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.

But, what also militates greatly against the presumption that either
revenge or an abnormal predisposition to cruelty could have animated
Winder, is that the possession of any two such mental traits so strongly
marked would presuppose a corresponding activity of other intellectual
faculties, which was not true of him, as from all I can learn of him his
mind was in no respect extraordinary.

It does not seem possible that he had either the brain to conceive, or
the firmness of purpose to carry out so gigantic and long-enduring a
career of cruelty, because that would imply superhuman qualities in a man
who had previously held his own very poorly in the competition with other
men.

The probability is that neither Winder nor his direct superiors--Howell
Cobb and Jefferson Davis--conceived in all its proportions the gigantic
engine of torture and death they were organizing; nor did they comprehend
the enormity of the crime they were committing. But they were willing to
do much wrong to gain their end; and the smaller crimes of to-day
prepared them for greater ones to-morrow, and still greater ones the day