A large number of political offenders were arrested. “Union talk” became a more serious misdemeanor. The common jail was filled up rapidly. Some prisoners were sent to Alabama for confinement. One of these was the Hon. Mr. Pickens, State Senator from the counties of Blount and Sevier. He had been already designated by name as a victim, in a postscript from Secretary of War, J. P. Benjamin, to Col. Wood. His son had been of the party that unsuccessfully assailed Strawberry Plains bridge, and was there wounded, but not mortally, evaded the soldiers who pursued him until his injury was healed, then escaped into Kentucky and joined the Federal army. Senator Pickens was a person of superior character and greatly esteemed by the people. He did not long survive, a captive and exile at Tuscaloosa, Alabama; and when death had released him at one and the same moment from “this prison of the body” and from a Confederate jail, his wife, too, sickened and went to the higher freedom into which his spirit passed. A number of persons had been arrested at different places, who were accused of having shared in the assaults upon bridges or their destruction. Col. Ledbetter, in command of the Post at Greeneville (reputed to be a native of the State of Maine), “stuck in the letter” of Secretary Benjamin’s instructions that “all such (prisoners) as can be identified in having been engaged in bridge-burning are to be tried summarily by drum-head court-martial, and if found guilty, executed on the spot by hanging,” and also “to leave their bodies hanging in the vicinity of the burned bridges.” In consequence, two men--Hensie and Fry--were hung at Greeneville by Col. Ledbetter’s immediate authority and without delay. Their bodies, instead of being quartered and distributed abroad after an old English custom, were left suspended for four days near the railroad track. In that exposure, they seem to have been less of a terror to Union men of the vicinity, than objects of merry observation to railway passengers. Had not the executions been so hasty, it might have been discovered, in time to save Fry’s life, that not he, but another person of the same surname, was the real offender in the case.