when they were paying the same tribute to the memory of their comrades buried on the mainland, and they have even been subjected to some criticism for this display of magnanimity. One sometimes sees statements that none of the prisoners ever succeeded in escaping from Johnson’s Island, but in the Burley extradition proceedings Capt. Robert C. Kennedy, who was afterwards hanged for his part in the plot to burn New York, swore that he had effected such an escape. Almost from the establishment of this dépôt for prisoners of war there were rumors of threatened attacks upon it by Confederates from Canada, though the first actual plan for a Rebel raid on the Great Lakes of which we have any official evidence, seems to have been directed primarily against the _Michigan_, the only Union war vessel in these waters, while she still lay at Erie. In February, 1863, Lieut. William Murdaugh, of the Confederate navy, laid before his superiors a plan for capturing the _Michigan_ and destroying the lake cities. He proposed, with a small steamer and fifty men armed with cutlasses, revolvers, and small iron buoys to be used as torpedoes, to surprise and capture the Union vessel by boarding and then, before news of the affair had reached the Canadians, to send the smaller vessel back through the Welland Canal, to work destruction along the New York shore of Lake Ontario, and especially to the Erie Canal aqueduct at Rochester, while he himself proceeded, in the _Michigan_, to treat in a similar fashion the locks and shipping at Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and the Sault Ste. Marie, finally running the _Michigan_ ashore in Georgian Bay and destroying her. The Confederate Cabinet approved of the scheme and set aside $100,000 for its consummation, but Murdaugh says that when everything was ready for a start Jefferson Davis, while deeming the enterprise practicable, caused it to be laid aside for a time, lest such a storm should be aroused over the violation of the British neutrality laws as to put a stop to the building of Confederate ironclads then on the stocks in England. Just six months later Secretaries Seddon and Mallory suggested to Lieut. R. D. Minor, also of the Confederate navy, a similar undertaking having for its main purpose the release of the Confederates confined at Sandusky. The proposition was eagerly embraced, and a party of twenty-two naval officers, who undertook to carry it out, reached Montreal about October 21 and announced to the Johnson’s Island prisoners, through the personal column of the New York _Herald_, that “a carriage would be at the door a few nights after the fourth of November.” The original plan contemplated taking passage on a lake steamer at Windsor, opposite Detroit, and seizing her when fairly out on Lake Erie. The prisoners were expected to overcome their rather scanty guard, and their rescuers were simply to receive them on board for transportation to Canada. But on learning that the lake steamers seldom