Biography
William A. Bowles was an Indiana physician and a leader of the Sons of Liberty, an antiwar secret society. Arrested in 1864, he was tried before a military commission at Indianapolis alongside Lambdin P. Milligan and sentenced to death. He was freed after the Supreme Court's 1866 decision in Ex parte Milligan held that civilians could not be tried by military tribunals where the civil courts were open.
Additional source for this Civil War detention: John A. Marshall, American Bastile (1869), printed pages 74, 83, 87, https://archive.org/details/americanbastile00marsgoog/page/n87/mode/2up. This is a partisan retrospective account; its judgments should be read as attributed claims.
