en 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.

Prior to this order of Buell's, Congress had passed an