Certainty about Providence?

The following is theologically thought-provoking. I've been studying the New England Puritans lately, and they were similarly inclined to look for divine meaning in the victories and tragedies of their lives, often at the cost of solving issues more practically and directly (though still looking to God for help). 

Thomas Jefferson "Stonewall" Jackson was born on this day in 1824. Interesting history: "Jackson, who was anything but ordinary in his military capacities, was also probably not ordinary in his profound trust in providence...Early in his adulthood, he started peppering his speech and corresopndance with phrases like ‘an all-wise Providence’ and 'the hand of an all-wise God.’ .. Jackson was almost incapable of accounting for any event or outcome during the war itself without referring it to God’s sovereign direction. After the dreadful fighting of the battle of Second Manassas, an aide observed to Jackson that the Confederates ‘have won this battle by the hardest kind of fighting.’ Jackson... would not hear of it: ‘No, no, we have won it by the blessing of Almighty God.’

"Not surprisingly, when Jackson died from wounds suffered at the battle of Chancellorsville.. . common people throughout the nation... instinctively sought the divine meaning in the passing of someone who had so consistently ascribed to God the rule over daily life. Yet what would that message be?... Some thought that Jackson’s death was a result of sin, usually ascribed to the South and only rarely to Jackson. ...[A pious Northern general] thought God was intending to bless the Union cause with victory…[and] some Southern ministers proclaimed that removing Jackson was a providential means of stripping away human props so that the glory for the South’s forthcoming victory would be given to God alone. Only a few confessed that it was entirely a mystery. After the war, and indeed after the assassination of Abrhama Lincoln had evoked a comparable flurry of assured but incompatible interpretations of God’s purposes, a few attempts were made to add nuance to earlier certainties. But as both Jackson ..and the reaction to Jackson's death demonstrated...ministers and the laity were as convinced as ...theologians that God was in control and that they could understand clearly why God was acting the way he did.” (Mark Noll, “The Civil War as a Theological Crisis,” University of North Carolina Press, 2006, pp. 85-86).