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Chapman (1880), pp. 411, 443, 680; Howard (1907) I, pp. 716–731, 736–742; Goodspeed (1893), Clay sketches read whole
Clay Township's war begins with a committee, not a company. At the second South Bend war meeting, on Friday evening, 19 April 1861 — a week after Sumter — township committees were appointed across the county to solicit subscriptions to form and equip volunteer companies and to provide for volunteers' families. Chapman names Clay's three committeemen (p. 411), and Howard prints them spelled out (p. 717): Thomas P. Bulla, G. E. Benton, and Jacob Eaton — the township's own first families, the mill-and-farm settlement organizing its money before its sons. No Clay Township militia company, and no Clay Township militia officer, is named in Chapman, Howard, or Goodspeed; the county's companies were raised as county companies, and Howard's muster rolls carry no township attribution anywhere. A township total — how many Clay men served, under what quota, at what bounty — is not in any carrier reached and stands as a named gap; what the books give instead is men, one at a time.
The one Clay serviceman Chapman names is a survivor. Samuel Jennings, born in Clay Township in 1845, a farmer of Section 30 and the township's Assessor when Chapman wrote, "enlisted in the army at South Bend, as a private," in the 21st Indiana Battery, served "until the close of the war," and was "discharged, June 27, 1865" (Chapman, Clay chapter biography, p. 680). Howard corroborates him twice: in the battery's own roster (p. 730), and — a generation on — in the 1903–04 roster of South Bend's Auten Post No. 8, G.A.R., which lists "Jennings, Samuel," 21st Battery, among its living members (pp. 736–742). His captain's name carries a small seam, printed whole and unmerged: the biography gives "Capt. W. W. Andrews"; both books' battery material gives William W. Andrew, singular. Terrell's Adjutant-General roster settles the spelling and Jennings's exact muster dates together. Chapman's other ten Clay-chapter biographies were read whole; Jennings's is the only one containing war service.