Alcatraz Island was a craggy perch surrounded by frigid winds, mists that stung the eyes and chilled the bones, fog in summer, rain in winter, and an occasional welcome blaze of sun and blue sky; there was always the endless slap of waves gnawing at the island, the swoops and cries of gulls, terns, and pelicans, their droppings streaking the rocks white. In this foreign and forbidding place there was much history. Perhaps, to pass an evening around a welcome warming fire, William A. might tell his son the tales, myths, and truths about the island.
Known officially and finally as Alcatraz and noted by the historian John Martini as the “island of many misspellings” (e.g., Alcatras, Alcatrazaz, Alcatrose, Alcatrus), the tiny island was discovered by Lt. Juan Manuel de Ayala from the San Carlos on August 5, 1775. Sighting the rocky outcropping in the bay and taken with the flocks of large-billed birds nesting there, Ayala called the place La Isla de Los Alcatraces (Island of the Pelicans).1
According to the National Park Service, which now oversees Alcatraz, “after the U.S. government took control of California from the Republic of Mexico in the late 1840s, it identified Alcatraz Island as a place of great strategic military value.”2
By 1852 the island had become a fortress guarding the Bay of San Francisco. Of the climate on the island, Union general James “Birdseye” McPherson—unlucky enough to be posted there—wrote that Alcatraz was a godforsaken place that “beats all countries for wind I ever inhabited.”3
Alcatraz was also in the sights of Lt. John Charles Fremont, the explorer, soldier, abolitionist, and ready scout. Upon reaching San Francisco at the peak of the gold rush, he took good, clean breaths of the salt-misted air and announced that now that the United States had captured California, it must be occupied and readied for war. Part of making ready for the conflict was a survey and then construction of buildings on the island. Alcatraz soon sprouted cannons, casemates, and the Citadel, a three-story stone-and-brick building looming over the island. According to one account, “the first or basement level was below ground level and was surrounded by a dry moat, which the army termed a ‘ditch.’”4
The Citadel, which was the army barracks, was a forbidding structure with narrow rifle-slot windows looking down on the ever-moving water. It seemed impenetrable, with only one access point, from a road that wound around from the pier to the sally port—a secured entrance. “Alcatraces Island” and “1857” are inscribed atop the arch of the sally port.
Shortly before the Civil War began, with a clear warning to any enemies of the Union, the Sacramento Daily Union boasted, “Alcatraz Fort is one of the strongest in the United States. It has now one hundred and seventy-five guns mounted—some of them of immense calibre—being Columbiads, which throw shot weighing 120 pounds. Alcatraz [as] . . . ‘the Sumter of California’ . . . [is] capable of resisting any force that could be brought against it. . . . San Francisco need fear no enemy while that giant fortress is in the hands of men loyal to the stars and stripes.”5 Further historic observations indicate that Alcatraz bristled with guns “ranging in size from . . . 24 pounder howitzers . . . mounted on the island’s guardhouse . . . and in the masonry towers . . . to the large smoothbore guns, the Columbiads.” Able to blast invading ships with heated “hot shots” (cannonballs from two furnaces that could send fiery red balls flying), the well-armed fortress was a world unto itself.6
And it was William A.’s world. The Alcatraz roster of officers records him as commander of Company D of the Third Artillery. His dear friend Capt. Henry S. Burton, who’d served with him at the old San Diego Barracks in 1854, was overall commander of the island. When Burton left for the front, we can be sure Winder wished to follow, but he was then legitimately commander of the entire island. William A., Abby, and Willie would occupy the first-floor officers’ quarters, a dining room, and an adjacent parlor in the Citadel. Reasonable accommodations, to be sure, but it is possible that Abby enrolled young Willie at a school in San Francisco, although in many cases children were taught on Alcatraz.
At the time the Winders arrived, a tour of San Francisco would have revealed a boisterous, bawdy, roaring city, a place where society’s immensely wealthy dined, gambled, and avoided the fragile shanties that clung to hillsides and dotted filthy streets. Whorehouses and gambling dens abounded in the Barbary Coast district, where drunks and failed forty-niners told tales of fools’ gold and the fools it made of them. San Francisco’s “many streets are made up of decaying, smoke-grimed wooden houses and the barren sand hills,” wrote the young Mark Twain to his mother from the opulent Lick House Hotel.7
As gold strikes were fading, silver, the new star metal, promised fresh wealth, and businesses like the Colorado Silver Mining Company offered shares to those who dared not venture below ground to stumble through darkness hoping to see the glint of silver, a pursuit that might well cost them their lives. The San Francisco Bulletin was awash in ads for entertainment. Some advertised minstrelsy; the rhythms of tambos, the rattling of bones and strumming of banjos, the shuffling caricatures of happy plantation slaves portrayed by white men in blackface always drew large crowds. Or if Shakespeare was your joy, you could spend an evening at the glorious American Theatre on Sansome Street, where the eminent star “Mr. Charles Dillon will commence with the tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice.” Private boxes went for “three and nine dollars,” cheap seats for twenty-five cents, and “the circle exclusively for colored persons” had tickets for fifty cents each. Platt’s Music Halls touted a “Grand Concert and Irish Evening.” Eye doctors like Dr. Pilkington promised miracle cures for blindness.8
The cries of hawkers and hucksters plying wares and water cure schemes abounded. Imagine young Willie Winder amid all this, in the city and at Alcatraz, a very short boat ride from land but a world away, where there was also much to explore. A little garden atop the water cisterns just outside the Citadel was tended by the families who wished for green and growing things. If Willie walked about the island with his father, he would see the North Battery, the North Caponier (one of several “two story brick towers for close-in defenses”), the parade ground, the Guardhouse, the lighthouse, the South Battery, the South Caponier, the West Battery, and the Engineer Building. Likely he marveled at the “cannon . . . from the small twenty-four pound howitzers up through the ten inch Columbiad” that belched smoke and fire as his father’s men drilled again and again, dutifully obeying their commander in spite of the whispers, of the press reports of the disloyal Winder rebels far away.9
What did the boy see and hear, separated as he was from his New Hampshire family and his Grandfather Ichabod Goodwin, who was so firmly against human bondage that he traveled to an encampment occupied by former slaves to teach them to read? So little is known about Willie as a child. Was he frail, hardy, curious? But for now he is in a new world with parents who love him and will try to protect him. Much later Willie would come to know the ocean, to make his mark on the ocean, but now he was only eleven, and whether he was in a mainland school or on the strange windswept island, the endless fogs, rains, and frigid, choppy waters were unforgiving. As was the war.
*
To California came packet steamers bringing news of the mounting dead on the front. Two thousand miles away from his enemy-nephew in California, his plight now familiar to many readers, William H. Winder was continuing to wage his own determined war. Of defiance. From prison.
Although William H. Winder was offered release, he was determined to stay in durance until pardoned. He wrote to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton on February 22, 1862, saying he has been five months in confinement and asking if Stanton would consider his arrest illegal and investigate his case once and for all.
“I am to this hour in ignorance of the cause of my arrest and detention,” he wrote. “My release was tendered me on condition of taking the oath of allegiance . . . a second time release was offered.” His refusal backed by Seward, Winder states that support of the Constitution did not include, necessarily, support of the individual members “of the Executive.” Winder is a clever man and insists that he in fact will support the Constitution but not the Union. Why should he not be favored with amnesty and parole? “If there be any charge of crime, I am ready to meet it,” he states.10 He denied that he was a traitor. His pleas went unanswered.
*
In Richmond, W. H. Winder’s brother John was hungry for more space to house a growing prison population as Union POWs overflowed their filthy, disease-ridden quarters. By March 1862 citizen Luther Libby’s riverfront brick warehouse was wrested from its owner and confiscated by General Winder “for government use.” It was larger than the other tobacco warehouses but just as unclean and overcrowded. Except when there was bright daylight, it was all darkness and cold. Winder “arranged for flat-iron bars to be installed over the windows.” Any inmate who did not obey the order to stay three feet away from the windows would be at the mercy of guards who “patrolled with their guns cocked and endlessly watched the windows for a chance to shoot” Yankees. There was a hunger to punish the bluecoats. For good.11
But for many of the ordinary Richmond denizens wearied by General Winder’s treatment of prisoners and citizens alike, tired of jeering and cursing the exhausted soldiers dragged through the streets on their way to hell, deprivation tamed bloodlust, for there was real hunger. Food prices were skyrocketing, and the Union blockade of Southern ports made it hard for all but the wealthy to purchase foodstuffs, clothing, and other necessities. To combat gouging, “Winder laid a tariff of prices on all articles of domestic produce,” wrote Richmond diarist Sallie Brock Putnam, “but did not legislate . . . groceries, liquors and articles imported from abroad.” Given the difficulty in obtaining sufficient foodstuffs, with “meats so indifferent as scarcely to be fit for food,” Putnam described how “the crowd pressed around the fish market was so dense that many were compelled to leave without anything for dinner . . . the market men declared that people might starve.” It was bad enough that many Richmond authorities were hoarding precious foodstuffs, stealing, and brawling. With the fear of Winder’s police force arresting with impunity, residents were bitterly aware that a once easy, languid life in an easy, languid city had ended. However, for a few hours at the close of April a grim spectacle sent hungry crowds racing to the fairgrounds to see a traitor die.12
*
William A. would not learn of the fate of the spy who brought him his father’s orders until the following month, but on April 29 Timothy Webster was hanged at Camp Lee in the old Richmond fairgrounds. Gen. John H. Winder, after learning that his trusted courier was a Pinkerton agent, ordered Webster tried by court-martial, which convicted him of “being an alien enemy and in the service of the United States . . . lurking about the armies and fortifications of the Confederate States in [and] around Richmond,” among other charges. Webster was swiftly sentenced to “suffer death by hanging,” a sentence carried out in full view of jeering Richmond citizens. In an article wanly headlined “Local Matters” in the Richmond Dispatch of April 30, 1862, the particulars of Webster’s suffering on the gallows were deemed fair and well-deserved justice, as the rope broke, whereupon he was thrown to the ground, then hauled back up the gallows, and finally hanged.13
Before he met that fate, however, Webster’s final mission and his disappearance had for a time been a mystery. After he left for his fourth trip to the Confederate capital with Pinkerton detective Hattie Lewis posing as his wife, the Pinkerton spy was incommunicado. Due to his unusual absence as well as McClellan’s reliance on the intelligence he brought back to headquarters, a worried Pinkerton sent operatives Pryce Lewis and John Scully, posing as cotton brokers and “ardent secessionists,” to locate Webster.
After inquiring as to Webster’s whereabouts—their cover identities gave them entry at first—and because Webster was successfully embedded in Richmond and so fully in Winder’s confidence, they learned Webster was at the Monument Hotel, “suffering excruciating pain, confined to his bed” with chronic rheumatism, his wife by his side.14
Lewis and Scully visited Webster several times and reported to General Winder that his courier was still very ill, even fabricating a warning that Webster was being watched by Federal detectives. On one occasion when Lewis and Scully were walking on the street, members of a secessionist family then in Richmond recognized Lewis and Scully as Union detectives whom Pinkerton had ordered to search their home in Washington DC to find evidence of their disloyalty. They reported their suspicions to Winder’s chief detective, Samuel McCubbin. An interview with Winder and others in his detective force followed. Unmasked, arrested, facing death, Lewis and Scully revealed that Timothy Webster was a Pinkerton detective. Winder’s subsequent fury and the hasty trial that followed sent Webster to the gallows. Condemned to be hanged, Lewis and Scully remained jailed in spite of pleas from Pinkerton and Stanton to spare their lives; they were finally were released in 1863. Hattie Lewis, aka Mrs. Webster, was jailed as Webster’s accomplice/wife but never exposed as a Pinkerton agent or tried. She pleaded with President Davis, claiming she was a loyal Southern widow, but Winder recommended against her release. Hattie lingered for eight months in two harsh prisons: Castle Godwin and Castle Thunder.
The latter was an infamous warehouse-turned-prison for accused spies and deserters. It was under the command of Gen. John H. Winder and run by his assistant provost marshal, Capt. George Washington Alexander, a black-bearded, pistol-and-knife-toting brute who was also a preternaturally cruel exhibitionist. At his whim or for reasons of insubordination, prisoners were bucked and gagged (a stick forced between their jaws and hands tied under the knees), shot, hanged by the thumbs, whipped, and starved, as well as routinely abused and tortured by Alexander and menaced by his giant Russian boarhound, Nero. So infamous was Alexander’s reign that on April 11, 1863, a special committee of Confederate congressional representatives was convened to hear testimony about Alexander’s brutality from other Confederates associated with the prison. After weeks of witness statements Alexander was exonerated, the judgment rendered. He was just following Winder’s orders and had to impose such measures to keep order. The majority report based on three of the five committee members found Alexander’s actions “justified” and stated that he “exhibited such traits of character as in our opinion eminently fit him for such a position.”15
In fact Alexander was the officer charged with taking Webster to the gallows. Thus ended the life of Timothy Webster, Pinkerton’s best. Thus began the next chapter in the saga of the U.S. Artillery captain, a man reported by Webster to his boss Allan Pinkerton as yet another traitor in the Winder family.