Clement Comer Clay, a lawyer, who had been a soldier in the Creek Indian War, Chief-Justice of his State, and had served in both branches of Congress and as Governor of Alabama, was arrested and tried at Huntsville, when seventy-three years of age, by a military commission of which I was president. There were several charges against him, the most serious of which was for aiding and advising guerillas to secretly shoot down Union soldiers, cut telegraph lines, and wreck trains. This charge he vehemently denied until a letter in his own handwriting was produced, recently written to a guerilla chief, advising him and his band to do the things mentioned. He was not severely dealt with, but was sent to Camp Chase, Ohio, for detention. He was later liberated, and died in Huntsville in 1866. His son, Clement Claiborne Clay, had been a judge, and subsequently a United States Senator. He withdrew from the Senate in February, 1861, and was formally expelled in March, 1861. He became a Senator in the Confederate Congress in 1862, and during the last two years of the war was the secret agent of the Confederacy in Canada, where he plotted raids on the Northern frontier. General O. M. Mitchel held advanced notions on the subject of the treatment and disposition of slaves of masters in arms against the government. The slaves of such masters, he thought, should be confiscated. He used some slaves as spies to gain information of the enemy, and to located secreted Confederate supplies, and to them he promised protection, if not freedom. Secretary Stanton approved his action and views in this matter.( 6) But Buell, his immediate commander, wholly disapproved of all employment or use of slaves in any manner as instruments to put down the rebellion. Mitchel, therefore, soon fell into disfavor with him. Buell, on learning that Mitchel had employed some able- bodied escaped slaves to aid the soldiers in constructing stockades to protect railroad bridges, necessary to be maintained to enable supplies to be brought up, ordered Mitchel to send an officer to see that slaves thus employed were forthwith returned to their masters. I was accordingly directed by Mitchel to take a small guard, and, with a locomotive and car, go to the bridges west of Huntsville and north of the Tennessee River, on the line of railroad from Decatur through Athens towards Nashville, to execute this order of Buell's. I executed it to the _letter--only_. While on this unpleasant duty I came to a place where a scouting party, commanded by a lieutenant sent out by Mitchel, had two citizen- disguised Confederate guerillas, just taken in the act of cutting the telegraph wires, an offence, by a proclamation of Mitchel, punishable by death. The scouting party proceeded to hang them with wire to telegraph poles. I did not approve the summary punishment, but was powerless and without authority over the officer; and was then engaged only in returning slaves to their owners.