Ask the average Arkansan to name the most famous Civil War figure from our state, and the answer (if any) is likely to be a 17-year-old civilian who never fired a weapon in combat.
This improbable celebrity, David Owen Dodd, was hanged as a spy by Union forces in Little Rock on Jan. 8, 1864, after a six-day military trial.
The execution’s 150th anniversary will be marked ceremonially Saturday at his grave site in Mount Holly Cemetery. A program will follow at the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History, as the sesquicentennial of the 1861-1865 Civil War marches on.
Dodd is lionized in these parts as the “Boy Martyr of the Confederacy” - although “Teen Martyr” would be a more accurate sobriquet for a young man who was only a year short of being old enough to be drafted into the Rebel army.
In terms of actual battlefield valor, Arkansans versed in Civil War lore can cite the renown of Gen. Patrick R. Cleburne.
Fellow Confederate commanders lauded Cleburne, who came from Helena, as “the Stonewall Jackson of the West.” He died in action in 1864 at the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., and an Arkansas county is named for him.
But Dodd, however peripheral his role in history, is the one immortalized in a stained glass window at the MacArthur Museum.
He is the one interred at Mount Holly, the so-called “Westminster Abbey of Arkansas,” in the company of assorted U.S. senators, Arkansas governors and Arkansas Supreme Court justices.
He is the one for whom a public school in southwest Little Rock is named, along with a street that leads to it.
He is the one whose name graces the official Arkansas centennial rose promulgated in 1936.
He is the one featured in a full-length play, staged three years ago by The Weekend Theater.
He is the one memorialized in various poems laced with elegiac sentiments about “the boy who gave his life for his Southland.” Poet Will T.Hale reverently rhymed, “For when for duty and right one dies, He even the gallows defies.”
The circumstances of Dodd’s death are succinctly recounted in Rugged and Sublime, a 1994 collection of essays on the Civil War in Arkansas. The essay’s author, Daniel E. Sutherland, is a historian at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville:
“Dodd’s trial, held before a military commission, had begun on the last day of 1863. He had been arrested two days earlier as a spy on the Benton road, 20 miles south of Little Rock. Dodd claimed to be innocent, but he carried a coded message that described part of the Federal defenses in Little Rock. The commission found him guilty on Jan. 5, and three days later some 6,000 people crowded onto the grounds of St. John’s Masonic School in Little Rock to watch him be hanged.
“Dodd entered the grounds sometime around 3 p.m. He rode in an open wagon and was seated on his own coffin. After a disgusting struggle in which he choked to death rather than having his neck broken, the lad gave his death kick and swung gently in the breeze for eight minutes, his feet dangling just above the ground. He was buried in Mount Holly Cemetery the following day.”
Details of the hanging are among the areas where fact blurs with legend. The discrepancy is pointed out by Carl H. Moneyhon, a history professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, one of the speakers at Saturday’s MacArthur Museum event:
“Contemporary sources make no note that anything unusual happened. The story that the execution was botched does not develop until much later. In these stories, somehow Dodd was strangled to death rather than having his neck broken as is typical in a hanging. The strangling stories vary considerably.”
SOURCE OF SPY MATERIAL
Pointing out that contemporary sources for the Dodd story are “fairly limited,” Moneyhon calls “hardly plausible” his lawyers’ contention at the trial that he was too naive to have gathered the coded material and must have gotten it from others.
The information, according to Moneyhon, included nothing “that could not have been gathered by simply moving about Little Rock and talking to people there. Nonetheless, the story that develops after the war asserts the truth of this defense, making Dodd’s execution even more heinous.”
The narrative changes over time, as Moneyhon recounts: “The story that Mary Dodge, a possible love interest, may have provided the information does not appear until 1915.”
Another doubtful part of the story, as Moneyhon sees it, is the notion that Union Maj. Gen. Frederick Steele repeatedly offered to call off the execution if Dodd would inform on his sources:
“There is no primary evidence to indicate that this did or did not happen. The modern story, however, continues to insist on Dodd’s refusal to inform on his friends. Indeed, this becomes the key to Dodd’s heroic character. It avoids celebrating the cause for which he was acting and instead links him to other heroic characters. He is variously likened to [Revolutionary War patriot] Nathan Hale - ‘I have but one life to give for my country.’ To Jesus Christ - giving up his life for his fellow man.”
The UALR professor credits efforts by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the first quarter of the 20th century as playing “a major role in making him ‘the Boy Martyr of the Confederacy.’ For a variety of reasons, they embraced Dodd as a reflection of the truly heroic in the Civil War and did all they could to celebrate his memory.”
By Moneyhon’s account, interest in Dodd later diminished, but was revived in the 1980s when the Sons of Confederate Veterans began the annual ceremony at Mount Holly.
“I have one source that suggests this began about 1985, but I have been unable to locate any newspaper coverage of the event until the 1990s,” Moneyhon reports. “If you read the accounts of these events, you can find that Dodd has come to represent a variety of things to different people. Some celebrate the heroism of the boy who gave up his life rather than inform on his friends. Others that he gave up his life for a particular cause.”
The youthful spy’s legacy is addressed by another historian, LeRoy H. Fischer of Oklahoma State University, in a 1978 article for the Arkansas Historical Quarterly:
“A mixture of fact and legend is woven around Dodd.Even stripped of fanciful invention, his story is one of personal courage and human pathos. His death highlighted the cruelty of a war that was no respecter of youth or fortitude. Moreover, Dodd’s death and the legends which cling to it are a revealing study in Arkansas history and folklore.”
The evolution of Dodd’s story, writes Fischer, “illustrates several stages by which historical fact gives way to fictional embellishment. First there was the historical figure of David around which a legend could coalesce. His personal popularity in Little Rock, tragic death for the Confederate cause, and stoic deportment on the gallows were like bits of an element, suspended in solution, to which crystals of folklore might adhere.”
A FRESH EXAMINATION
A fresh look at the saga appears in the current issue of The Pulaski County Historical Review. Written by lawyer Phillip H. McMath, also author of the 2011 play about Dodd, it relies in part on previously unexplored letters of Maj. Gen. Steele.
McMath focuses on the question of why Steele chose not to spare Dodd’s life. The general, he writes, “could have referred the matter directly to [President Abraham] Lincoln, with whom he was in direct and regular correspondence.”
Lincoln “was famous for commuting death sentences of Union and Rebel alike.” And one of Dodd’s lawyers, William Fishback, had been a friend of Lincoln when both were practicing law in Illinois.
Steele did write a letter on the morning of the hanging to a group of Little Rock women who had petitioned for clemency. He explained his refusal to spare Dodd:
“His youth and inexperience pled strongly in his favor as an individual, but as the object of punishment is not revenge but to deter others from committing similar acts, it was necessary to make an example of a person whom our sympathies tell us was almost guileless.”
Based on one passage in Steele’s correspondence, McMath concludes that the general believed he had captured “a mere courier. … It seemed obvious that someone in his own army had been a traitor” - probably an officer.
So Steele believed “he was setting an example for an espionage ring that had compromised his own command. That was his biggest concern. David O. Dodd, it turns out, was a pawn in a much bigger game.”
As for Dodd’s heroism, McMath acknowledges that he “showed amazing grace under pressure” the day of his hanging, as manifest in a final letter to his family. But the author adds a caveat from the defendant’s written statement at the trial:
“Yet, when faced with death by hanging, David O. Dodd readily renounced the Confederacy as ‘insurgents,’ disavowed any relationship or service to it, and offered to swear allegiance to the United States. In short, despite his loyalty to the South, he did everything to save himself save compromise his comrades.”
The most exhaustive account of Dodd’s life and death can be found in Boy Hero of the Confederacy, a 184-page book by avocational historian Jim Lair published in 2001.
“Had David Owen Dodd not lived, or had his choice been to adopt another way of life for himself, we of the Southland would have created someone of his stature,” writes Lair, a Maumelle resident. “Humankind has long exhibited the need for heroes, role models, exalted individuals worthy of emulation.”
Lair quotes a contributor to the 1989 Encyclopedia of Southern Culture as asserting: “The most significant impact of the Civil War upon Southern culture lay not in its reality but in its memory. The memory may have been a myth, but for many Southerners the Lost Cause has been a myth believed and acted upon.”
As Lair sums up, “David O. Dodd is a classic representation of that idea: Much that has been accepted in the surrounding aura of his life has its roots in legend; the reality of his existence is incredible; and many have acted upon his legend and reality to create one of the foremost folk heroes of the Confederacy.”Dodd forum at museum, memorial at cemetery
Programs at Mount Holly Cemetery and the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History on Saturday will mark the sesquicentennial of David O. Dodd’s hanging.
The annual memorial service, organized by David O. Dodd Camp No. 619 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, will begin at 10 a.m. at Mount Holly. Members of the organization and Confederate re-enactors will meet at 8:30 a.m. at MacArthur Park to make the mile-long march to the cemetery at 1200 S. Broadway.
More information on the ceremony can be found at arkansassvc.org.
The free event from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday at the MacArthur Museum, 503 E. Ninth St., is titled “David O. Dodd: The Man, The Myth,The Window.”
Speaking will be Anthony Rushing, a high-school history teacher; Carl H. Moneyhon, a history professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock; and Stephan McAteer, executive director of the MacArthur Museum.
Rushing will discuss the historical figure of Dodd, while Moneyhon will address the Dodd myths that have arisen since the Civil War. McAteer will talk about the origins and history of the Dodd stained glass window exhibited at the museum. The program is sponsored by the Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission.
For details, call the museum at (501) 376-4602 or visit arkmilitaryheritage.com.
- Jack Schnedler
Style, Pages 45 on 01/05/2014