Two years after William A.’s death, his half brother Sidney committed suicide at his Baltimore home on February 26, 1905, at the age of seventy-one. “Old, alone and almost blind,” his father’s devoted acolyte, adjutant, and defender at Richmond and Andersonville never gave up trying to clear John H. Winder’s name, or his grandfather’s.1
“Was 71 and Shot Himself,” the Baltimore Sun headlined its coverage in the February 26, 1905, edition. Among Sidney’s papers, the Sun reported, was a “clipping of an address by Dr. William Osler of Johns Hopkins University in which reference was made to the uselessness of men over sixty years old.” In a farewell speech to colleagues at the university as he was about to assume a post at Oxford College, Dr. Osler, a famous and innovative medical practitioner, had suggested that men achieve their best work before forty. After sixty, he said, death by chloroform might be a mercy. The outcries and condemnations after these remarks were instantaneous. They were intended to be tongue and cheek, Osler was alleged to have said. It seemed that Sidney Winder took them to heart. He shot himself in the head two days after Osler’s address.2
On May 9, 1906, in the Portsmouth Herald came notice of the death of “Mrs. Abbie [sic] Rice Winder . . . at the home of her sister Miss Hope Goodwin, on Islington Street at the age of seventy-seven years, two months and twenty days.” Abby was a beloved Portsmouth fixture, adored and respected: “A lady of fine presence and of distinguished talent. Her kindness of heart and generous impulses were proverbial and she leaves precious memorials to kinship and to the community.”3
Once, long ago, her “community” had included Alcatraz, Old Town, and New Town in San Diego, places of confinement and pain for Abby as well as for William A. “On returning from San Francisco with her husband . . . she remained in the East and passed her life in her native city, the intimate companion of her parents and oldest child,” the obituary stated. Abby “endeared herself to young and old . . . a friend to the friendless,” helping to raise the children left in her family’s care after the death of their mothers. “Nor was there any patriotic or charitable movement in the city which did not enlist her interest,” the Portsmouth Herald noted.
And Willie, “the beloved son, knit to her heart by stronger than ordinary ties . . . was able to return in time to be at his mother’s bedside and witness the passing.” It had been of great comfort to Abby, as her husband lay mute and suffering on his deathbed in the Millard Hotel, that Willie had spent time with his father during those last days. The little boy grown to become a naval commander saw both of his parents buried side by side, his life growing more and more troubled when his wife frequently left him to travel in Europe, eventually separating from him completely.
On October 3, 1922, “Capt. William Winder, U.S. N., retired formerly of this city, committed suicide in Brookline [Massachusetts]. . . . Beside the body was found a 32-caliber revolver.” Shortly after his mother’s death Willie had “retired as a captain on June 30, 1907 . . . after having had 18 years sea service to his credit.” Even as his father loathed and feared the sea, his son soared and flourished on the water until his demons descended and his life ended on a street in Brookline.4
By 1922, for those who remembered anything of Willie’s father or the family name that had been besmirched, cursed, and damned, William A. would always be a Winder. But the sum of the man was more. Father to one, husband to one, son of a war criminal and brother to same; shipwreck survivor—notable brave, rescued and rescuer—he was a Union loyalist, a thoughtful and innovative defender of a madman who, because of him, did not hang for his crime. He was a healer, exile, and maker of new paths forward, reborn in the West; a San Diego notable striving in vain again and again for his place in the army, and finally, at the Rosebud Reservation, finding yet another purpose, another path forward until a fatal illness ended his days.
Numerous records of the man remain very much extant, including a memorial of sorts—a short block in San Diego called Winder Street, named for a subdivision William A. had purchased in the mid-1880s. Thus, if a curious modern-day passerby might inquire as to who he was, in these pages his uncommon saga—at the very least—will be illuminated. At the very least.