New York City, Friday, November 15, 1861
To the beggars, prostitutes, hucksters, and saloonkeepers along the wharf the steamship’s arrival at the bustling Port of New York meant fresh business. Ordinary trade. With sails furled, the ship and its huge side-wheel paddles churned through the water, billows of coal dust from a single smokestack obscuring the passengers thronging the upper deck. But as the ship nears and the smoke clears, the sight of masses of soldiers decked out in Union blue is far from ordinary. Seven months into the war, when homegrown boys and newly arrived immigrants are already fighting and dying for the Union, aren’t these Yankees late to the fight? Was the ship a floating Trojan horse full of invading rebels? Or perhaps a survivor of the “worst storm in years that struck the Atlantic Seaboard” just two weeks before, when “floodwaters swamped Newark, Manhattan and Newport[,] Rhode Island”?1
Not likely. It was clear this was no battered vessel; it was fitted out, sleek, and steady on the water. But to those who regularly scanned the shipping news columns published in the daily press, the impending arrival of the iron side-wheel steamship Champion, a star of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Atlantic and Pacific line, was no mystery.
And for the soldiers aboard, the truth was prosaic. The New York Evening Post trumpeted the “Arrival of Regulars from California bringing fifteen thousand stands of arms—Springfield rifles with a large amount of ammunition,” eight companies of the Third U.S. Artillery, and three of the Sixth Infantry regiments fresh from “occupying barracks at the Presidio and at Benecia [sic].”2
Many of those troops, the New York Herald announced, were “among the guardians of California soil.”3 Along with troops the Champion brought nearly $800,000 in gold specie. And glowering in the ship’s iron hold were three fractious prisoners of state. The journey from California to New York had been a grueling slog of twenty-four days. Leaving from San Francisco, the companies of the Third Artillery and Sixth Infantry Regiments had boarded the Orizaba, a trusty workhorse of a steamer that plied the Pacific from San Francisco to Panama City. Then came a five-hour journey on the six-year-old Panama Railroad, traveling forty-seven miles from Panama City on the Pacific Coast across the isthmus to Aspinwall. It was a very good road and a beautiful but slow trip in cars with cane seats and wooden blinds instead of windows. Depending on conditions, however, some travelers might notice only that the way was full of violent curves, pestiferous marsh, and tangled forest before reaching Aspinwall, where finally the passengers boarded the Champion.
Although the vessel was only three years old, it was “the first iron steamship ever built in the United States.”4 At 1,850 tons, 250 feet long, and built to carry more than seven hundred passengers, the Champion was reputed to be little more than a seagoing cesspool, with “tainted meat, dirty tablecloths and sheets, a lack of bathrooms or spittoons,” in addition to filthy upper cabins, the stench of offal wafting from steerage, and ill-mannered service.5 Finally, after twenty-four days at sea, the steamer crossed the bar of Sandy Hook, a series of shoals running roughly south from Long Island to the northern tip of New Jersey and separating New York Harbor from the deep waters of the Atlantic. The Champion chugged into the harbor, the hum and thrum of its engines growing louder as it passed the sloops, packets, and other steamers hovering or berthing.
Among the five hundred officers and privates recorded on the Champion’s manifest by Shipmaster David Wilson is newly minted Capt. William Andrew Winder of the Third U.S. Artillery, the commander of Company M.6
Born on December 3, 1823, in Baltimore, William A. in 1861 is thirty-eight and a seasoned soldier honed and hardened by army service throughout the country. When the Civil War began he was a first lieutenant stationed at Alcatraz, a rocky, fog-shrouded outpost-turned–federal fort a mile and a half from shore in the Bay of San Francisco, where news of the bombardment of Fort Sumter arrived twelve days after the historic onslaught. With mostly army deserters and miscreants jailed at Alcatraz, Captain Winder’s transfer to the front was a prized and welcome assignment. Although more than ready to fight the rebels, he will be forced to wage a very different kind of war. His loyalty and his very honor will be tried and tested. So if he is at first a blurred image, frozen and faceless in the frames of an old stereoscope viewer—a soldier among many soldiers amassed on the ship’s deck—he will come into bold relief, for this is his story.
Now, as the long-awaited sight of Manhattan comes into view, Captain Winder must summon his men. No matter their rank or station, they are a brotherhood forever bonded by a disaster at sea that had decimated their ranks. Many members of the Third Artillery “comprise the survivors of the regiment,” the New York Evening Post reported, “nearly all the remainder of which were lost” when the steamer San Francisco pitched headlong into a hurricane in the mid-Atlantic on her maiden voyage in December 1853.7
Aboard that doomed vessel, performing heroically as the crippled ship drifted for fourteen days, was young 2nd Lt. William A. Winder. As he frantically bailed water from the hold while huge waves swallowed the upper deck and washed two hundred comrades away, he tended to those stricken with cholera, as time and again three would-be rescue ships tried but could not breach the turgid waters. Finally, when help did arrive, the ship had become a “floating coffin.”8 William A. Winder’s heroic efforts earned him and other shipmates—including his cousin, 1st Lt. Charles Sidney Winder—official commendations for bravery from their native state of Maryland. The wreck shattered William A. with the tragedy of many lives lost, passengers and soldiers alike, and, as he later recounted, it resurrected his own personal trauma of having nearly drowned as a small child. “I have met several times with serious accidents on water,” he recalled. “I have never gotten over my nervousness.” He nevertheless faced those furious gales and always found land. Now, eight years after the loss of the San Francisco, on this calm, crisp November morning as the Champion glides along the glassine waters of the New York Harbor and noses into the dock, perhaps he does not yet see the darkening skies, the coming of a very different kind of storm that will forever change his life.9
But for now, as the Champion is finally docked in the harbor, to enliven the weariest of voyagers there is music as the regimental drummers strike up the brass bands. Feet tapping, a patriotic song or two, amid nods and good-byes to the soldiers who will wait aboard the ship to see everyone safely ashore, witness the civilian passengers as they leave the ship. There are wealthy, high-hatted gents and silk-clad ladies and their servants from the cabin class. From steerage come the laborers, immigrants, and laundry workers. And emerging from the hold under guard are three belligerent California prominenti detained by Gen. Edwin Vose “Bullhead” Sumner, who had replaced Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston as commander of the Department of the Pacific when the latter had resigned to serve the Confederacy. Determined to save California from being another divided state, Sumner demanded that “the troops hold their [Union] positions” and concentrate on rooting out disloyal citizens.10 Just relieved of his command of the Department of the Pacific by his own brother-in-law, Gen. George Wright, Sumner was eager to join Gen. George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. Not the least of his missions that day was to deliver his prisoners to Union authorities. They were “former California senator William Gwin, attorney and state senator Joseph Lancaster Brent[,] and San Francisco government attorney Calhoun Benham.”11 These well-known California Copperheads (or Peace Democrats sympathetic to the Confederate cause) were “men whose secession leanings were so strong that they felt they had to leave for the Confederacy.”12
On December 2, 1861, these men were “granted a parole by an official at Fort Hamilton in New York Harbor” after pledging not to act against the Union in any way.13 “Whereas Gwin remained a private citizen throughout the war, Brent and Benham both became Confederate officers, Brent rising to the rank of brigadier general.”14 Although Gwin, Brent, and Benham would “be placed on Governor’s Island, to await the order of Government,” had they been able to flee their captors and melt into Manhattan, a divided borough that once “boldly flirted with leaving the Union,” they would have found sympathy, if not the means to escape to the Confederacy.15
Afoot and prospering in the staunchly Democratic city are cotton brokers fattened by longtime trade with the South, as well as Copperheads led by Democratic mayor Fernando Wood, who favored the secession of Manhattan early in the war. The mayor’s stance underscored a belief that “slavery wasn’t so much a moral as an economic necessity.” In his view the city “made its reputation—and the lion’s share of its revenues—by supplying goods and services to the slave South,” and it stubbornly continued to hold itself apart from the rest of the Union. In part because Mayor Wood’s brother Benjamin owned the New York Daily News, the widely read anti-Lincoln mouthpiece that the mayor had gifted to his sibling, the newspaper ginned up like-minded readers.16
And of course there was William Magear “Boss” Tweed’s Tammany Hall political machine. Democratic in theory but not practice, Boss Tweed’s machine ruled the city. In spite of other voices, such as Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, which urged Union troops to take Richmond and end the war, bribery, corruption, and intimidation held sway above all else. But for Capt. William A. Winder, hearing the joyful cries of mothers, brothers, fathers, and children rushing to embrace loved ones as the regiments muster and prepare to march up Broadway, there would not be a single blood relation to welcome him home. Most of them had “gone over to the dragons,” as New York City diarist and fervent Union loyalist George Templeton Strong wrote, damning those who’d turned tail, turned traitor, and swarmed south.17
Driven by Lincoln’s election on November 6, 1860, further irritating already inflamed sensibilities, ignoring the president’s pleas to “rely on the better angels of our nature,” and further enraged by his promise to contain the spread of slavery, uncountable numbers began massing in Richmond to swear loyalty to the newly formed Confederacy. Among them was the Winder clan.18
First to go was Capt. William A. Winder’s cousin, Capt. Charles Sidney Winder, who had left the Third Artillery on April 1, eleven days before war was declared. On April 21 William A.’s father, Maj. John H. Winder, a hard-handed martinet with more than thirty-eight years of service in the U.S. Army, resigned his commission and went to the Confederate capital at Richmond. John H. Winder’s second son, William Sidney Winder—known as “Sidney” or “Sid”—and another cousin, Richard Bayley Winder, joined John there. John H. Winder’s third son, John Cox Winder, an engineer before the war, was first a Confederate captain, then a major “placed in command of Company A, Second Engineers,” at North Carolina’s Fort Fisher.19
Noting John H. Winder’s arrival in Richmond, the War Department clerk and diarist John Beauchamp Jones took an immediate dislike to the “stout gray-haired old man from Maryland applying to be a general, . . . the son of the General Winder whose command in the last war with England unfortunately permitted the City of Washington to fall in the hands of the enemy.”20
It was true that Gen. William Henry Winder’s failure to hold the lines at the Battle of Bladensburg, Maryland, during the War of 1812 and his inability to prevent his troops from throwing down their weapons and running from enemy rocket fire allowed the British an undefended and unobstructed path across the Potomac into Washington. They sacked and burned buildings until they reached the White House, setting it afire. The “Bladensburg Races,” as the American rout was derisively termed, nearly caused the demise of an infant nation, and the defeat made Gen. William Henry Winder an object of scorn and suspicion and led to his being court-martialed. Although cleared, his army career was over and his reputation in tatters. His biographer notes that even his closest friends felt it necessary to refer to Winder as ‘that most unfortunate general’ of the war of 1812.”21 This was a humiliation for all the Winders, including the disgraced general’s namesake son William H. and his brother Charles H., but especially John H., who like his father was a soldier and who wanted desperately to restore honor to the family name by serving a cause the Confederate president deemed “just and holy.”22
Born in Maryland on February 21, 1800, at Rewston plantation in Nanticoke (present-day Wicomico County, originally part of Somerset and Worcester Counties), John H. Winder was from a storied, patrician Maryland family boasting of judges, generals, lawyers, and a governor. He was a West Pointer, veteran Indian fighter with notable service in the Mexican War, a failed plantation master, and ultimately a peripatetic Third Artillery officer unable to rise above the rank of major in the U.S. Army. At sixty-one, too old to fight and too fired up not to, he was promoted to the much-coveted position of brigadier general in Richmond on June 21. Rumor had it that his old friend Confederate president Jefferson Davis had succumbed to his constant petitions, finally awarding Winder his first assignment as inspector general of the camps, a position that made him “responsible for overseeing the fitting out of soldiers for field duty . . . handling discharges, returned deserters and medical care for sick and wounded soldiers.”23 Six months later Winder “was given command of the Department of Henrico.” On March 1, 1862, he received his next post, as “commander of the Federal prisoners in Richmond . . . and Danville,” and it gave him sweeping powers.24
John H. Winder, the man who would come to be known as the “formidable dictator of the Capital,” would see his career reborn in Richmond.25
John H. Winder’s reign of terror began when, with a growing reputation for brutality to Union prisoners as well as his own people, he hunted down and incarcerated those suspected of disloyalty to the Confederacy—anyone deemed a threat to the government. Part of the crackdown on Richmond citizenry was first made possible by an earlier product of the Confederate Congress: “An act respecting Alien Enemies.” Pres. Jefferson Davis had proclaimed, “I do hereby warn and require every male citizen of the United States” over the age of fourteen and “now within the Confederate States” that if they should “adhere to the Government of the United States” and “not declare themselves a citizen of the Confederate States, they must depart from the Confederate States within forty days or will be treated as alien enemies.” Worse, if any alien left the Confederacy and returned to the United States (i.e., Union territory), they “shall be regarded and treated as an alien enemy” and, if made prisoner, would be turned over “to the nearest military authority, to be dealt with as a spy or [a] prisoner of war.”26
With this dictate many innocents, suspected spies, and underground Unionists were later rounded up and jailed by Winder’s much-feared “force of civilian detectives,” composed of petty larceny detectives from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. Known as “plug-uglies,” they were given free rein and “interfered intolerably with citizens going about their lawful business.”27
With illegal arrests and the eventual suspension of habeas corpus when martial law was enacted, the fears of Winder’s police state becoming a harsh reality, and the price of food and dry goods skyrocketing, Winder’s biographer writes, “Richmond was a rather grim place . . . and Winder was blamed for much of the despair.”28
William A., the last of the Winders left in the Union Army over this long winter of 1861–62, must have known that in spite of the “dragons” that summoned most of his family, surely there was comfort in knowing that his wife, Abby, and eleven-year-old son, Willie, might soon join him in Washington. Would the reunion be bittersweet or bitter? He was a Winder, after all. His beautiful, musical, and extremely competent wife—they’d married on December 24, 1850, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—was well aware of his family’s disloyalty. Perhaps she feared that her husband might be torn and tested by their defection and that their son might be ridiculed or worse by the stolid and solid residents of her home state—most if not all had voted for Abraham Lincoln. Abby’s father was former New Hampshire governor Ichabod Goodwin, a Unitarian, abolitionist, and passionate Lincoln man. As soon as war was declared and Lincoln had sent out the call for “seventy-five thousand volunteer militiamen to fight for the Union for a period of just ninety days . . . [Goodwin] set up recruiting offices throughout the state.” Volunteers—more than two thousand men streamed in—eventually made up the First and Second Regiments of New Hampshire. “Fighting Governor Goodwin,” who at first funded the regiments with personal and borrowed funds, thrilled to the sight of Union flags everywhere he looked.29
With William A.’s blood kin rooted deep in the Confederacy, his father-in-law positioned as the sworn enemy of those kin, and William A. himself now squarely at the seat of war in Washington, he surely looked back to the days of dread before the war began, when it seemed he might remain at the front. Possibly with his consent, Ichabod Goodwin and his daughter had decided to pursue a position for William A. as a paymaster with the Union Army. It was a plum job. Only a few were awarded the post, which required appointment by the president. At a salary of eighty dollars a month and the rank of major, paymasters traveled with the troops to the front, where they set up in mobile tent offices to disburse pay to the soldiers. Although armed, they would not be fighting with the troops unless dire conditions required their support; surprise attacks, friendly fire, or unforeseen emergencies could require a paymaster to raise his weapon. Surely the Goodwin clan would have discussed William A.’s plight with him in person or by mail. Would he too bolt south or would he turn his back on the Winders to remain with the Union? What would he choose to be—a paymaster or an artillery officer in the bloody chaos sure to come? On April 11, one day before the firing on Fort Sumter, the New Hampshire Sentinel reported, “Percival Pope of this state has been appointed a second Lieutenant and Captain Winder, a Paymaster in the army.”30 This article made it seem that William A.’s position was a fait accompli. It was not.
Two months later, on June 24, 1861, Ichabod Goodwin wrote to President Lincoln from Portsmouth, New Hampshire: “My daughter . . . wife of Lieut. W. A. Winder [Goodwin was not yet aware of his son-in-law’s promotion to captain] . . . goes to Washington in behalf of her husband, asking that he may be appointed a Paymaster. . . . Mr. Winder has seen much service, had been stationed for . . . years in California. He is a native of Maryland and has passed most of his life in the states that are True as himself to the Union. This is the only favor I have asked for one of my immediate family, or connection, and hope it may be granted.” Soon came an answer to Ichabod Goodwin’s request that President Lincoln appoint his son-in-law paymaster—a one-page quarto endorsement signed “A. Lincoln” and penned vertically on the integral leaf of the June 24 letter signed by Ichabod Goodwin and addressed to Lincoln. The president replied, “I have written some letters or notes in behalf of persons as Paymasters in the Army. . . . I am entirely willing for Capt. William A. Winder of Maryland, [to] be appointed a Paymaster in the Army.”31
Although Lincoln appeared willing to make the appointment, Abby, not waiting for an official answer, went straight to Washington to lobby for the post. For two weeks she went about the city vouching for her husband’s loyalty and urging someone, anyone in authority to grant him a paymaster’s job. If in fact the appointment came while William A. was in California, communication with the West Coast was spotty at best. Letters and newspapers took three to four weeks by ship and, depending on weather and road conditions, three to four months overland. And then, in a seeming miracle of wire and engineering, of splicing and connecting, on October 25, 1861, a long-awaited telegraph line finally connected New York and San Francisco. Imagine the thrill as the first message crackled through the wires, then raced from telegraph offices on opposite sides of the country to both cities’ mayors. San Francisco mayor H. F. Teschemacher rejoiced: “San Francisco to New York sends greetings and congratulates her on the completion of the enterprise which connects the Pacific with the Atlantic. May the prosperity of both cities be increased, and the projectors of this important work meet with honor and reward.”32
There was little honor and certainly no reward for Captain Winder, however, in spite of his intrepid wife and devoted father-in-law’s efforts, for treason roosted on the home front.
William A.’s civilian uncle, attorney Charles H. Winder, a fifty-two-year-old “citizen of Washington of notoriously disloyal character,” was arrested on September 9 by the Union Army provost marshal, Gen. Andrew Porter, for having “a quantity of disloyal correspondence from him to his brother William H. Winder of Philadelphia.”33
The same day Charles Winder was arrested he was “examined and questioned” at the provost marshal’s office by E. J. Allen, the wartime alias of Detective Allan Pinkerton, head of Gen. George McClellan’s secret service. Although E. J. Allen’s true identity was not revealed to Charles H. Winder at the time of his interrogation, his critical part in the evolving drama of William A.’s time in Washington City will be fully illuminated in the following chapter.
Notable are some excerpts from the transcript of the questions Allen asked Charles H. Winder. Notable are the answers he gave. For example, Allen asked, “Do you know, Mr. Winder, on what charge you are brought here?” Winder answered in all innocence, “I have not the remotest idea.” Perhaps he guessed it was because of a “violent discussion about the war” he had had with an unnamed Englishman when he loudly declared, “I am all for the South from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet.” He denied he’d done “anything against the North,” and although he admitted he would “like to serve my people in the south,” and if he did he would do it “openly and aboveboard,” he added—and one can imagine a raised voice, a verbal shot at the Yankee interrogator—“I would fight you to the death if I had the power.” After more questioning he admitted, “I am acquainted with a large number of officers in the Southern Army. General John H. Winder is my brother.” And with this came the following: “I have not corresponded with any of them since the war commenced.”34
In fact Charles H. Winder had written to his brother John H. Winder on August 20, 1861, five months after the war began. In that letter he reported that one Dr. Edward Taylor desires “to be absolved from his parole,” as he had been captured in Richmond. In addition Charles H. tells his brother that William A.’s wife “Abby left here a few days ago,” after trying to get her husband a paymaster’s job: “Wm. still in California his object was to get a paymaster’s appointment.” This letter would have been deemed treasonous—any letter written from the North to the South, particularly to a Confederate officer, was forbidden, and Charles H. Winder could have been charged with far more than defiant secessionist proclivities.35
In addition to E. J. Allen’s interrogation of Charles H. Winder on September 9, excerpts of letters Charles H. wrote to his brother William H. before and just after the war began were seized. Describing his unyielding devotion to the Confederate cause and bemoaning the “military garrison” that was Washington, on April 17 Charles H. wrote, “I know we are better organized, that in the coming contest we are more than a match for them. . . . When I say ‘we’ I mean the Confederate States.” There were many letters and many sentiments like this in his correspondence to his brother, as well as to men of growing prominence in Richmond.36
One of several depositions made against Charles H. Winder the day after his arrest on September 10 was that of his neighbor George Theodore McGlue: “I have had conversations with C. H. Winder frequently, and from the language used I have regarded him as a violent secessionist and enemy of the Union. He said he was in favor of Jeff Davis and that he’d be damned if Lincoln would ever be inaugurated in the city.”37 On the same day one W. H. Parker swore that Charles H. Winder was “receiving dispatches from Richmond stating that Jefferson Davis was not dead but that he was present at the opening of Congress by the Rebels.” When Charles H. Winder offered to show Parker the dispatch, “I declined seeing it,” Parker stated.38
Surprisingly Charles H. Winder was released on a conditional parole on October 15, carefully watched, and warned, as noted in a letter of November 30 from Secretary of State William H. Seward to the provost marshal, Gen. Andrew Porter: “General: Mr. Charles H. Winder’s parole which expires on December 1 may be extended for sixty days further, but it is indispensably necessary that he should abstain from political conversation. He has already been reported to me as publicly expressing treasonable sentiments within the past month. It will not be in my power [sic] this exemption from confinement if he does not himself co-operate in the regulations prescribed. Very respectfully, your obedient servant, William H. Seward.”39
Charles H. Winder cooperated. His brother did not. William H. Winder, an extremely wealthy Maryland-born Philadelphia attorney and correspondent for the New York Daily News—a well-known anti-Lincoln publication—was arrested in Philadelphia on September 11. At fifty-three, the bold, successful William H. Winder never hid his southern sentiments and dared government authorities to arrest him. A warrant was issued: “War Department, Washington, September 11, 1861. William Millward, U.S. Marshal, Philadelphia: You are directed to arrest William H. Winder and transfer him to the charge of Col. Martin Burke at Fort Lafayette. Simon Cameron, Secretary of War.”40
On the same day, U.S. Attorney George A. Coffey wrote to Secretary of War Simon Cameron: “William H. Winder, of this city, has been arrested for treasonable correspondence with rebel officers in obedience to a dispatch sent on from Provost-Marshal General Porter. We find scores of letters in Winder’s possession to and from many traitors—Breckinridge, Burnett, Vallandigham, Halleck, of the Journal of Commerce, etc.,” noting that “he has destroyed or concealed the letters from his brother, Charles Winder, of Washington.” Even more damning was an accusation that “Charles Winder and William H. Winder knew of the intention and plan of taking Washington last April. Please order the marshal of this district at once to take William H. Winder to Fort Lafayette. He is a constant conspirator and should not be at large.”41
By September 13 the constant conspirator was an inmate at Fort Lafayette, a military prison “built on a small rock Island lying in the narrows between the lower end of Staten Island and [L]ong Island.” William H. Winder was housed behind twenty-five- to thirty-foot walls, “with outdoor exercise limited.” It was a place where the “foul water” (when water was available at all) was contaminated by dirt and bacteria. The notoriously bad food—“fat pork and beans, a cup of thin soup and undrinkable coffee . . . bread on alternate days”—must have been a great shock to the gentleman lawyer.42
Defiant from the moment he arrived, locked into a dark and damp cell, William H. Winder wrote copious correspondence protesting his incarceration and the seizure of his papers, said to contain treasonous correspondence. Although he had expressed sympathy with the rebellion publicly and on paper, he claimed he had never regularly corresponded with his brother the Confederate general, John H. Winder, after the war began. (This may or may not have been true since all his correspondence was seized by the authorities, deemed treasonous, and lost or suppressed during and after his incarceration.)
Yet on the morning of November 16, while his uncle William H. sat fuming and unrepentant in prison, Union captain William A., in spite of the sure knowledge he had of the recent arrests of his uncles and with angry government authorities wary and watching, marched in orderly lockstep with a portion of the Third Artillery and Sixth Infantry. As crowds cheered, they paraded up Broadway to the accompaniment of a “full and splendid band.” Hurrah the soldiers, hurrah! But who were they, exactly? The New York Herald gave a shaky and befuddled glad-hand to the event: “Nobody knew what regiment it was, where it came from, or whither it was going,” but the Herald’s readers were assured that the men were “a double compliment to our national pride and to the drill and discipline of our gallant volunteers.”43 In a bit of a fog as well, the New York Commercial Advertiser reporter stated, “It is not known to what duty they will be assigned.” However, the journalist noted that they “were all well-drilled men,” as some had “stripes on their arms denot[ing] having served twenty years.”44
It was “a rare and most brilliant sight,” the New York Evening Post gushed.45
After the glittering parade the troops were to remove to their temporary barracks in City Hall Park until called to the front. The Union-loyal New York Times expected a “better use for them occurring nearer home.”46 What better use might lie in store for William Andrew Winder, as he leaves the barracks and boards a steamer traveling down the coast, around Hampton Roads, into the Chesapeake Bay, and up the Potomac River to Washington City? On this November morning, with California and sea disasters a world away, he leaves a place where being a Winder is tinged with peril. He is adrift with no compass and no guide.