Once William A. was back in command at Alcatraz, he immediately had to contend with rumors of rebel schooners, often used for blockade running and privateering, lurking in the waters around San Francisco. Might invaders arrive via the Golden Gate, the waterway to the city? In the busy harbor would ships loaded with gold bullion be commandeered and delivered to the enemy?
There came on the night of March 14, 1863, just such a threat, one that William A. would have to handle head on. Suspicious activity had been detected on and around the J. M. Chapman, a ninety-ton schooner docked at the Jackson Street wharf. Men were steadily going aboard and coming from the vessel—dockworkers, thieves, no one knew just who they might be. Burly strangers were busying themselves, loading boxes, then scurrying—if a burly bunch could scurry—into the darkness. But it was the wharf, and strangers made strange night forays. But this night the men along the wharf had been under surveillance for months. And a raid was imminent.
At first light only two men remained on the deck of the J. M. Chapman, one of many schooners in port. It was later learned that the vessel’s captain, W. C. Laws, had gotten cold feet and stumbled into a saloon, allegedly spilling details of a plot to anyone who would listen. Just as the J. M. Chapman slipped from the wharf, moving slowly toward the bay and open water, city detective Isaiah Lees, along with revenue officers, customs house officials, and Federal soldiers from the Cyane, a revenue cutter ship, clambered aboard, weapons drawn. They rushed below toward the hold and found not “an assorted cargo of innocent merchandise including machinery bound for the Port of Manzanillo, Mexico,” according to the bogus manifest filed by the absent Capt. W. C. Laws, but an arsenal of “vast quantities of powder, shells, and ammunition.”1
Three men, hunched in the darkness, were dragged to their feet.
Scattered about them were torn bits of paper. One of the captured was attempting to chew and swallow the papers. Once the salvaged documents were examined, incriminating evidence emerged: a Confederate captain’s naval commission, a letter of marque signed by Pres. Jefferson Davis, “whereby a government can authorize a private individual to prey on the shipping of another government . . . consistent with international law,” to protect the perpetrators should they be captured.2
Behind a false door in the hold crouched fifteen other men, “armed with navy revolvers, loaded and capped,” and brandishing Bowie knives.3
It is worth a good look at the ringleaders of this invading force—in modern parlance, the rebel cell orchestrating this planned attack. Among them was Asbury Harpending, a wealthy, hair-trigger young Confederate fanatic from Kentucky who with a cabal orchestrated by the Knights of the Golden Circle had at the start of the war tried and failed to recruit Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston.
A year later Harpending traveled to Richmond and, according to him, had an audience with Pres. Jefferson Davis and Secretary of State Judah Benjamin about the immeasurable value of a takeover of California. “Had this isolated state on the Pacific joined the Confederate States,” he wrote in a self-aggrandizing but mostly accurate account of his life, “it would have complicated the war profoundly.” That may have been true, but he was captured. Harpending’s effort to smuggle munitions out of San Francisco on the J. M. Chapman may have been foiled, but the cocky compendium of zealots waiting to grasp riches and glory and to extend slavery into Mexico was still alive: the Golden Circle and its insurgent dreams, which were in turn the stuff of Union nightmares.4
Captured along with Harpending was the J. M. Chapman’s buyer, a rich, like-minded Confederate sympathizer and fellow Kentuckian named Ridgely Greathouse. Yet another was British citizen Alfred Rubery, a constituent of the famous abolitionist, parliamentarian, and philosopher John Bright. Harpending, Greathouse, and Rubery—no Dickensian inventions here—all used their real names. Their plot was the stuff of Wright’s nightmares. The “efforts made in smuggling materials of war into Mexico . . . and [to] clear vessels for southern ports . . . to use as privateers under the employment of the Confederate states” were also real.5
The prisoners were taken to Alcatraz in irons, and William A. immediately began their interrogation in the prison building.
The Marysville Daily Appeal of March 20, 1863, reported the particulars:
From the Custom-house authorities we learn that the examination of the prisoners taken from the Chapman is being made, under the authority of General Wright, by Capt. Winder of the forces at Alcatraz, who holds a military court. The prisoners are being examined separately, and are kept in solitary confinement, no person being allowed access to them, and no papers, either written or printed, can be passed to them without especial permits . . . though the particulars of the examination cannot now be made known, yet the result of the same is to place beyond any doubt the criminal designs of the prisoners to commit piracy upon the United States commerce.6
William A. duly warned the prisoners that what they say might be used against them as evidence in a civil trial. According to Harpending, he was “locked in a lath and plaster room” in the prison building. He boasted that, when captured, he’d concealed a derringer “in a specially prepared pocket inside the right cuff of my coat.” Allegedly this weapon was still with him at Alcatraz. When Captain Laws, who had betrayed the rebel band to the authorities and had just been arrested, tried to speak to him through a hole Harpending had bored in the plaster of his prison cell with a penknife he claimed to have, Laws escaped death by derringer as William A.’s men dragged him away for questioning. It is questionable that the weapon was on Harpending’s person throughout his durance at Alcatraz, in spite of his boast.7
William A., in charge of Harpending and his partners, was for once and for a painfully short time not the object of suspicion. Until he was. Very quickly a new assault on Winder’s character was made by the San Francisco Morning Call, which accused him of “feeding the rebel prisoners held there [Alcatraz] on the fat of the land and . . . from silver plates.”8
Because members of the J. M. Chapman rebel cell were in Winder’s keep and under military interrogation, it is not a leap of logic to see just how much some fearful Unionists wanted a man named Winder gone. Imagine his distress and discomfort, not just for himself but also for his family. And would he succumb, resign, or seethe and stay in place and do his job, which was at that moment to examine and determine the guilt of the rebel raiders locked in solitary confinement?
On March 24 Winder sent the damning squib from the San Francisco Morning Call to General Wright.
A reply that had to be of some small comfort came almost immediately. Not from General Wright but from Assistant Adjutant General Drum:
Headquarters Dept. of Pacific
San Francisco CA March 27th, 1863
Sir
The General commanding [Wright] read your letter of the 24th instant enclosing a slip cut from the “Morning Call” and desires me to say that scurrilous attacks against officers have no influence whatever at these Headquarters, the General has the most implicit confidence in your ability and zeal, and feels confident that you will look to the safety of your post,
Very respectfully yr obt sevt
Richd C Drum. Assist Adj gen
Capt Wm. A. Winder
3rd Arty
Comdg Alcatraz9
A letter to William A. from Wright arrived on the same day.
San Francisco, March 28, 1863
Give yourself no uneasiness about what the papers say. I have full confidence in your ability and will to take care of the fort and everything confided to your care. Yours very truly,
G. Wright10
After William A.’s interrogations of his prisoners were completed, Harpending, Rubery, and Greathouse were transported to the jail on Broadway in downtown San Francisco on October 2 and were tried in the U.S. Circuit Court by Judge Stephen J. Field and Judge Ogden Hoffman. On October 17 it took the jury four minutes to reach a verdict. The three were convicted of high treason, sentenced to ten years, and fined $10,000 each. The fifteen crewmen found hidden in the J. M. Chapman were released after they claimed they didn’t know what the mission was but that they’d simply been hired on as guards. All were ordered to take the oath of allegiance to the U.S. government. Greathouse made bail, and Rubery was eventually pardoned by Abraham Lincoln at diplomat John Bright’s request. Only Harpending remained jailed because, according to the papers seized on the J. M. Chapman, he “held a commission in the Confederate Navy.”11
*
With Harpending still in durance and William A. witnessing the war from afar at Alcatraz, a May spring rustles to life on the island.
Then from across the ocean came a notice, elusive and temporary, a bolt of hope that might have thrust Winder willingly into battle. According to one small paragraph in the Sacramento Daily Union of May 28, 1863, “The Governor of New Jersey has tendered to Lieutenant Winder (now in command of Fort Alcatraz) the Colonelcy of the First Regiment New Jersey Volunteers. He will accept, with General Wright’s permission.”12
It would be an escape for William A., a legal escape from Alcatraz. But nowhere except for the brief item in the newspaper is there any mention of this offer or of Wright’s pending permission. Perhaps there was a request conveyed to New Jersey governor Joel Parker by William A.’s father-in-law, Ichabod Goodwin. Maybe it was a favor, something owed, or just a hope, a way to extricate this family and enable Captain Winder—erroneously called lieutenant—to be the warrior he wanted to be. And it does not happen—the colonelcy will go to Maj. William Henry Jr., of the First New Jersey Volunteers, who led the infantry regiment after the battlefield death of Col. Mark Wilkes Collet on May 3, 1863, at Chancellorsville. Henry was a hero, an on-the-spot hero. He has glory. He has a colonelcy. William A. has Alcatraz. He was still being kept isolated from the fray.
Loyal Unionists wherever they were learned that a bloody July had brought trouble for the Confederacy. Vicksburg was besieged and fell to Grant. The last guardian of the Mississippi River was now in Union hands. Gettysburg, a cataclysm of death and fierce fighting during a brutal three-day battle as Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania, meant to storm to the center of the Union and ultimately overtake Washington City, was stopped, with tens of thousands dead. But Lee was not defeated; he merely backed away, his forces readying for more advances, more lunges. More war.
*
There was trouble of a different kind for William A. Family trouble. His half brother, Capt. Sidney Winder, his father’s adjutant in Richmond, was threatened with execution. The news sent William A. scrambling to help.
It is worth the telling, the story of how a man called Winder, this time a Confederate Winder, became headline news—and not for presumed atrocities against his father’s prisoners. The strange tumble of fact and misinformation began with Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s order of execution for Confederate captains William F. Corbin and T. G. Mcgraw, who’d been caught out of uniform in the divided state of Kentucky while recruiting for the rebels. Union authorities claimed they were spies and summarily executed them. Confederate authorities demanded immediate retaliation, with Gen. John H. Winder issuing Special Orders No. 160 on July 6, 1863. “At the Libby Prison yesterday (July 7th),” the San Francisco Bulletin reported, two Union captains from among the packed prison, thinking they were summoned for exchange, were to be shot in retaliation for the deaths of Corbin and Mcgraw. Huddled around a hat filled with black and white beans (or a box filled with slips of paper, depending on the reports), the men were to reach in and pick out the symbol of their fate: a white draw meant life, while a black one meant death. “Amid a silence almost deathlike the drawing commenced.”13 Capt. Henry Washington Sawyer of the First New Jersey Cavalry and Capt. John Flinn of the Fifty-First Indiana, were the “condemned men . . . sent to Winder’s office,” and they were allowed to write to their loved ones, as they were to die in a matter of days. Upon hearing of her husband’s fate and his request to see her and his children one last time, Sawyer’s wife raced to Washington and, with the help of a New Jersey congressional representative, was able to see Lincoln. With one day left, the president conferred with Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck and recommended that “two Confederate officers in our hands would be immediately selected for execution in retaliation for the threatened one of Sawyer and Flinn.”14
W. H. F. “Rooney” Lee, who was Robert E. Lee’s second son and who had been wounded at Brandy Station and captured by Federal cavalry two weeks later, was the first hostage. Lee was taken to Fortress Monroe. Capt. R. H. Tyler, already an inmate of the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, was ordered to stand with Lee and face the same fate as Sawyer and Flinn.
A storm of desperation, high drama, and inexplicable error began. Capt. William Sidney Winder’s name was mentioned over and over as the hostage taken along with Rooney Lee, though there was never any information to back up the capture of General Winder’s son. Reading of this—and it was impossible not to read of this—with great alarm on August 7 at Alcatraz, William A. sent an urgent telegram to a Lincoln cabinet member, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair:
Via San Francisco, 7 Aug
Alcatraz Island
I ask the release of Capt. Winder held as hostage.
W. A. Winder
Capt 3rd U.S. Artillery15
William A.’s plea is the only mention in any known primary source material of his concern for any Confederate relation. But he is pleading for a life. In that brief moment there is a window into Winder’s humanity and concern for a half brother. For an enemy.
On August 8 Blair forwarded the telegram to President Lincoln: “Sir, I submit the enclosed from Capt Winder of our service on behalf of his brother [illegible, demanding?] this. I hope we may not be compelled to execute the hostages.”16
*
The news traveled fast. Having just heard of his nephew Sidney Winder’s impending fate, William A.’s uncle, William H. Winder, wrote to Secretary Stanton from New York: “Sir, I learn from the papers that Captain Winder [is] held with Capt Lee as hostages for Capt Sawyer and another Federal officer in Richmond. [He] is the son of my brother Gen Winder of Richmond.” W. H. Winder goes on to say their detention is “unjustifiable” and that he would “procure a substitution of myself for Capt. Winder . . . that he is young and has a family, [whereas] I have not long to live.” He excoriates the “terrible evils which this administration is multiplying for the succeeding generations.” He further adds that if he is substituted for his nephew, Stanton will be “availing himself of an implacable opponent who deems the entire course of the administration unadulterated treason.”17
The rumor of Captain Winder’s capture and impending execution was untrue. His life was never at risk, and it is not clear as to why word of his incarceration was carried in newspapers throughout the country. The Confederate hostages were in fact Robert E. Lee’s second son, “Rooney,” and Capt. Robert H. Tyler of the Eighth Virginia Infantry. Why the great error? Because the story concerned two generals’ two sons? Because the newspapers wanted sensational headline fodder?
William A. would still be worried about his half brother, as the mistaken identity of the hostages was not publicly rectified or clarified until February 1864, when Lee and Tyler were released and returned to their regiments. When Winder knew of this is not known. A letter, perhaps? A quick word overheard? A message from San Francisco? There is no trace of any letter or message. Absent relief, or plagued with concern, did he wonder if his telegram had averted a disaster for his half brother or if it had been ignored? Was there breathing space for William A. at last? The answer was no, because he nearly caused an international incident that might well have vastly complicated the war.