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 all the inquisitors of the world ever slew by the less dreadful rack and wheel.  It was he who in August could point to the 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 an incompetent; the son, always cautiously distant from the scene of hostilities, was the tormentor of those whom the fortunes of war, and the arms of brave men threw into his hands.

Winder gazed at us stonily for a few minutes without speaking, and, turning, rode out again.

Our troubles, from that hour, rapidly increased.

CHAPTER XVII.

The plantation negros—­not stupid to be loyal—­their dithyrambic music —­copperhead opinion of Longfellow.

The stockade was not quite finished at the time of our arrival—­a gap of several hundred feet appearing at the southwest corner.  A gang of about two hundred negros were at work felling trees, hewing legs, and placing them upright in the trenches.  We had an opportunity—­soon to disappear forever—­of studying the workings of the “peculiar institution” in its very home.  The negros were of the lowest field-hand class, strong, dull, ox-like, but each having in our eyes an admixture of cunning and secretiveness that their masters pretended was not in them.  Their demeanor toward us illustrated this.  We were the objects of the most supreme interest to them, but when near us and in the presence of a white Rebel, this interest took the shape of stupid, open-eyed, open-mouthed wonder, something akin to the look on the face of the rustic lout, gazing for the first time upon a locomotive or a steam threshing machine.  But if chance threw one of them near us when he thought himself unobserved by the Rebels, the blank, vacant face lighted up with an entirely different expression.  He was no longer the credulous yokel who believed the Yankees were only slightly modified devils, ready at any instant to return to their original horn-and-tail condition and snatch him away to the bluest kind of perdition; he knew, apparently quite as well as his master, that they were in some way his friends and allies, and he lost no opportunity in communicating his appreciation of that fact, and of offering his services in any possible way.  And these offers were sincere.  It is the testimony of every Union prisoner in the South