“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. The father was a coward and incompetent; the son, always cautiously distant from the scene of hostilities, was the tormentor of those whom fortunes of war and the arms of brave men threw into his hands.“ Of his personal appearance I have no recollection, but the above is a true picture of his character. He filled a place in the Confederacy which no brave officer of equal rank would have accepted. Hill, Longstreet, Early, Polk, Hardee, even Forrest and Mosby would have spurned with contempt an offer of assignment to the position occupied by the cowardly John H. Winder. Of Captain Henry Wirz I can write of my own knowledge. In personal appearance he was about five feet nine or ten inches in height, slightly built with stooping shoulders. He had a small peaked head, small twinkling eyes, grisly, frowsy whiskers, and the general contour of his features and expression of eyes reminded one of a rodent. In character he was pusillanimous, vindictive, mean and irritable to those beneath him, or who had the misfortune to be in his power; while to his superiors he was humble and cringing, an Uriah Heep; a person who would “Crook the pregnant hinges of his knee, that thrift might follow fawning.”