In his examination touching this report, Colonel Chandler says: 

“I noticed that General Winder seemed very indifferent to the welfare of the prisoners, indisposed to do anything, or to do as much as I thought he ought to do, to alleviate their sufferings.  I remonstrated with him as well as I could, and he used that language which I reported to the Department with reference to it—­the language stated in the report.  When I spoke of the great mortality existing among the prisoners, and pointed out to him that the sickly season was coming on, and that it must necessarily increase unless something was done for their relief—­the swamp, for instance, drained, proper food furnished, and in better quantity, and other sanitary suggestions which I made to him—­he replied to me that he thought it was better to see half of them die than to take care of the men.”

It was he who could issue such an order as this, when it was supposed that General Stoneman was approaching Andersonville: 

         &nb
sp;                         Headquartersmilitary prison,
                                   Andersonville, Ga., July 27, 1864. 
The officers on duty and in charge of the Battery of Florida Artillery at the time will, upon receiving notice that the enemy has approached within seven miles of this post, open upon the Stockade with grapeshot, without reference to the situation beyond these lines of defense.

                                   JohnH. Winder,
                              Brigadier General Commanding.

This man was not only unpunished, but the Government is to-day supporting his children in luxury by the rent it pays for the use of his property —­the well-known Winder building, which is occupied by one of the Departments at Washington.

I confess that all my attempts to satisfactorily analyze Winder’s character and discover a sufficient motive for his monstrous conduct have been futile.  Even if we imagine him inspired by a hatred of the people of the North that rose to fiendishness, we can not understand him.  It seems impossible for the mind of any man to cherish so deep and insatiable an enmity against his fellow-creatures that it could not be quenched and turned to pity by the sight of even one day’s misery at Andersonville or Florence.  No one man could possess such a grievous sense of private or national wrongs as to be proof against the daily spectacle of thousands of his own fellow citizens, inhabitants of the same country, associates in the same institutions, educated in the same principles, speaking the same language—­thousands of his brethren in race, creed, and all that unite men into great communities, starving, rotting and freezing to death.

There is many a man who has a hatred so intense that nothing but the death of the detested one will satisfy it.  A still fewer number thirst for a more comprehensive retribution; they would slay perhaps a half-dozen persons; and there may be such gluttons of revenge as would not be satisfied with the sacrifice of less than a score or two, but such would be monsters of whom there have been very few, even in fiction.  How must they all bow their diminished heads before a man who fed his animosity fat with tens of thousands of lives.