Filled it with cursing cries, and deep exclaims.
If thou delight to view thy heinous deeds,
Behold this pattern of thy butcheries.”
—King Richard, III.
Shakspere.
The man who had charge of the prison at Andersonville, and who was responsible for the barbarities practiced there, more than any other man, was Gen. John H. Winder.
I had not the honor(?) of a personal acquaintance with that fiend in human shape, but Comrade John McElroy of the 16 Illinois Cavalry, the author of “Andersonville,” gives his readers a description of the man. I quote from that work.
“There rode in among us, a few days after our arrival, an old man whose collar bore the wreathed stars of a Major General. Heavy white locks fell from beneath his slouched hat, nearly to shoulders. Sunken gray eyes too dull and cold to light up, marked a hard, stony face, the salient features of which was a thin lipped, compressed mouth, with corners drawn down deeply—the mouth which seems the world over to be the index of selfish, cruel, sulky malignance. It is such a mouth as has the school boy—the coward of the play ground, who delights in pulling off the wings of flies. It is such a mouth as we can imagine some remorseless inquisitor to have had—that is, not an inquisitor filled with holy zeal for what he mistakenly thought the cause of Christ demanded, but a spleeny, envious, rancorous shaveling, who tortured men from hatred of their superiority to him, and sheer love of inflicting pain.
The rider was John H. Winder, Commissary General of Prisoners, Baltimorean renegade and the malign genius to whose account should be charged the deaths of more gallant men than the inquisitors of the world ever slew by the less dreadful rack and wheel. It was he who in August could point to three thousand and eighty-one new made graves for that month, and exultingly tell his hearer that he was “doing more for the Confederacy than twenty regiments.”
His lineage was in accordance with his character. His father was that General William H. Winder, whose poltroonery at Bladensburg, in 1814 nullified the resistance of the gallant Commodore Barney, and gave Washington to the British.