By late 1863 and into early 1864 starvation was stalking Union prisoners and citizens alike in the South. “Food was scarce, fuel was scarce . . . our soldiers in the field were insufficiently supplied with shoes and blankets. . . . Oh, Lord, how long, how long?” an agonized Sallie Brock wrote as she witnessed the dire conditions in Richmond.1
A good number of men and women once plump and in fine fettle were reduced to utter desperation—eating rotted foodstuffs, rioting for loaves of bread, robbing neighbors, or finding themselves with no choice but to beg in the streets. They blamed John H. Winder’s damnable rot holes of prisons and the damn Yankees trapped there for their miserable circumstances. To ease the catastrophic situation, and while still under the ever-present threat of invasion by Union troops, General Winder must empty his bulging prisons and send his captives away. And fast. But where was a place big enough to house thousands of Union POWs? On November 24, 1863, John H. Winder’s son Capt. Sidney Winder received orders issued that very day by Secretary of War James A. Seddon. The order came from Adj. Gen. J. W. Pegram of the Department of Henrico at Richmond and stated that “a prison for Federal Prisoners shall be established in the State of Georgia” and that he should “proceed without delay . . . to a town . . . between Macon and Andersonville.”2
After consulting as ordered with Georgia governor Joseph E. Brown, Gen. Howell Cobb, and others, Sidney Winder homed in on a remote whistle-stop of the Southwestern Railroad known as Anderson Station, which had a “depot that consisted of a dozen log and plank buildings.” This sparsely populated backwater—later called Andersonville—was a good find, because Sidney Winder, as he traveled deeper into the Georgia countryside, was turned away several times by landowners who feared the proximity of Yankee prisoners.3
Finally, the historian Richard Scott Davis writes, “Benjamin B. Dykes persuaded Winder to lease land owned by Deputy Sheriff William Wesley Turner on a tributary of Sweetwater Creek in Sumter County—less than thirty acres—for thirty dollars a month.”4
A short distance away work on the parcel that was to become the Andersonville Prison stockade—originally called Camp Sumter—was begun, as had protests from Sumter County residents who “voiced fears about potential mass prisoner escapes, bloody slave revolts and the looting of their farms by hungry guards.”5
Although orders from Richmond gave Sidney the ability to commandeer “whatever labor and materials he needed . . . and at the government’s prices,” supplies were delayed or nonexistent. John H. Winder’s cousin Capt. Richard Bayley Winder would serve as quartermaster. He would oversee the building of the camp and eventually provision it. Winder cousins Richard and Sidney “found that their needs ranked at the absolute bottom of both Confederate and Georgia priorities.” This seeming indifference was puzzling.6
When the Winders learned that prisoners would soon begin arriving, it became obvious that great speed in preparing the site would be necessary if any captives were to be safely housed and kept from escaping. Close to one thousand slaves were immediately taken from plantations and put straight to work felling the large stands of pines that covered the area, the cut timber eventually forming the walls of the stockade. Lacking any shade, the sun-scorched prison pen—deadly and pestiferous in the summertime Georgia heat and without shelter from winter rainstorms and cold—was to enclose many, many thousands of Union prisoners of war. With a scarcity of ready timber, save for stumps and fallen branches, or, as it was rumored, because William A.’s half brother Sidney had purposely ordered the grounds left barren, no shelters were built. Sidney’s order was reportedly, “Make a pen here for the d—d Yankees, where they will rot faster than they can be sent!”7
With the prison expected to hold no more than nine thousand captives, on February 3, 1864, the first five hundred men were taken by train from Richmond, being “packed in freight cars like sardines,” wrote Andersonville survivor Charles Ferren Hopkins of the First New Jersey Volunteers.8
Prisoners were sent from Richmond “by way of Raleigh, North Carolina, and Columbus, South Carolina.”9
While the old cars rattled along and the stench of cattle manure hung in the air, many of the prisoners, sick, pained, and wasted from their durance at Libby and Belle Isle, had heard the rumor of prisoner exchanges as they lay dreaming of home, imagining bountiful meals, then catching the scent of pines and the rush of fresh water as the train headed south. Throughout March and into April thousands of Union POWs poured in to Andersonville, men captured on battlefields, in swamps and cornfields, men from the Northeast, men from the regiments serving Gen. Benjamin Butler and who had never been south before the war.
“The people told us that we were going to Andersonville, but they said it was a fine place,” wrote Andersonville survivor Alexander Angus McLean, a corporal in the 117th New York Infantry. “They represented it as a pleasant shady grove, with a fine stream running through it, with barracks enough to accommodate all of us,” he stated.10
As McLean and other prisoners approach the tall, wooden gates of the camp, they are forced into the stockade and their possessions commandeered. Of course they were promised all would be returned. It was a fever dream pocked with falsehoods; many of the men are ill, and there is no salvation in sight. As the stockade gate swings open, they are pushed inside. Alexander Angus McLean describes the sight that met him and his fellow prisoners:
It beggars the description! There were men with nothing to cover their bodies but poor remnants of drawers. . . . Some had ragged old blankets for tents, some had holes dug in the ground, in which they vainly sought shelter, others had nothing but the burning sun by day and the cold blue heavens by night; the latter class was by far the largest; there they were wallowing in their own filth. The ground was literally alive with maggots. Near the gate was a long row of dead, lying with their ghastly faces upturned to the glaring sun; many of the bodies were entirely uncovered except by the patches of ravenous flies.11
Prisoner, diarist, mapmaker, and watercolorist Robert Knox Sneden, a private of the Fortieth New York Volunteer Regiment, was resident at Andersonville as of February 24, having traveled from Richmond to Petersburg, Lawrenceville, Virginia, to Roanoke and Salisbury, North Carolina, to Macon, Milledgeville, and Savannah, Georgia, “packed sixty to seventy in cattle cars . . . in a filthy state, and the manure was some inches deep . . . over twenty were so sick and feeble that their companions had to lift them out . . . and lay them on the ground.”12 Willing himself to live through this nightmare and record most of what he saw, Sneden was one of the very few artists to sketch the prison, the men inside, and the outbuildings—hospitals, cookhouses, swamp, and guard camps.
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Into this morass and with great reluctance, on June 17, 1864, William A.’s father, Brig. Gen. John H. Winder, now commander of all prisons east of the Mississippi River, arrived at Anderson Station after a six-hundred-mile journey. He’d been ordered to “report to Americus, Georgia with the assumption of the command of the . . . prison post at Andersonville,” the Richmond Examiner reported, “hoping for . . . the best results.”13
It was more than likely that General Winder’s poor reputation in Richmond was one of the reasons he was sent to Andersonville, replacing and ranking the original prison commandant, Col. Alexander W. Persons of the Fifty-Fifth Georgia Infantry, an essentially humane man who tried to better the deteriorating conditions at the prison camp.
Picture John Winder peering at the stockade though a pair of binoculars: a weathered, grim visage, hard-set mouth, all framed by long straggling gray hair above a gray, bright-buttoned uniform and loose whiskers poking from his star-studded collar. He is at a safe distance from the camp, sequestered in his quarters across the railroad tracks. For fear of contracting a disease, he would rarely if ever venture inside the pen, where the stench of corpses, feces, and the gangrenous, rotting limbs of his prisoners filled the air.
Behind the stockade walls as commander of interior operations was Winder’s close protégé, Capt. Heinrich “Henry” Hartmann Wirz, a Swiss-born former adjutant and prison keeper in Richmond. Faced with the growing mortality of the prisoners, not to mention their abiding hatred, as he was said to be cruel to many, a scapegoat to some, and to most a fearsome, profane specter on a white horse, his perpetually festering arm in a sling, Wirz was tasked with the impossible. Despite the knowledge that Wirz sent packs of bloodhound mixes—trained to track runaway slaves—after any men who dared to try to tunnel out to freedom, many prisoners did attempt escape. Few succeeded. Some even made last-ditch efforts by pitching themselves into the wagons that carted bodies to the trenches for burial.
For most, because of illness, starvation, or skin color, there was no chance of escape. John H. Winder would have called for particularly harsh treatment of black soldier-captives; their very existence was anathema to him and to the Confederate Army, which saw them not as fighting men but black demons who should be treated as slaves.
According to prisoner Warren Lee Goss, of the Second Massachusetts Heavy Artillery Regiment, wounded black soldiers were tortured and often subjected to “atrocious amputations” or outright neglect by rebel surgeons who figured the men would die on the spot.14
One of the victims of outright neglect was Cpl. James Henry Gooding, a poet and columnist for the Mercury in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Gooding was a member of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, a unit of black soldiers already famous for their heroism and sacrifices at the assault on the South Carolina rebel earthwork at Fort Wagner. Corporal Gooding was captured on or about February 24, 1864, at the Battle of Olustee in Florida and dragged to Andersonville, having been severely wounded in the thigh. Doctors there ignored him as he lay near death, his wound festering until a massive infection finally killed him in July 1864. Gooding’s columns for the Mercury, printed as letters to the editor, appeared as weekly columns from March 3, 1863, until shortly before his capture.15
Gooding’s letter to “Your Excellency Abraham Lincoln,” of September 28, 1863, was written when black men were finally allowed to serve in combat. But Gooding protested the unequal pay of black soldiers versus white troops. Gooding asked, “Are we Soldiers, or are we Laborers?” It was not until after Gooding perished at Andersonville that “Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts introduced legislation for the retroactive equalization of pay. . . . The law was finally passed . . . in mid June of 1864.” Three months later—and two months after Gooding’s death—“the United States Paymaster distributed $170,000 in back pay to the men of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment.”16
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Yankee soldiers being paid while imprisoned was the least of John H. Winder’s concerns. He is overburdened by the responsibility his government has placed on him. His orders are ill defined, and he is at times incapable of taking any action, even as he frequently requested help for what he could see was beyond help. He learned from his distant perch that by June 22 there were “24,193 prisoners of war and increasing daily . . . I ask nothing that is not necessary,” he wrote. To control the masses of captives, he also requested an additional guard force of two thousand men after learning about “a tunnel . . . fourteen feet deep and from 90 to a hundred feet long.”17
In fact there were never two thousand “spare” men in Confederate service. Desertions were common. Guarding Andersonville was never a realistic assignment. If the prisoners did attempt to escape, how could the guards who were present—older men and boys from the Georgia Reserves, the dregs of a rebel army that has run low on soldiers—and planted atop the stockade walls in sentry boxes, called “pigeon roosts,” control twenty-four thousand captives?18
They were a ragtag, trigger-happy lot, hurling taunts at the prisoners while training their guns on them. They shot to kill. Often. Inside the stockade was a crude wooden railing running along the interior perimeter, a “dead line” ordered by Winder. Given his choice not to risk his health by visiting the stockade, Winder no doubt had never witnessed a starving man breaching his dead line by so much as a fingertip to snatch a piece of offal or a crust of bread and, half-mad with this brutal durance, be shot dead for the act of simply falling on or reaching through that low, rickety fence?
Or, as was alleged, had Winder promised the guards a bounty or a furlough for shooting a Yankee? With cries of “Halt!” or sometimes no warning whatever, they often fired a shot to the head or chest and watched as a prisoner crumpled to the ground.
As for food, rations were often raw; men were fed indigestible cobs, rancid meat, and cornmeal studded with maggots. There was also the horror of thirst due to the lack of water, the essence of life and survival for the captives. Between two hills above the prison a single stream called Stockade Branch flowed downhill from the officers’ quarters, the overcrowded hospital building, the Confederate soldiers’ tents, guardhouses, slaughter pens, dead houses, and cookhouses. The filthy, feces-filled stream served as a toilet and a place to wash and drink.
Hygiene was thus practically nonexistent. Throughout the summer of 1864 and into early fall, roughly one hundred men die of starvation each day, succumbing to dysentery, smallpox, scurvy, rickets, and other wasting illnesses. Chief camp surgeon Isaiah H. White could do little to help, as the hospital was bulging with the sick. When the emaciated prisoners died, if their corpses were noticed at all, they were carted off in wagons by prisoners or slaves and then pitched like cordwood into trenches and covered with dirt or nothing at all. The survivors lived packed together in an unholy mass, some in improvised shelters. Pieces of ragged cloth stretched atop thin, uneven wooden poles—forming a shelter called a shebang—offered some protection if the frequent rains did not make everything a stew of dangerous filth swarming with lice. Many men lay in holes in the ground, which they had laboriously scratched out by hand or dug with sticks of firewood, with nothing but dirt as cover.
For the still strong, or at least those strong enough to be resourceful, a society or city-within-a-stockade formed. Prisoners known as “Raiders” preyed continually on others. After so many vicious attacks—murder, beatings, and theft—fellow prisoners known as “Regulators” began to fight back against the murderous Raiders. Finally General Winder “formally authorized the prisoners to organize trials for the worst of the raiders.” Six Raiders went to the gallows on July 11, 1864.19
Once a semblance of order had been restored among thousands of weak, diseased, and dying men, General Winder apparently began to contemplate what would happen if Union general William T. Sherman’s forces attempted to liberate the camp. Seeming to disregard the possibility that the prisoners were physically too incapacitated to fight, Winder had a plan to counter the threat of liberation by force: an order.
Order No. 13
Headquarters Military Prison
Andersonville, Ga., July 27, 1864
The officers on duty and in charge of the Battery of Florida Artillery at the time will, upon receiving notice that the enemy has approached within seven miles of this post, open upon the Stockade with grapeshot, without reference to the situation beyond these lines of defense.
John H. Winder
Brigadier General Commanding20
Guard troops never opened fire on the helpless prisoners within the stockade, but doing so would never have caused Union troops to stop their advance, no matter how many prisoners were murdered. After Sherman’s forces battled their way south to Atlanta, destroyed it, and ordered everyone out of the city before beginning their scorched-earth march to Savannah, many expected that Maj. Gen. George Stoneman’s cavalry troops would try to liberate Andersonville and the officers’ prison at Macon. Stoneman’s cavalry troops were ordered to do just that, but there was no raid on Andersonville.
On August 4 General Grant sent an urgent dispatch to Sherman from his headquarters at City Point, Virginia:
Richmond papers of yesterday announce the capture of General Stoneman and 500 of his party near Macon, Ga. The capture took place the 31st of July. Have you heard anything of this?
U. S. GRANT,
Lieutenant-General21
Sherman answered immediately. The unthinkable had occurred.
NEAR ATLANTA, GA., August 4, 1864.
Lieutenant General U. S. GRANT, City Point:
General Stoneman had only 2,300 men; 900 have got in. I fear the balance are captured as related in your dispatch. General Stoneman was sent to break railroad, after which I consented he should attempt the rescue of our prisoners at Andersonville.
W. T. SHERMAN22
“The last lingering illusions about imminent freedom crumbled on August 2, . . . when four hundred Union cavalrymen were brought to Andersonville,” and they reported to the prisoners the truth of the rumor that “they, General Stoneman, and many more of his men had been captured.”23
As a high-ranking officer, Stoneman was not taken to Andersonville. He was instead detained at Macon’s Camp Oglethorpe and exchanged two months later.
As the first days of August scorched and killed at Andersonville, 33,006 men were penned in the stockade. Hearing reports of the horrors at the camp, Richmond authorities ordered an inspection of the prison. The man chosen by the adjutant and inspector general’s office was a Confederate assistant adjutant and inspector general, Lt. Col. Daniel Thomas Chandler, a former Union POW and District of Columbia native. His lengthy second report of August 5—his first of July 5 was essentially ignored—to Confederate colonel Robert Hall Chilton provided a full account of the prison’s conditions. It is meticulous in detail and gravely damning, especially to Gen. John Winder. After detailing the particulars of the stockade and the dead line, he notes that a “small stream passes from west to east through the inclosure. . . . [It] furnishes the only water for washing accessible to the prisoners. Some regiments of the guard, the bakery, and cook-house, being placed on the rising ground bordering the stream before it enters the prison, render the water nearly unfit for use before it reaches the prisoners.”24
Colonel Chandler then addressed the lack of medical care “furnished within the stockade . . . and the hospital accommodations are so limited that, though the beds (so-called) have all or nearly all two occupants each, large numbers who would otherwise be received are necessarily sent back to the stockade.”
Chandler’s report continued the bleak listing of horrors: “The dead are hauled out daily [by] the wagon load and buried without coffins, their hands in many instances being first mutilated with an ax in the removal of any finger rings they may have. The sanitary condition of the prisoners is as wretched as can be, the principal causes of morality being scurvy and chronic diarrhea. . . . Nothing seems to have been done, and but little, if any effort, made to arrest it by procuring proper food.” As noted earlier, the prisoners received raw rations. In addition, “no soap or clothing has ever been issued. It is impossible to state the number of sick, many dying within the stockade whom the medical officers never see or hear of ’till their remains are brought out for interment. The rate of deaths has steadily increased from 37.4 per 1,000 during the month of March last to 62.7 per 1,000 in July. The supply of medicines is wholly inadequate, and frequently there is none, owing to the great delays experienced in filling the requisitions.”
Chandler’s report closes with this:
My duty requires me respectfully to recommend a change in the officer in command of the post, Brig. Gen. J. H. Winder, and the substitution in his place of someone who unites both energy and good judgment with some feelings of humanity and consideration for the welfare and comfort (so far as it is consistent with their safe-keeping) of the vast number of unfortunates placed in his control; someone who at least will not advocate deliberately and in cold blood the propriety of leaving them in their present condition until their number has been sufficiently reduced by death to make the present arrangements suffice for their accommodation, and who will not consider it a matter of self-laudation and boasting that he has never been inside the stockade, a place the horrors of which it is difficult to describe, and which is a disgrace to civilization; the condition of which he might, by the exercise of a little energy and judgment, even with the limited means at his command, have considerably improved.
Upon receiving Chandler’s report, Colonel Chilton wrote to Secretary of War James A. Seddon on August 18: “The condition of the prison at Andersonville is a reproach to us as a nation.” Chilton said that no more prisoners should be sent to Andersonville, and he recommended that Winder move the present occupants immediately.25
At that, Winder ordered mass evacuations. No matter their condition, save for the men too weak or sick to move at all—the dead and the near dead—the prisoners were sent to equally unendurable sites as Sherman’s men—the “blue behemoth”—thundered and plundered along. Imagine then an army of POWs pushed and forced ahead, far too weakened to cause any real trouble. “The prisoners at Andersonville were divided into three groups in September 1864,” writes the historian Robert S. Davis. “One group went to Camp Lawton at Millen, Georgia.” Sherman came closer. Six long weeks later those captives were relocated to Blackshear, Georgia, and six weeks later they were moved again, to Florence, South Carolina, and Salisbury, North Carolina. The group was then divided into two. Off went the “second group to Savannah and later to an open-air island prison at Blackshear.” What was worse, “those prisoners ended up back at Andersonville.”26
According to John H. Winder’s biographer, when the general finally read Chandler’s report, “he branded the charges as false . . . he did not know of Chandler’s charges against him personally and never saw that portion of the report.”27
On September 24, 1864, Winder’s subordinate, Henry Wirz, was sent Chandler’s damning report, by Winder himself. In his response to Winder, his commandant, Wirz claims that he accompanied Chandler as he toured the camp, serving “as his guide. . . . I soon found however that he preferred to communicate with the prisoners themselves.” Wirz is clearly uncomfortable and writes, “I saw very soon he would be made the plaything of cute Yankees.” Wirz fears that the prisoners “would give him most horrible descriptions of their sufferings, short and uncooked rations, and unheard of outrages perpetrated upon them.” Particularly egregious in Wirz’s opinion were the “sympathy which his [Chandler’s] looks indicated he had for them.” After defending the indefensible, Wirz complains that Chandler’s tour took three hours that “should have demanded one week’s devoted attention.” With a “very sympathizing look toward the Yankee prisoners,” Chandler remarked to Wirz, “this beats anything I ever saw; it is indeed hell on earth.”28
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On February 6, 1865, John H. Winder collapsed and died as he was entering an officer’s tent—a celebratory dinner was the occasion—at the Florence, South Carolina, prison. “The boys said it was a clear case of Death by Visitation of the Devil,” prisoner John McElroy wrote years later. “It was always insisted that his [Winder’s] last words were: My faith is in Christ; I expect to be saved. Be sure and cut down the prisoners’ rations.”29
Last words or not, true or not, McElroy’s account of Winder’s utterings as he died were recorded for all posterity.
John H. Winder’s life thus ended on the dirt floor of a prison. His death was only the beginning of the descent of the Winder name into perpetual infamy and irretrievable darkness.