was arrested and jailed for several weeks before being allowed to flee to the North. Attorneys John Baxter and Oliver Perry Temple remained in Knoxville for much of the war, and rendered assistance to Unionists facing charges in Confederate courts. Numerous Convention delegates served in the Union Army. At the Convention's Greeneville session, Robert K. Byrd (of Roane), Joseph A. Cooper (of Campbell), Richard M. Edwards (of Bradley), S. C. Langley (of Morgan), and William J. Clift (of Hamilton) made a secret pact to return to their respective homes and raise troops to defend the region. Others would flee across the border to Kentucky to join the Union army. Cooper and James G. Spears would both rise to the rank of general. More than two dozen Convention delegates would achieve the rank of colonel, and numerous others served as lower-ranking officers. Perhaps the most brazen wartime act in which East Tennessee Convention delegates engaged was the East Tennessee bridge-burning conspiracy, an attempt to destroy nine railroad bridges across the region to make way for a Union invasion. William B. Carter, who had been a member of the Carter County delegation at the Convention, was the mastermind behind the conspiracy. He was aided by Hamilton County delegate Alfred Cate, Anderson County delegate William Cross, and Sevier County delegate Daniel M. Ray. On the night of November 8, 1861, the conspirators destroyed five of the nine targeted bridges, but the Union Army balked at an invasion. In response to the bridge burnings, Zollicoffer instituted martial law in East Tennessee. Many Convention delegates suffered greatly as a result of their Union sympathies, and some died. Tolliver Staples, a Morgan County delegate, was captured in Kentucky in 1863, and executed by Champ Ferguson's men. John McGaughey, a delegate from McMinn, was executed by Confederate guerillas in early 1865. Montgomery Thornburgh, a Jefferson County delegate, died in a Confederate prison in Tuscaloosa. Hamilton County delegate William J. Clift nearly died from injuries sustained during his escape from a Confederate prison in Atlanta. Convention secretary John M. Fleming and Sevier County delegate Robert H. Hodsden were arrested and detained by Confederate authorities in December 1861, but were subsequently cleared by a Confederate court. Second Knoxville session President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, issued in early 1863, divided Tennessee's Unionists. While Andrew Johnson, who had been appointed the state's military governor, supported the Proclamation, other prominent Unionists, including T.