Begin then with my acquisition of a nineteenth-century oil portrait of a man: a stern visage, pale blue eyes, and a haunted, inward gaze. Judging from his black frock coat, its narrow lapels, the formal white shirt, and the style of his long, silver-threaded, patriarchal beard, the portrait was likely done in the mid-1880s. Scrawled on the back in ink was the name Captain William Andrew Winder, U.S. Army. The last name was familiar, but he was not. Was this somber, troubled-looking man related to the infamous Winder clan allegedly responsible for the war crimes at Georgia’s Andersonville Prison, a place of horror and death long synonymous with brutality in an already brutal war? According to the portrait’s inscription, he was at one time in the U.S. Army, but an important question was if he had served the Union or the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Hover in the past, and sometimes there is that rare occurrence when the discovery of an obscure figure—at first a pinpoint of light on a darkened stage—slowly takes shape, with face and form, and, rarer still, resonates with themes of the dissonant past with all its dips, stutters, and cataclysms. Allegations of treason, the definition of patriotism and loyalty, the dividing of a nation, and the aftermath of war, including war crimes trials, and the sins of a father and a father’s father are the themes of this work.
This is the saga of William Andrew Winder, a man who appeared in far-flung, improbable places, only to reappear again and again—a cipher, yet a composite of many people fleeing a past or a place. The memory of the world around him—the history he witnessed—was a rare opportunity for a modern scholar to pry the hidden alloys of the past from its rusted hinges. William A. Winder was a player on a uniquely American stage, a metaphor for the recovery and reinvention of a fractured nation and its people during and after the Civil War.
Often mute, always peripatetic, William A. Winder was at times accused of being a traitor, a failure, or, worse, a coward. In the end one bears witness to a life often lived in palpable agony and frustration, a man with an honor-bound conscience and an uncommon ability to forge new beginnings.
Herein lies a story of collective shame and redemption, of prisoners and prison camps, American Indian abuses, nineteenth-century medicine, of railroads, healing, and renewal in the remote outpost of San Diego; of gold and copper mines; of disloyalty and disunion; of the “go-Westers,” the hucksters, politicians, pioneers, humbugs, traitors, and generals who blazed through William A. Winder’s long life until it sputtered to a close near the gouged earth of a place called Rosebud.