Confederate Gen. John Henry Winder dropped dead from a heart attack Feb. 7, 1865, just two months before the South's surrender at Appomattox Court House ended the Civil War.
News of his sudden death prompted one contemporary observer to note: "Winder is safe from the wrath to come."
That pronouncement proved wildly shortsighted. Winder's death may have spared him from the gallows — the fate his next-in-command would bear before the year was through — but it did him no favors in the eyes of history.
Unable to defend himself, the native of what would become Wicomico County was initially branded the mastermind behind the monumental suffering at the prisoner-of-war camps he had come to manage.
More than 150 years later, the Winder name has flared into the public's consciousness again. Local civil rights activists are calling for his historical marker to be removed from the courthouse lawn in downtown Salisbury.
The group Showing Up for Racial Justice contends the marker's prominent location confers undeserved honor and conveys implicit civic support for the Confederacy and its No. 1 cause: slavery. The group's online petition has garnered more than 300 signatures since it was posted in early June.
A counter-petition, which appeared quickly in its wake, has received nearly twice as many signatures. The movement, led by a conservative local blogger, argues that opposition to the marker represents political correctness run amok.
A parallel controversy churns on about Winder, one that looms large in the present debate but, so far, has drawn little attention outside the twin islands inhabited by Civil War buffs and academics.
The question is: How much of the blame for the deplorable prison conditions, particularly at the infamous Andersonville camp, rests on his shoulders?
There are no signs the issue will be put to rest anytime soon, said Ben Cloyd, a historian and author of the book "Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory."
With that being the case, the image of Winder refracts based on what historical lens is being used.
“By him dying during the war, he’s a blank slate," Cloyd said. "People will see in him what they want to see."
Confederate controversy spreads
Recent history hasn't been kind to monuments of Confederate figures.
From San Antonio to Boston, calls have come to remove the markers. The attention began after a 2015 shooting inside a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a white supremacist killed nine African-Americans.
The city of New Orleans started removing its Confederate monuments in April, sparking protests and death threats. In Richmond, the former capital of the Confederate States of America, officials last month formed a commission charged with finding ways to redefine the city's Monument Avenue.
The towering statues along the street amount to "nostalgia masquerading as history," said Mayor Levar Stoney.
Activists say the monuments dotting the nation's landscape, many of which were erected during the Civil Rights era, serve as not-so-subtle nods toward white supremacy. Opponents charge that taking down the monuments does nothing to further racial harmony except erase history.
The fate of the Winder sign remains in the balance. Amid the outcry, state officials have begun researching just who has authority over its placement.
The issue is that the marker was erected well before 1985, when the General Assembly established funding for the historic marker program within the Maryland Historical Trust, said Department of Planning spokesman John Coleman. Meanwhile, Wicomico officials have said the sign is the state's responsibility.
Winder, for his part, bears a heavier historical burden than many of his counterparts.
What he shares in common with other Confederate leaders is his choice, freely made, to back a secessionist movement that drove to sustain a culture and economy underpinned by human bondage. But Winder carries something more: the stain of inhumanity from his association with the South's prisons.
As Roger Pickenpaugh, a historian who has written about Civil War prisons, put it in an interview, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gen. Robert E. Lee “didn’t directly have the blood of 10,000 men on their hands,” as Winder did.
Winder's pursuit of redemption
While the vast majority of research focuses on Winder's role in the Civil War, that period occupies less than a tenth of his life.
By the time of the war's outbreak in 1861, he was already a distinguished soldier. He was widely seen as a hero of the Mexican War and as an able administrator in Florida's Indian conflicts.
With his thick crown of white hair and white mustache-less beard, he looked every bit as ancient as his decades of military service implied.
Although he cast his lot with the South, he was originally from Maryland, which ultimately sided with the North. But Southern sympathies ran deep in the border state, especially on the isolated Eastern Shore, where he was born.
The courthouse marker notes he was born in 1800 in "Rewstown" in the western portion of present-day Wicomico. (The area was part of Somerset at the time.)
A local historian, Jefferson Boyer, said he suspects that "Rewstown" is a misspelling of Rewastico, a community nestled between Quantico and Hebron. There is no other evidence of a home or a place known as "Rewstown" beyond the writing about Winder, he said.
Winder wouldn't call the Shore home for long. His family soon moved across the Chesapeake Bay, and his father, William H. Winder, fought in the U.S. Army as a brigadier general in the War of 1812.
The younger Winder would be inspired to follow his father's footsteps into the military — not so much to emulate him but to redeem the family name. William Winder was the losing commander at the Battle of Bladensburg in 1814, which opened the door for the British to capture Washington, D.C. Afterward, he was court-martialed but acquitted of wrongdoing.
That year, John H. Winder entered West Point. He graduated six years later, finishing 11th in his class of 30.
After bouncing from one post to another, he gained acclaim and a battlefield promotion to major in the Mexican War. At the dawn of the Civil War, though, Winder, like many other military brass with Southern sympathies, chose to fight against the country he had previously devoted his life to fighting for.
What followed was a tumultuous run as the provost marshal of Richmond, a task that led him to use a sometimes-brutal hand to keep the peace. Since that position included oversight of the prison camps springing up around the southern capital, Winder became the overseer of the Confederacy's prisons by default, Pickenpaugh said.
As a result, the historian said, Winder “reigned, but he didn’t rule. He was never given the authority he needed over other officers."
Beyond his command problems, Winder soon faced snags with finding housing for all the POWs streaming into his camps. His situation was compounded by the South's political leaders' stubbornness to look upon blacks as anything but slaves, Cloyd said.
In the first few years of the war, both sides routinely exchanged prisoners after battles. But by the latter half of 1863, the North had begun deploying black soldiers in earnest and demanding that its enemy exchange them just as it had with white soldiers.
The South responded by not only withholding blacks but also the white officers who commanded their black-only regiments. This put an end to the exchange program, and prisoner rolls exploded on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
With the Richmond-area camps overflowing with prisoners and competing with local residents for sustenance, Confederate officials prepared a giant camp in southern Georgia. The location was deemed relatively safe from Union fighting forces and capable of sustaining itself on the bounty available from its home state and nearby Florida.
Hell on Earth
But for anyone who ever set foot inside — Union or Confederate — Andersonville enclosed as much hell as any 26 acres ever has on Earth.
Of the 45,000 Union soldiers imprisoned there, 13,000 would never leave. Those deaths are typically attributed to disease, lack of sanitation, starvation, overcrowding and exposure.
A facility designed to hold 10,000 prisoners, Andersonville, also known as Camp Sumter, would swell to as many as 33,000 men under guard by summer 1864.
A survivor from the 4th Massachusetts Calvary recalled: "The camp was covered with vermin all over. You could not sit down anywhere. You might go and pick the lice all off of you, and sit down for a half a moment and get up and you would be covered with them.
"In between these two hills it was very swampy, all black mud, and where the filth was emptied it was all alive; there was a regular buzz there all the time, and it was covered with large white maggots," the trooper said, according to the National Park Service's Andersonville website.
The overwhelming number of fatalities, coupled with the haunting photographs of emaciated men, provoked immediate outrage in the North. The stockade's commander and Winder's subordinate, Capt. Henry Wirz, bore the brunt of the country's wrath.
At a military tribunal, he was accused of war crimes, including intentionally withholding food and supplies from prisoners. He pleaded innocence, arguing that he was merely carrying out orders and was given insufficient resources to do his job.
On Nov. 10, 1865, Wirz was hanged at the Old Capitol prison in D.C. Winder had died eight months earlier.
“Probably your guy would have been hanged if he had lived," Pickenpaugh said. "I don’t want to sound like Yogi Berra, but dying of a heart attack probably saved his life in the long run.”
Mitigating factors
For more than a century after Winder's death, most historical accounts painted the military bureaucrat as something very close to the personification of evil.
In 1955, the popular historical novel "Andersonville" emerged as the leading authority on the sad chapter in American history, and its appraisal of Winder was damning: "General Winder wanted to kill as many prisoners as possible. It was as simple as that."
It wasn't until 1990, when Winder's first — and still only — biography appeared that talk of mitigating circumstances crept into the debate about his performance.
Although Winder left behind no letters or other writings, "what we do have are his actions," Pickenpaugh said, "and his attempts to do as much as he could suggested at the very least he didn’t want the prisoners abused."
By now the commissary general of prisons, Winder did succeed in effecting some modest improvements in conditions for his prisoners. One of his more sympathetic historians, Charles W. Sanders, wrote that Winder undertook a grueling schedule of prison inspections, instituted a system of bimonthly reports from commandants and repeatedly beseeched his superiors for more aid.
After his first inspection of a prison in Salisbury, North Carolina, for instance, he called on the government to shut it down. The prison's water source, he wrote, emanated a "stench that is insupportable to both the prisoners and the people of the vicinity," according to Pickenpaugh's book, "Captives in Blue."
Another favorite anecdote of Winder's supporters finds him denying Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard's request to borrow 30 prisoners to hunt for land mines along a railroad line.
"I don't think this is legitimate work for prisoners of war," Winder wrote, and Richmond upheld his decision.
By the time Winder officially became the commissary, many historians agree there was little left he or anyone could do to reverse the deteriorating conditions of the prisons. The North's blockade was as crippling as ever, and the South could barely feed its own soldiers, let alone those within its prison walls.
To be sure, the South didn't have a monopoly on harsh prison conditions during the war. Despite its superior advantage in resources, the North also had a similarly dismal record. One of its prisons in Elmira, New York, produced a death rate just 4 points shy of the 29 percent at Andersonville.
“There were Union prison camps where there were people who almost practiced premeditated murder against the Confederates, and they did it out of spite," said Daniel Carroll Toomey, who has written more than a dozen books about Maryland's role in the Civil War. "So, in my mind, they’re no better than anybody else.”
How much blame to assign
But the question of how much Winder did and how much he could have done remains far from settled.
The National Park Service's Andersonville website and others argue that Andersonville's authorities could have relieved the suffering by foraging more in the surrounding landscape. As Gen. William Sherman's stunning march through Georgia illustrated, they say, there were supplies aplenty in the countryside.
"Is (Winder) doing everything he can?" Boyer asked. "I have trouble with that one.”
That argument ignores one key difference between Sherman's army and Andersonville, Pickenpaugh said. The army was on the move, capable of finding fresh resources around the next bend. The prison, however, was stationary and surely exhausted everything useful early on that was within foraging distance, he said.
If Winder's efforts fell short, his pride may have been one of his downfalls.
After a scathing internal report described Andersonville as "a place of horrors," Winder attacked the investigator, accusing him of having become "the plaything of the cute Yankees," Pickenpaugh wrote. Everything that could be done was being done, Winder added in his official reply.
Historians likely will always question Winder's effectiveness and state of mind amid the tragedy unfolding before his very eyes, said Cloyd, whose work has sought to show how lingering resentment over prisoner abuse influenced the war's bitter aftermath.
Civil War emblems like Winder's marker continue to stir so much passion “because people are finally coming to terms with the fact the Civil War is unfinished business," he said. “Many of the same issues and causes that sparked the war in the first place remain barely resolved if not resolved at all.”
If anything can be said firmly about Winder's culpability, Cloyd added, it may be this: "If his job was to provide humanitarian care in the people under his command, that was not accomplished.”
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