NEW YEAR’S DAY--DEATH OF JOHN H. WINDER--HE DIES ON HIS WAY TO A DINNER
--SOMETHING AS TO CHARACTER AND CAREER--ONE OF THE WORST MEN THAT EVER
LIVED.
On New Year’s Day we were startled by the information that our old-time
enemy--General John H. Winder--was dead. It seemed that the Rebel
Sutler of the Post had prepared in his tent a grand New Year’s dinner
to which all the officers were invited. Just as Winder bent his head
to enter the tent he fell, and expired shortly after. The boys said it
was a clear case of Death by Visitation of the Devil, and it was always
insisted that his last words were:
“My faith is in Christ; I expect to be saved. Be sure and cut down the
prisoners’ rations.”
Thus passed away the chief evil genius of the Prisoners-of-War.
American history has no other character approaching his in vileness.
I doubt if the history of the world can show another man, so
insignificant in abilities and position, at whose door can be laid such
a terrible load of human misery. There have been many great conquerors
and warriors who have
Waded through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,
but they were great men, with great objects, with grand plans to carry
out, whose benefits they thought would be more than an equivalent for
the suffering they caused. The misery they inflicted was not the motive
of their schemes, but an unpleasant incident, and usually the sufferers
were men of other races and religions, for whom sympathy had been
dulled by long antagonism.
But Winder was an obscure, dull old man--the commonplace descendant of
a pseudo-aristocrat whose cowardly incompetence had once cost us the
loss of our National Capital. More prudent than his runaway father, he
held himself aloof from the field; his father had lost reputation and
almost his commission, by coming into contact with the enemy; he would
take no such foolish risks, and he did not. When false expectations
of the ultimate triumph of Secession led him to cast his lot with the
Southern Confederacy, he did not solicit a command in the field, but
took up his quarters in Richmond, to become a sort of Informer-General,
High-Inquisitor and Chief Eavesdropper for his intimate friend,
Jefferson Davis. He pried and spied around into every man’s bedroom and
family circle, to discover traces of Union sentiment. The wildest tales
malice and vindictiveness could concoct found welcome reception in his
ears. He was only too willing to believe, that he might find excuse for
harrying and persecuting. He arrested, insulted, imprisoned, banished,
and shot people, until the patience even of the citizens of Richmond
gave way, and pressure was brought upon Jefferson Davis to secure the
suppression of his satellite. For a long while Davis resisted, but
at last yielded, and transferred Winder to the office of Commissary
General of Prisoners. The delight of the Richmond people was great. One
of the papers expressed it in an article, the key note of which was:
“Thank God that Richmond is at last rid of old Winder. God have mercy
upon those to whom he has been sent.”
Remorseless and cruel as his conduct of the office of Provost Marshal
General was, it gave little hint of the extent to which he would go
in that of Commissary General of Prisoners. Before, he was restrained
somewhat by public opinion and the laws of the land. These no longer
deterred him. From the time he assumed command of all the Prisons east
of the Mississippi--some time in the Fall of 1863--until death removed
him, January 1, 1865--certainly not less than twenty-five thousand
incarcerated men died in the most horrible manner that the mind can
conceive. He cannot be accused of exaggeration, when, surveying the
thousands of new graves at Andersonville, he could say with a quiet
chuckle that he was “doing more to kill off the Yankees than twenty
regiments at the front.” No twenty regiments in the Rebel Army ever
succeeded in slaying anything like thirteen thousand Yankees in six
months, or any other time. His cold blooded cruelty was such as to
disgust even the Rebel officers. Colonel D. T. Chandler, of the Rebel
War Department, sent on a tour of inspection to Andersonville, reported
back, under date of August 5, 1864:
“My duty requires me respectfully to recommend a change in the officer
in command of the post, Brigadier General John H. Winder, and the
substitution in his place of some one who unites both energy and good
judgment with some feelings of humanity and consideration for the
welfare and comfort, as far as is consistent with their safe keeping,
of the vast number of unfortunates placed under his control; some one
who, at least, will not advocate deliberately, and in cold blood, the
propriety of leaving them in their present condition until their number
is sufficiently reduced by death to make the present arrangements
suffice for their accommodation, and who will not consider it a matter
of self-laudation and boasting that he has never been inside of the
Stockade--a place the horrors of which it is difficult to describe, and
which is a disgrace to civilization--the condition of which he might,
by the exercise of a little energy and judgment, even with the limited
means at his command, have considerably improved.”
In his examination touching this report, Colonel Chandler says:
“I noticed that General Winder seemed very indifferent to the welfare
of the prisoners, indisposed to do anything, or to do as much as I
thought he ought to do, to alleviate their sufferings. I remonstrated
with him as well as I could, and he used that language which I
reported to the Department with reference to it--the language stated
in the report. When I spoke of the great mortality existing among the
prisoners, and pointed out to him that the sickly season was coming on,
and that it must necessarily increase unless something was done for
their relief--the swamp, for instance, drained, proper food furnished,
and in better quantity, and other sanitary suggestions which I made to
him--he replied to me that he thought it was better to see half of them
die than to take care of the men.”
It was he who could issue such an order as this, when it was supposed
that General Stoneman was approaching Andersonville:
HEADQUARTERS MILITARY PRISON,
ANDERSONVILLE, Ga., July 27, 1864.
The officers on duty and in charge of the Battery of Florida Artillery
at the time will, upon receiving notice that the enemy has approached
within seven miles of this post, open upon the Stockade with grapeshot,
without reference to the situation beyond these lines of defense.
JOHN H. WINDER,
Brigadier General Commanding.
This man was not only unpunished, but the Government is to-day
supporting his children in luxury by the rent it pays for the use of
his property --the well-known Winder building, which is occupied by one
of the Departments at Washington.
I confess that all my attempts to satisfactorily analyze Winder’s
character and discover a sufficient motive for his monstrous conduct
have been futile. Even if we imagine him inspired by a hatred of the
people of the North that rose to fiendishness, we can not understand
him. It seems impossible for the mind of any man to cherish so deep and
insatiable an enmity against his fellow-creatures that it could not be
quenched and turned to pity by the sight of even one day’s misery at
Andersonville or Florence. No one man could possess such a grievous
sense of private or national wrongs as to be proof against the daily
spectacle of thousands of his own fellow citizens, inhabitants of the
same country, associates in the same institutions, educated in the same
principles, speaking the same language--thousands of his brethren in
race, creed, and all that unite men into great communities, starving,
rotting and freezing to death.
There is many a man who has a hatred so intense that nothing but
the death of the detested one will satisfy it. A still fewer number
thirst for a more comprehensive retribution; they would slay perhaps
a half-dozen persons; and there may be such gluttons of revenge as
would not be satisfied with the sacrifice of less than a score or two,
but such would be monsters of whom there have been very few, even in
fiction. How must they all bow their diminished heads before a man who
fed his animosity fat with tens of thousands of lives.
But, what also militates greatly against the presumption that either
revenge or an abnormal predisposition to cruelty could have animated
Winder, is that the possession of any two such mental traits so
strongly marked would presuppose a corresponding activity of other
intellectual faculties, which was not true of him, as from all I can
learn of him his mind was in no respect extraordinary.
It does not seem possible that he had either the brain to conceive, or
the firmness of purpose to carry out so gigantic and long-enduring a
career of cruelty, because that would imply superhuman qualities in a
man who had previously held his own very poorly in the competition with
other men.
The probability is that neither Winder nor his direct superiors--Howell
Cobb and Jefferson Davis--conceived in all its proportions the gigantic
engine of torture and death they were organizing; nor did they
comprehend the enormity of the crime they were committing. But they
were willing to do much wrong to gain their end; and the smaller crimes
of to-day prepared them for greater ones to-morrow, and still greater
ones the day following. Killing ten men a day on Belle Isle in January,
by starvation and hardship, led very easily to killing one hundred men
a day in Andersonville, in July, August and September. Probably at
the beginning of the war they would have felt uneasy at slaying one
man per day by such means, but as retribution came not, and as their
appetite for slaughter grew with feeding, and as their sympathy with
human misery atrophied from long suppression, they ventured upon ever
widening ranges of destructiveness. Had the war lasted another year,
and they lived, five hundred deaths a day would doubtless have been
insufficient to disturb them.
Winder doubtless went about his part of the task of slaughter coolly,
leisurely, almost perfunctorily. His training in the Regular Army
was against the likelihood of his displaying zeal in anything. He
instituted certain measures, and let things take their course. That
course was a rapid transition from bad to worse, but it was still in
the direction of his wishes, and, what little of his own energy was
infused into it was in the direction of impetus,-not of controlling
or improving the course. To have done things better would have
involved soma personal discomfort. He was not likely to incur personal
discomfort to mitigate evils that were only afflicting someone else.
By an effort of one hour a day for two weeks he could have had every
man in Andersonville and Florence given good shelter through his own
exertions. He was not only too indifferent and too lazy to do this,
but he was too malignant; and this neglect to allow--simply allow,
remember--the prisoners to protect their lives by providing their own
shelter, gives the key to his whole disposition, and would stamp his
memory with infamy, even if there were no other charges against him.