bierce was a 24-year-old ex-soldier who loathed the provincialism of prairie life. The prospect of returning home to rural Indiana probably was more frightening to him than facing Rebel bullets. Thus, an offer from Capt. Sherburne B. Eaton to join him in becoming a Treasury agent in Alabama seemed to offer excitement, good pay and time to figure out what he might do with the rest of his life.

In the months after the surrender of the Confederate armies in 1865, the South proved to be dangerous territory for soldiers and civilians alike. Decommissioned Confederate soldiers returned to find their cities, towns and farms in ruins; shops and factories burned; livestock driven off or killed; railroads and bridges destroyed; and the only social order they had ever known overturned. Other ex-soldiers decided not to return home and roamed the roads as rootless bands of brigands, attempting to survive by fair means or foul.

In the wake of the triumphant Union armies, hordes of civilians from the North descended like swarms of hungry locusts. Administrators arrived to restart local government services, and Treasury Department agents eagerly seized contraband property.

They mingled with fortune hunters, land speculators, thieves, con artists, camp followers and thousands of newly emancipated former slaves to produce a roiling social amalgam rife with corruption and seething with violence.

Seizing cotton

In June 1865, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, commander in chief of all the Union armies, informed his subordinate commanders in the South that military forces should assist civilian Treasury agents in their lawful efforts to seize holdings of the former Confederate government while ensuring the safety of legitimate private property.

However, the Southern economy was in shambles, and there wasn't much left for government agents to seize. One valuable commodity did remain, though: cotton, tons of it that couldn't be shipped during the war because of the Union naval blockade of Southern ports.

Just how much cotton lay across the South is open to speculation. While much of it was destroyed by Confederate forces before the surrender, Alabama still had more of it than any other state. But how much of it was owned by the former Confederate government? How much of it was legitimate private property? And who decided which was which?

What was certain was that the cotton was worth a lot of money. According to Bierce, "It was worth about $500 dollars a bale, say one dollar a pound. The world agreed that was a pretty good price for cotton."

To make matters worse, Treasury agents were entitled to a bounty of 25 cents for every dollar of Confederate cotton they found. Naturally, unscrupulous agents and others pretending to be agents found a lot of government cotton and very little privately owned cotton. Even Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch noted, "I am sure I sent some honest cotton agents South; but sometimes it seems very doubtful whether any of them remained honest very long."

Seething in Selma

The occupying Union forces soon found themselves forced to guard Treasury agents against angry Southerners while ferreting out dishonest agents for prosecution by federal authorities. In November 1865, a correspondent for the New York Timesreported that most of the Treasury agents in Alabama were "on the fiddle" and more than $2 million in cotton was unaccounted for.

With the sarcasm for which he was famous, Bierce observed: "With no great knowledge of 'business' I venture to think that in Alabama in the latter part of the year of grace 1865 commercial conditions were hardly normal."

Eaton and Bierce were headquartered in Selma, at the northern edge of Alabama's "Black Belt," a stretch of rolling prairie across the center of the state. Its rich black soil supported some of the state's wealthiest cotton plantations. Selma also was a manufacturing center during the war, and in the summer of 1865, it was a particularly unfriendly place for Yankees of any kind.

Selma residents had good reason to be angry. On April 2, 1865, Union Gen. James H. Wilson and 9,000 battle-hardened cavalry troopers had arrived on the outskirts of the city with orders to lay waste to central Alabama and run the South's most notorious raider, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, to ground once and for all.

Forrest and about 3,000 men, many of them untested reserves, defended Selma. They put up a good fight until Wilson's dismounted troopers overran their thinly manned trenches. Forrest and about 300 men escaped. The frustrated Union soldiers, fueled by local whiskey stocks that the retreating Confederates neglected to destroy, put Selma to the torch.

The Union troops lingered in the stricken city for a week, looting personal property, burning private residences and destroying public buildings, including three rolling mills and a large naval foundry and yard with its stores of weapons and powder. Thirty-five thousand bales of cotton also went up in flames. As a final indignity, Wilson ordered all the horses and mules in the area killed, including 800 of his own worn-out mounts.

Morality tale

Undoubtedly the stench of the raid still lingered with the local population when Eaton and Bierce arrived. Bierce quickly sensed, "Every Northern man represented some form or phase of an authority which these luckless people horribly hated, and to which they submitted only because, and in so far as, they had to."

Eaton was the senior man and managed to avoid the worst of the locals' enmity by spending much of his time "on government business" in the fleshpots of New Orleans. That left Bierce in charge.

A man as scrupulous and honest as Bierce understood, as he said, "Against bribery no provision could have provided an adequate safeguard; the magnitude of the interests involved was too great, the administration of the trust too loose and irresponsible."

To tell his tale of temptation and corruption, Bierce re-imagined all the stock characters from his childhood reading of "The Pilgrim's Progress," the most famous of all Christian morality novels, a standby in many 19th-century households, and incorporated them into "Way Down in Alabam." Beneath its veneer of reality, this story is a biting satire of ineffectual government administration, a parable of corrupt capitalism and a savage indictment of well-intentioned social reform.

Strange characters

Bierce plays the part of the naive hero who must journey through a strange land, symbolically represented by the desolate Alabama city, to gain knowledge through experience. On his journey of enlightenment, he meets characters who tempt, protect and educate him.

There's the seductive adventurer whom Bierce calls Jack Harris. Harris tries to tempt Bierce with an illegal scheme to acquire 1,000 bales of cotton and smuggle them to Cuba. All that is needed is the hero's signature on some blank shipping forms to put the enterprise in motion. Bierce resists the wily Harris and, as in any good morality tale, Harris eventually meets his doom in Cuba a few years later.

Bierce also meets a courtly secessionist family who serve as his benefactors and guides through the unknown territory. The sons, "Charles and Frank," befriend the hero, educate him on the realities of life in Selma, and pledge to protect him from harm.

One night, after a convivial dinner, the brothers escort Bierce back to his lodgings. On the way, they encounter a mysterious stranger who follows them through the darkened town. Frank instinctively senses danger.

To save the hero, Frank shoots the stranger, wounding him in a leg that subsequently requires amputation. But this act of honor requires all three men to appear before an elderly justice of the peace "of severe aspect ... who had no more legal authority than I had myself."

Playing the role of the wise counselor, the justice lets Frank go with a $5 fine and costs for disorderly conduct. With classic understatement, Bierce concludes: "There were queer characters in Alabama in those days."

Twist of fate

In typical Bierce fashion, this cautionary tale concludes with a hair-raising adventure with an unexpected twist of fate at the end. He describes a trip down the Tombigbee River with a consignment of contraband cotton guarded by a squad of soldiers.

One night, the boat was attacked by armed bandits, firing from the shore. Bierce related that he "happened to be on the hurricane deck, armed with a revolver, which I fired as rapidly as I could, listening all the time for the fire of the soldiers, and listening in vain. It transpired later that they had not a cartridge among them; and of all helpless mortals a soldier without a cartridge is the most imbecile."

Like all morality plays, this one has a happy ending when the hero receives unexpected assistance from an unlikely source. During the firefight, Bierce hears "pretty regularly recurring explosions, as of a small cannon."

Searching for the source of his much-appreciated salvation, because "capture meant hanging out of hand," Bierce finds "a long, ungainly person, clad in faded butternut, bareheaded, his long, lank hair falling down each side of his neck, his coat tails similarly parted, and his enormous feet spreading their soles to the blue sky."

Bierce's unlikely benefactor is an old Confederate veteran with an ancient horse pistol in hand. He is the ship's only passenger, unexpectedly taken on at one of the upper landings of the river.

Bierce inquires why the old man chose to assist Yankees confiscating Southern cotton. In a form of speech common among the hill-country people of northern Alabama, the courtly old gentleman gives a reply steeped in Christian charity. "I allowed it was mouty clever in you-all to take me on, seein' I hadn't nary cent, so I thought I'd jist kinder work my passage."

Bierce's career as a government agent was a short one, but like the hero in "Pilgrim's Progress," he emerged a wiser man, better able to cope with the ways of the world.

In the autumn of 1865, he received a letter from his old commander, Gen. William Babcock Hazen. It invited Bierce to join him on an inspection tour of the Army's frontier posts in the West. Bierce accepted immediately. He packed his Alabama experiences in his memory bank and headed into the West to begin yet another chapter in his life.

• Gordon Berg is a past president of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia.