Washington City, the once-sleepy southern town that Capt. William A. Winder had known, was now seething, pestiferous, and paranoid. With his uncle, Charles H. Winder, recently paroled and under close observation, William A. now navigates a much-changed landscape. Throughout the city are hospitals teeming with mutilated, weakened, and diseased troops. The lists of the sick and wounded, nameless and simply numbered according to the hospitals that care for them, were a tally of men who came stumbling or borne by litter from many regiments: New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New Jersey, to name a few.1
For those hungry for distractions and guffaws, Canterbury Hall advertised “Frank Bower, The Chief Impersonator of the Happy Darky,” and King’s National Circus announced “Ella Zoyara, the sensationalist,” who promised breathtaking acts.2
Spreading comfort and doses of venereal disease to fresh recruits far from home were the prostitutes swarming Union camps. Hidden among sedate mansions and throughout the infamous Swampoodle District were brothels doing booming business. Should infection occur from these romps, fear not—an ad in the Evening Star consoles, “Dr. Johnston will cure all diseases of imprudence” and warns those waking to sexual arousal of the “terrible disorders arising from solitary habits of youth.”3
And with many city streets so muddy, so fetid and marshy that typhoid fever is borne through canals polluted by rotting army mules, offal, defective plumbing, and filthy drinking water, the disease is rampant. Worse, heavy rains have so flooded the Potomac River that it “washed downstream the uniformed corpses of Federal soldiers who had died weeks earlier, in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, thirty-four miles above Washington.”4
Rebel and Yankee spies prowl across the Potomac as a Confederate invasion is looming. All loyal Union eyes turn to the strutting, magnetic, and notably bigoted Gen. George Brinton McClellan, chief of all Union forces. President Lincoln had appointed him to that top post on November 1. It is worth a look at a few passages from McClellan’s copious, intimate, gossipy, and often shocking letters to his wife and confidant, Mary Ellen. He complained that he found the “Army just about as much disorganized as was the Army of the Potomac [when he was overall commander] . . . no system, no order—perfect chaos.” He assures her (and himself) that “I can and will reduce it to order. I will soon have it working smoothly,” but he almost immediately contracted typhoid fever, thus halting the prospect of the winter offenses so longed for by Lincoln.5
“The original gorilla,” McClellan called the president of the United States in one of the numerous letters in which he viciously denigrated the commander in chief. “What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now!”6
In a letter to his friend Samuel M. Barlow about Lincoln’s views on what he termed the “nigger question” and about his own belief that the war should not be about the abolition of slavery, McClellan wrote, “I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union—and no other issue. . . . Help me to dodge the nigger—we want nothing to do with him.”7
In spite of McClellan’s personal stances—at times he appeared to be a closeted foe of the Union—roundups of Confederate sympathizers, the seditious enemy within, increased daily.
More than determined to root out such traitors was the detective Allan Pinkerton, aka E. J. Allen, a wily Scot and devout abolitionist with views antithetical to McClellan’s. He had lately been summoned to be the head of the new secret service department. Pinkerton’s reputation as a Chicago detective and former head of the secret service for McClellan’s previous command, the Department of the Ohio, and most of all his great admiration for the president made his appointment a personal honor, a feather in his already well feathered cap. During the “Secessionist winter,” a term often used by historians to refer to the time between Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and his inauguration on March 4, 1861, Pinkerton swore he’d saved the life of the president-elect when conspirators threatened to assassinate him in Baltimore as he traveled from Springfield, Illinois, on his whistle-stop tour that would take him to Washington.8
Pinkerton and his operatives Timothy Webster and Hattie Lewis, dubbed “Hattie Lawton” by Pinkerton in his book The Spy of the Rebellion, had embedded in Perrymansville, Maryland, and Baltimore to uncover secessionists. Pinkerton now decided that the threat to Lincoln was real, and he later determined that Lincoln was to be ambushed at Baltimore’s Calvert Street depot by rabid would-be assassins who had vowed the president-elect would not live to see his inauguration. Lincoln, traveling from Springfield, Illinois, toward Washington, received the alert in Pennsylvania and reluctantly agreed to don a disguise—a cap and shawl. He was secreted in a “special train” with Pinkerton, Ward H. Lamon (Lincoln’s bodyguard), and Kate Warne (the head of Pinkerton’s female detective agency). After “determining . . . that the telegraph wires which connected Harrisburg” should be cut, Pinkerton later wrote, “the sleeping car . . . drawn by horses” whisked Lincoln safely through Baltimore to the Willard Hotel in Washington City. Some historians believe that this plot never existed (this author joins those who are convinced there is ample reason to assume the particulars are true), as Maryland’s virulent secessionists throughout the city and Lincoln’s refusal to let the state join the Confederacy are indisputable. According to Pinkerton, it was his warning to the newly elected chief executive, as well as his cloak-and-dagger operation to save his life, that helped to enhance Pinkerton’s reputation, at least for a time.9
Soon after, McClellan gave the detective a plum assignment.
“By my own preference, as well as at his request, I accompanied him (McClellan) to Washington,” Pinkerton wrote. “Among the first things the General did . . . was to organize a secret service force under my management and control,” Pinkerton added, fully confident in the general’s promise that the war would be easily won—with his help.10
Witness the capture of one of Pinkerton’s earlier high-value targets on August 23, 1861: the sleek, black-eyed belle and Washington DC hostess Rose O’Neal Greenhow, the most cunning and beautiful rebel spy in Washington, nabbed by Pinkerton himself. At her home, with high-level government officials and Union officers calling at all hours of the night, breathless love notes, the letter W scrawled after utterances of undying passion (allegedly from the pen of Rep. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts), and Rose listening, memorizing, and then caching details of troop movements in her house, and in her courier’s hair, after her lovers had left—all this was happening a scant two blocks from the White House.
It was rumored that, secreted in the long tresses of Rose Greenhow’s courier, were battle plans sent straight to Confederate general Pierre Beauregard. The plans were said to detail Gen. Irvin McDowell’s troop movements and his strategy for a great rebel rout. But that plan did not pan out at the initial Battle of Bull Run on July 20, 1861, when Lincoln’s army suffered its first defeat. The humiliating skedaddle of Union troops after the battle was witnessed by celebratory picnickers perched on a ridge, providing a macabre entertainment for the champagne drinkers, cake sellers, sundries hawkers, and reporters eagerly penning details of the spectacle. As the war progressed and deaths piled up on both sides, the summer lark of that July soon turned to horror, as Bull Run was just the first of many bloodbaths. More defenses sprang up, and soldiers mustered and marched in a show that was sure to be spotted by the rebels through their spyglasses: the gleam of polished sabers, masses of blue uniforms not yet tattered or faded. It wasn’t just Pinkerton and his men who were on the job. Federal police, the provost marshal general’s forces, and State Department investigators were all certain that the innermost sanctums of the government had been infiltrated. The Washington National Republican newspaper helmed the hunt, seeking information on anyone “not true to the Union.”11
*
As both sides of the shattered nation waited for an outcome, William A. waited for his orders. At first securing a boardinghouse room at 231 F Street, he is no longer blurred but a sharp image: slender, of average height (“five foot eight and a half inches”), weighing 157 pounds; pale blue eyes, a trim beard, an “aquiline nose” that would droop and elongate as he aged; “round forehead, ordinary mouth, round chin, dark brown hair, healthy complexion and oval face.”12
If William A. were soon to receive orders to proceed with Company M to the front, he would say good-bye to his beloved wife and son by letter or in person, ask her to give his love and regards to her father, and tell her to wait for him until the war was over. Maybe he would secure the paymaster’s post or command his company in battles to come and fight his own relations if it came to that. Or die trying.
Perhaps he does not at first see the official dispatch as he combs through the mail he’s picked up on the way to his lodgings. Or perhaps, as was previously suggested, he had already received his orders by the time he arrived in Washington City but had had not time to reply. When a military man received an order, army protocol required a prompt reply. William A. wrote immediately to Brig. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the army. Like William A., Thomas is a Mexican War veteran and Indian fighter, a stern, silver-haired old soldier already at war with Edwin M. Stanton, soon to be secretary of war but now serving as legal advisor to the corrupt and corruptible present secretary of war, Simon Cameron. Because Stanton is waiting to step in, step over Cameron, and run the war department himself and because he does not think Thomas is capable or competent, the adjutant general’s future is uncertain. As is William A.’s. He must reply to the order. On November 22, 1861, he wrote, “I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of a letter from the honorable Secretary of War dated October 14, 1861 informing me of my promotion to a Captaincy in the 3rd regiment of artillery.” He then informed General Thomas, “I would respectfully state for your information . . . that I was transferred from my proper Company ‘I’ 3rd artillery now stationed at Alcatraces [sic] Island, Harbor of San Francisco, Cal, to Company ‘M’ and ordered to accompany the Battalion of the 3rd Artillery which left San Francisco for New York on the 21st of October by order of Brigadier General Sumner.”13
In fact portions of Company M did remain on the front, engaging in battles throughout the war. Notably, in 1862 Company M was at “Newbridge, Mechanicsville and Gaines Mill.”14
William A. asks the adjutant general if he has been assigned to the wrong company; he requests a delay until the situation is sorted out. He needs time and hopes there has been some great mistake. He waits and, unknown to him, while dining, sleeping, or walking about he is under constant surveillance. When Allan Pinkerton learned that yet another Winder had come to Washington, one of his priorities was to determine if this Winder could be trusted, for as Lincoln family friend Horatio Nelson Taft had written shortly before the war began, “Treason is rife in the city . . . we know not what a day may bring forth.”15
Of course Pinkerton was well aware of William A.’s uncle, Charles H., whom he had interrogated and who was living a few blocks away from his nephew’s boardinghouse at 168 North F Street. Pinkerton saw traitors everywhere: in the streets, in fancy hotels, across from the White House. And he vowed to find them all.
“I shall seek access to their houses, clubs and places of resort, managing that among the members of my force shall be ostensible representatives of every grade and society,” Pinkerton boasted, adding, “Some shall have entry to the gilded salon of the suspected aristocrat traitors, and be their honored guests, while others will act in the capacity of valets, or domestics of various kinds. . . . Other suspected ones will be tracked by the ‘Shadow’ detective, who will follow their every footstep, and note their every action.”16 No one would be safe. Not even a Union Army captain.
The days crawl along. By December 1, 1861, William A. is still alone in Washington, without an assignment and not knowing that he was under surveillance by Pinkerton’s “shadows.” He still doesn’t know if he is to remain with his company at the front or be sent back to California.
Also in early December President Lincoln delivered his State of the Union address to Congress, summing up the first year of war and the rebel insurgency that began it all. “A disloyal portion of the American people have during the whole year been engaged in an attempt to divide and destroy the Union,” he stated. His anguish was apparent as he alluded to and warned against a war with England: “A nation which endures factious domestic division is exposed to disrespect abroad, and one party, if not both, is sure sooner or later to invoke foreign intervention.” And then came a shot across the bow to France as well: “I am quite sure a sound argument could be made to show them [foreign nations] that they can reach their aim more readily and easily by aiding to crush this rebellion than by giving encouragement to it.”17
By December 3 McClellan’s artillery chief, William Farquhar Barry, had answered a request from Winder to delay his departure to California. Barry wrote to McClellan, referring to “Special Orders NO. 315, Hd quarters U.S. Army, November 27, 1861, Captain Winder, 3rd Arty to join his Co. in California. Captain Winder is now in command of 2 Companies 3rd Arty consolidated as a Battery now just being mounted, and with both of which there is only one other officer—a Lieutenant. Cannot Capt. Winder be permitted to remain here until the Capt. of these Companies expected on the next steamer from California arrives? Yours truly, William F. Barry.”18
William A., of course wished to remain in the East. He waited. The winter days grew longer and colder.
*
Some two hundred miles away, at the Confederate capital in Richmond, Virginia, snow is falling on Ligon’s Warehouse and Tobacco Factory at the corner of Twenty-Fifth and Main Streets. The incoming blizzard has dampened the already rotting rafters of the porous building. Gen. John H. Winder was busy confiscating and converting the rest of the tobacco warehouses: Harwood’s, Gwathmey’s, Palmer’s, Barret’s, Scott’s, Grant’s, and Smith’s. The reason the Confederate government took possession of those structures was to house Union POWs arriving by the hundreds on trains and wagons.19 Eventually the warehouses and other buildings would be known by archly grand names, in stark contrast to the dungeons they’d become: Castles Godwin and Thunder would house Union spies, soldiers, and political prisoners. Many of their inmates would never leave. More prisons were to come, bigger and better ones, for the South would pile up victory after victory. For that was the belief of many Richmond citizens, at least those who had not been jailed on false charges by General Winder’s detectives. He also employed a trusted courier who was tasked with carrying rebel mail and personal communications across enemy lines, from Richmond to Baltimore and the nation’s capital.
On the night of December 23 the courier slipped into the darkened streets of Washington City. He’d ridden hard and fast, avoiding the Yankee soldiers who guarded the bridges looking for anyone without a proper pass. On his way past President’s Park—a cluster of stately wood and marble buildings, including the Departments of War, State, Treasury, and the White House—a few idle Union soldiers, unlucky enough to pull an all-night, frostbitten shift on sentry duty, might raise a rifle or two, think better before committing to a chase, and grumble back to camp.
Making sure he wasn’t being followed, though only fools or harlots would be out on a frigid night like this, the courier rode on to his boss’s headquarters to deliver the correspondence he’d carried from Richmond. He would brief and be debriefed by Allan Pinkerton. The initials “T.W.” appear throughout Pinkerton’s field reports when referring to his esteemed spy, the pride of his detective force, “a man of great physical strength and endurance, skilled in all athletic sports and a good shot . . . whose boldness and ingenuity was of incalculable value to Union officers,” he wrote.20
At almost forty, Timothy Webster, an English immigrant turned proud American patriot, was tall and stocky, with wide-set gray eyes, a long, uneven nose twisted slightly to the right, and a high forehead with a spill of jet-black hair curling long at the neck. A brawler, a barrister, or zealous Confederate, depending on the mission, he was a different kind of soldier in Lincoln’s army, for he was waging a secret war in cellars, rebel camps, statehouses, saloons, and would-be assassins’ hotel rooms. This type of work was far preferable to his prewar career: nabbing crooks on the streets of Chicago. And it was far, far, preferable to a languid life with his faithful wife, Charlotte, in a cozy frame cottage in sleepy Onarga, Illinois. His “work behind enemy lines included multiple trips to the Confederate capital . . . acting as a courier for members of the Confederate army, and [he] received passes to cross enemy lines from the Confederate Secretary of War,” wrote Corey Recko, Webster’s biographer.21
According to another Pinkerton operative, Pryce Lewis, “Webster’s usual plan was to bring the rebel mail bag himself into the office of the Provost Marshall [sic] [Andrew Porter] where the letters, one by one, were steamed open, and read and a careful record kept of the important ones. Then they were sealed up again.”22
Always “successful at selling his cover and getting what he wanted,” Webster would cross Union lines, snaking through the thickets and byways of the southern Maryland outback, all the while watching for adverse weather conditions, available river crossings, and the vigilance of the enemy. He was at great risk of capture, for which the consequences would be dire.23
Although it is not known how Webster was dressed that frigid December night, he may have changed into the full-on garb of a Washington gentleman: a top hat, plumped and spun-straight in his hand, a fur-trimmed frock coat, the pockets basted shut to conceal dispatches, ebony-black leather riding boots, and a derringer resting in his right hip pocket. It was the look of a high-stepper out on the town or, if anyone asked, a late-night patron of fallen angels, the women of the red-light districts, sludge-filled and crime-ridden. Should his mission go as planned, he would unmask another traitor to the government of the United States.
Webster headed east, toward a row of townhouses packed cheek to jowl on a block so dark only a rider who knew the city like a blind man’s guide could find his way. Midnight, and the bone-chilling cold had shuttered the neighborhood. When war descended on the capital, dozens of Confederate spies, sympathizers, and saboteurs began arriving or were already in place; they were as much of a threat as the Confederate troops waiting for the first thaw to strike from across the Potomac in Virginia. In addition, a good number of businessmen, cotton brokers, and Southern families seeking proper comforts away from the cigar-choked hotels sheltered there.
It was at an innocuous, respectable location where Webster’s quarry, Capt. William A. Winder, had lodged as he anxiously waited for his future to be decided. Pinkerton, using his wartime alias “E. J. Allen,” wrote to General McClellan on December 27, 1861, detailing Webster’s encounter with William A.: “Captain Wm Winder of 3rd US Artillery [was found] at his residence or boardinghouse, on H. Street 296[,] Washington—kept by Mrs [Salome] Hutton, to which place he had been fully traced and with which . . . he had been permanently identified by a most thorough and rigorous ‘shadowing,’ with my operatives, from Nov. 30th to the 23rd . . . inclusive . . . and my operative saw Capt. Winder alone,” Pinkerton wrote.24
Picture Webster pausing before walking up the boardinghouse steps. With ready facts stored in his head, he will quickly remember his briefing and William A.’s service record in some detail, as though reading from an unseen page.
William Andrew Winder: civilian paymaster in the Mexican War; organizing a ragtag bunch of civilians to repulse an assault by Mexican soldiers at the Battle of Buena Vista; rewarded for bravery with a second lieutenancy in the Third Artillery in 1848; subsequently a first lieutenancy promotion. A soldier moving from post to post: Newport Barracks, Kentucky; Jefferson Barracks, Missouri; Fort Constitution, New Hampshire; Fort Preble, Maine; and Palatka, Florida, where he attempted to locate Seminole Indians after the Second Seminole War. Brilliant and practiced as Webster is, he cannot see the past—the younger William A. Winder fighting alligators and slogging through the swamps when most of the Seminole had been dislocated, fighting illness and leeches in an effort to find malingerers, never killing or injuring a single man, woman, or child. This man Webster could not know. But he did know that after the wreck of the San Francisco, William A. was sent to California, to the remote outback of San Diego, to the Mission San Diego de Alcalá, then detached to Fort Yuma, California, finally leaving from San Francisco, arriving in New York City to begin recruiting service for the army, then posted to Alcatraz. From there he came to New York on the Champion. That was the sum of the captain’s record, the sum of the soldier from whose possession Webster has been sent to determine William A.’s true loyalties and give verbal communications from his father, Confederate general John H. Winder.25
Going straight to Winder’s room, he announced himself. Webster gave his real name, not an alias. He used one when he needed to but often depended on his ability to transform at a moment’s notice. Given Webster’s practiced southern drawl and a curl of the lip, a hiss, or a curse at the mere mention of a hated Yank, he became a trusted courier for targeted secessionists, rebel officers (especially Gen. John H. Winder), their detectives, Confederate secretary of state Judah Benjamin, and Richmond’s elite; they all gave him letters, dispatches, packages, and medicine to transport. And now Webster, having gained admittance to William A.’s room, “fully satisfied the Captain of his entire reliability,” Pinkerton wrote, and then Webster gave an “account of his interview in Richmond with Genl. Winder (the Captain’s father.)” To further enhance his credibility, Webster spoke of the “great and essential aid,” he rendered to Winder’s close friend and bunkmate, a former Third U.S. Artillery assistant surgeon, Dr. James C. Herndon, when he deserted the U.S. Army shortly after the Champion docked in New York City. Webster told William A. Winder that he had “accompan[ied] Herndon in making his way to Virginia, by way of Leonardtown, Maryland.”26
Pinkerton related, in a later letter to General McClellan, the difficult and often dangerous route to Richmond from Washington that Webster had taken: “via Leonardtown, MD . . . crossed Potomac at Cobb Neck . . . to Cuckhold Creek . . . to Fredericksburg, Virginia” and on to Richmond.27
William A. would have known of Herndon’s desertion, but the fact that Webster presented a letter of introduction vouching for Webster (which Herndon had given to General Winder) and related the particulars of Herndon’s flight appeared to convince William A. that Webster was who he said he was: his father’s courier.
And there in the Pinkerton report was this, with italics for emphasis: “that he [General Winder] wished my operative to tell his son . . . that his father wished him to resign his commission if he could not find the means of certain escape by desertion, and come south.”28
And then came this demand: “that his Father had much rather he should resign and, if it must be so, lay in jail until the close of the war, or if it should be demanded, that he would rather his son should suffer death of the most ignominious character, than continue to hold his commission and be made to serve the United States in this War against the South.”29
Resign, be jailed, or die: this from a father to a son. And does William A., hearing his father’s orders, curse the day he became a soldier?
He was not the son his father wanted him to be. No, this kind, artistic boy who painted and sketched in light-studded lands when at his posts in California—or wherever he was—was this whelp who humiliated him by six failures to get into West Point from “1840 to 1845.”30
Even though the Winder name alone, his grandfather’s shame, and his father’s thuggish reputation among West Point’s cadets might have spoiled his chances, this son with a pressing need to study medicine and heal others, this son who slipped sideways into the Mexican War as a civilian paymaster and then trudged dutifully into the family business of warring, this son, the father demanded, must join the other Winders. Or desert, be jailed, or die.
What then must William A. say to this rebel courier who landed at his boardinghouse like an errant nighthawk? With the room filled by the unseen presence of his father, a small man in gaudy general’s garb, an old man with the power to singe a son from a distance of two hundred miles, was there a pause, an intake of breath until William A. told Webster what he knew his father wanted to hear?
“The Captain, further, told my operative that when he returned to Richmond,” Pinkerton wrote, he should tell his father that “all his sympathies were with the South, that his relations and all he held dear were there, and that if he had the means, he would go South the very first chance he could get,” that his father “might rest assured that he would never fight against the South . . . that he had met with General McClellan and had told the General his feelings, and had obtained from him the offer of returning to duty in California,” but that “his pay, as Captain in the United States Army, was his only means of support for his wife and son.”31
It is not difficult to imagine John H. Winder’s face purpling with rage when he heard this upon Webster’s return to Richmond. William A.’s father knew full well that his son had married into a wealthy and aristocratic New Hampshire family. The U.S. Army his only means of support? Of course his son would be salaried if he joined the Confederate forces and would likely be promoted to the rank of major, or even general. This excuse, this rationale must have been unbearable for General Winder. And yet there was more from William A., reported Pinkerton. “In no possible event would he draw his sword against the south,” Pinkerton stated, for William A. had indicated that he’d already sent his wife back to New Hampshire to join their son. “He would upon Webster’s return tell him what choice he had made” and “would be ready to leave for Virginia the first chance, as all his hopes and prayers were with the South.”32
So ended the interview, but not the final paragraphs of the report from Pinkerton to McClellan, which were replete with more emphasis, and if one views the original document, Pinkerton’s hard, angry scrawl builds, scorches, until we can almost see the outraged detective clamping down hard on his ever-present cigar, puffs of smoke filling the room, choking the air:
In Conclusion, General . . . I am not sufficiently acquanited [sic] with Military rules and law, to know if there be any power which can be exercised in the case of Captain Winder; but that a man, who, for bread and butter will continue to hold his commission and receive the pay from the country which has been his benefactor, while, at the same time, he intends to act the traitors part, can find no parallel short of Benedict Arnold, if indeed, his crime be not yet deeper dyed. . . . If there be no military rule far-reaching enough to touch his case, that at least, he be requested to subscribe to and swear allegiance to the Country, not that I have much confidence in the saving power of such an Oath . . . but for the purpose of testing whether Captain Winder will add perjury to the crime of Treason. I am, General, Your obet. Servt. E. J. Allen.33
The meeting ended. Webster rushed down the stairs of the boardinghouse and went straight to Pinkerton’s headquarters to report word for word his disturbing conclusions. He’d found yet another traitor: William A. Winder.
According to William A., however, after the courier departed, he immediately rode two blocks to the Department of State, roused a dozing clerk, and reported his late-night encounter. While no record of this report has been found, there is this: many years later he wrote a letter mentioning the incident to his old friend from his early Third Artillery days at Jefferson Barracks, Lt. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. “I was on various occasions called on by parties claiming to be spies of the Confederate Government who urged me to cross the lines with them. . . . After reporting one of these and finding no notice was taken of it . . . with suspicion visited on me,” Winder wrote, “I concluded that it was a plan to test my loyalty.” Worse, “all my applications for service in the field were rejected. . . . I called on the President, and after stating my case, which by the way he appeared to understand perfectly, [was] satisfied.”34
Although the Abraham Lincoln Papers in the Library of Congress are replete with daily logs of his appointments and chance meetings, no record of Winder’s visit has been found. The absence of such a record is probably not unusual as so many people came to the White House seeking pardons or favors, so it is very likely that William A. did make the visit he recalled. The visit might have assured President Lincoln that he could be trusted to defend the Union. Perhaps that was enough. Perhaps.
On December 27, the day Pinkerton wrote his furious missive to General McClellan, a clearly desperate William A. Winder also wrote to McClellan’s adjutant, Col. Albert V. Colburn, requesting a leave “rendered necessary by urgent personal business.” He wrote that he’d tried to see General McClellan “on this subject,” but he was “too unwell to receive me.” Winder indicated that he went to Secretary of War Cameron, who “told me he knew of no objection and advised me to see the Adjt. Gen. [Lorenzo Thomas]. This I was not at all disposed to do, as he is unfriendly to me. I therefore submit the application directly to the Commanding General.” This was a highly inappropriate and precipitous move, as Winder was breaching military protocol by going over Thomas’s head. When Thomas learned of this, according to William A., he told him he “will regret it.” This direct threat is foreboding, especially knowing that Winder’s perceived disloyalty might well reach McClellan. A new year was threatening, or beckoning.35
*
William A.’s movements in the first weeks of 1862—as he anxiously awaited what the army had in store for him—are unknown. The whereabouts of his uncle, William H. Winder, at the time are well documented. He had been transferred from Fort Lafayette to Fort Warren Prison, “a two Story pentagon shaped fortress of heavy granite built on Georges Island . . . at the entrance of Boston Harbor.”36
William H. Winder complained of the harsh durance, of having no chairs and “nothing but bare floors to lie on . . . some few perfectly raw hams, in the open air . . . were distributed, and some of the prisoners thus got something to eat.”37
But on January 11, during the fifth month of his incarceration, it seemed freedom was at hand. Assistant Secretary of State Frederick Seward sent an order to Fort Warren’s commandant, Col. Justin Dimick. “Let W. H. Winder be released on taking the Oath of Allegiance to the Government of the United States, stipulating that he will neither enter any of the states in insurrection against the United States,” Seward wrote, “nor hold any correspondence with persons residing in those states” and do nothing “hostile” while at liberty.38
On January 14 William H. Winder wrote, “I was offered release on condition of taking the oath of allegiance.”39 In extremis and fearing he might fall victim to a typhoid epidemic sweeping the prison, he listened to the moans of the dying and the infernal grinding of the single pump that furnished water for the entire population; he could barely hear the words of the guard or read the paper they thrust at him through the bars of his cell. Freedom is yours, they told Winder—his once round face thinned and hardened by months of confinement—freedom will be imminent if, and only if, he’d finally swear loyalty to the United States of America.
He refused. Clearly outraged, Assistant Secretary of State Frederick Seward, informed of this refusal, wrote to Colonel Dimick:
Department of State, Washington, January 17, 1862.
Col. Justin Dimick, Fort Warren, Boston
Colonel: Your letter of the 15th instant reporting that William H. Winder refuses to take the oath of allegiance has been received. In reply I have to request that you hold Winder in custody till further orders from this Department.
I am, sir, very respectfully your obedient servant,
F. W. Seward, Assistant Secretary40
William H. would subsist on raw ham and soda crackers if he had to, as that was common fare. He’d write again to his brother Charles in Washington, and to the newspapers, damning Lincoln, the Union, and the abolitionists as “lunatics with Negro on the brain.”41 With no stove nearby, and no fire to stoke, he’d keep writing. It warmed him to write.
*
In Washington, his brother Charles H. Winder was taking an oath and making promises he was loath to keep. But unlike his brother, he is conditionally free.
WASHINGTON, February 1, 1862.
I, Charles H. Winder, of the city of Washington, D. C., do voluntarily agree and pledge myself in having this my parole extended to honorably fulfill the stipulations hereinafter set forth, to wit: That during the existence of the present rebellion I will not visit any insurrectionary State or Territory without permission from the Secretary of State and that I will not render to the enemies of the Federal Government any aid, comfort or information of any nature whatever. It is hereby understood that this parole extends until the 1st day of March 1862, upon which day I will report myself at the office of the provost-marshal of this District.42
As for William A. Winder, by January 14 it seemed that word of his meeting with Timothy Webster and Pinkerton’s furious letter to McClellan had reached Assistant Secretary of State Frederick Seward’s desk.
Department of State, Washington, January 14th, 1862
Brig. Gen. Andrew Porter, Provost Marshal, Washington
General: I inclose [sic] herewith and invite your attention to a memorandum laid before the Department relative to one Captain Winder, a son of the insurgent General John H. Winder, who it is alleged has given utterance to expressions that place him under strong suspicions of disloyalty. Will you please cause inquiries to be made into the matter and adopt such proceedings as in your judgment are proper and report to this Department.
I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
F. W. Seward
Assistant Secretary43
It is unclear as to whether General Porter acted on this alarming memo, as by January 15 President Lincoln had appointed Edwin McMasters Stanton to be the new secretary of war. It is entirely possible that during this transition, for Stanton did not officially take up his position until January 20, the Seward-to-Porter correspondence went astray amid the bureaucratic tangle of orders and documents transferred between the Departments of State and War. Perhaps government authorities—hugely distracted by the capture at sea of James M. Mason and John Slidell, two Confederate diplomats on their way to London, in the so-called Trent Affair that nearly led the United States into a war with Britain—dropped the allegations against William A. If there was to be any future action taken against him, the U.S. Army had perhaps unwittingly removed the threat to him for the time being. Or so it seemed.
*
On January 21 the Champion left New York City for California. Among the many passengers facing the arduous voyage was a family of three: a husband, his wife, and their eleven-year-old son—the William A. Winder family. As the buildings and spires of New York fade into the distance, no doubt young Willie is thrilled at his first sea voyage, his new adventure, for he has been a protected child tucked under the wings of a large adoring family, the son of a father who loves him but must spend months and years away from home. His mother is leaving her family’s mansion on Islington Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where she is the eldest and most relied-upon child of her parents. She is leaving her father, Ichabod Goodwin, her mother, Sarah, her sisters Hope, Sadie, Georgette, and Susie, and her brother, Frank, to stay by her husband’s side. She is sacrificing everything to live among uniformed strangers, to go to this far-flung place. This is not what she planned. Her husband might have been a paymaster, close to home or at the front. Not a combat soldier, but holding an important position with the Union Army where even as a paymaster—he was a trained soldier after all—he would be in uniform and ready to fight should an attack come. Nothing had come of her effort to get him a good position. She had tried to help. At least now they were together. On a ship. Off to war. What then?
The Champion docks at Aspinwall and will return to New York. Its passengers must board a train across the isthmus to Panama City. All was not quiet there. Riots and a major fight were going on between the militia and the police. Willie Winder, so far from anything familiar, might have thrilled to or perhaps feared this part of the long journey. At Panama City the steamer Orizaba was waiting in dock for the railroad passengers to come aboard. By February 15 the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin was reporting “Capt. Wender [sic] & family” were on the Orizaba passenger list.44
Ahead is Alcatraz, their destination. Company D was William A.’s command. In spite of all his efforts to prove that he belonged on the front and his interview with President Lincoln during which he vowed that he could be trusted, he is after all and will always be a Winder. Absent real proof that he was a traitor to the Union, the order that sent him to California was clear. But who issued the order? An article in the Milwaukee Sentinel on April 12, 1889, reported, “During the Civil War he [William A.] was desirous of going to the front, but fell under suspicion of disloyalty because his father was Gen. Winder, an officer in the Confederate Army. Although President Lincoln was satisfied upon the assurances of (Captain) Winder as to his loyalty, Secretary Stanton insisted on his being sent to California.”45
Stanton did not officially become secretary of war until January 20, 1862. Until then he had been legal advisor to the outgoing secretary of war, Simon Cameron. However, Stanton was notorious for investigating and prosecuting Union officers whom he suspected of having ties to the South. So who did order William A. to Alcatraz? Follow-up correspondence from Pinkerton to McClellan, written on January 24, is filled with Pinkerton’s complex and lengthy details of Timothy Webster’s spying. Pinkerton wrote, “My operative saw General Winder before leaving Richmond, and learned from him that his son, Captain Winder of the U.S.A. had been sent back to California, as he supposed for the purpose of getting him out of the way, as he (Captain Winder) was not to be trusted here in Washington, by Genl McClellan on account of his Southern sentiments.”46
*
Not trusted. Gotten out of the way. The Winder name became increasingly and publicly synonymous with treason. It was almost immaterial at this point whether or not Capt. William A. Winder’s unwanted post was a punishment from higher-ups beset by rumors of his disloyalty but unwilling or unable to act against him. The real question was if Alcatraz would become as much his prison as his command.