David O. Dodd

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David Owen Dodd


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David Owen Dodd



The only known photograph of Dodd

Born November 10, 1846(1846-11-10)

Lavaca County, Texas, USA

Died January 8, 1864 (aged 17)

Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Known for Hanged as a spy in the American Civil War

Religion Baptist



David Owen Dodd (November 10, 1846 – January 8, 1864) was an American 17 year-old who was tried, convicted and hanged as a Confederate spy in the American Civil War.[1]



In December 1863, Dodd carried some letters to business associates of his father in Union-held Little Rock, Arkansas. While traveling home to Confederate-held Camden, Arkansas, he mistakenly re-entered Union territory. Found to be without a pass, Union soldiers questioned him and discovered that he was carrying a notebook with the locations of Union troops in the area. He was arrested and tried by a military tribunal, with little defense offered for his actions. The tribunal found him guilty of spying and he was hanged for his crime in January 1864. Though Dodd did not reveal the source of the information, a 15-year old girl named Mary Dodge and her father were summarily escorted back to their home in Vermont. These events have led to David Owen Dodd being called the "Boy Martyr of the Confederacy".[1]



Biography

Early life

David Owen Dodd was born in Victoria, Lavaca County, Texas, to Andrew Marion Dodd, a merchant, and Lydia Echols Owen.[1][2] His Baptist[3] parents had married in a village south of Little Rock, Arkansas and moved to Texas where David and his sisters, Leonora and Senhora, were born. David's sister Leonora died before the Civil War.[2]



In 1856, the family returned to Arkansas and settled near Benton. In 1861, the Dodds moved to Little Rock to be closer to Senhora, who attended school in the city and lived with her aunt, Mrs. Susan A. Dodd. David Dodd went to classes at St. John's Masonic College. Dodd and his father moved to Monroe, Louisiana in August 1862, where Dodd began working as a clerk in the telegraph office, where he learned Morse code. His father traveled to Mississippi, leaving Dodd to stay with family and friends.[1][2]



In January 1863, Dodd went to Grenada, Mississippi and worked for his father who was operating a store. In September 1863, when the Union Army occupied Little Rock, the entire Dodd family moved south to Camden, Ouachita County, behind Confederate lines.[1][2][4]



Trip to Little Rock

As Union troops destroyed southern fields, tobacco was becoming scarce. Andrew Dodd devised a plan to buy tobacco and store it for later sale at a higher price. He looked to his business associates in Little Rock for the needed cash. Because Little Rock was in Union hands, he could not make the trip himself.[5]





Confederate General Fagan gave Dodd a pass so he could travel to Little Rock.On December 24, 1863, he sent David Dodd, a minor and therefore assumed neutral, to Little Rock to deliver letters to former associates seeking investments for the tobacco deal. Confederate General James F. Fagan issued the boy a pass. Dodd rode a mule to Little Rock, carrying a birth certificate showing he was an underage 17 along with his pass.[1][5]



Dodd stayed with his aunt, Mrs. Susan Dodd, in Little Rock. Except for some Union soldiers, there were very few teenage boys in the city, and Dodd was popular with the city's younger girls. He even became popular with some of the younger servicemen at the arsenal, especially because he usually was accompanied by a local girl or two. In addition to his father's letters, he also delivered letters to several people he knew.[2] Dodd attended some holiday dances with at least two girls, Mary Swindle and Minerva Cogburn. He also spent some time with 16-year-old Mary Dodge at her home, where Union officers were quartered. Mary supported the Southern cause; her father, R. L. Dodge, was a Vermont native on friendly terms with the Northern troops.[1][5]



On December 28, 1863, Dodd visited the Provost Marshal's office at St. John's College (several hundred yards southwest of the arsenal) and had no trouble obtaining a pass through Union lines to rejoin his family in Camden.[2] Dodd left Little Rock the next day. As he left Union territory, the guard tore up Dodd's pass since he would no longer need it now that he was in Confederate land. He went toward Hot Springs to spend the night with his uncle, Washington Dodd, southwest of Little Rock. The next day, Dodd traveled through the woods and found himself back behind Union lines.[1][5]



Arrest and trial

On December 29, 1863, Dodd was stopped by a Union sentry in west Little Rock, near Ten Mile House on Stagecoach Road, and was discovered to be without a pass. For identification, he showed his small leather notebook, where Union soldiers found his birth certificate and a page with dots and dashes. A Union officer was able to read some of the Morse code messages, which contained information about Union troop strength and locations in Little Rock; Dodd was arrested.[1][5]



The next day, Dodd was taken to Little Rock to face Brigadier General John Davidson, who was commanding the Union occupation forces in General Frederick Steele's absence. A telegraph operator translated the Morse code, which provided precise locations and strengths of Union troops. David was formally charged as a spy and was taken to the military prison on the site of the present Arkansas State Capitol building.[5] Dodd was interrogated for two days by Union officers who tried to discover the source of the information. On the third day, under personal orders from General Steele, Mary Dodge and her father were escorted under armed guard to a Union gunboat on the Arkansas River and transported to Vermont, where Mary was kept until the end of the war. This suggests that Steele had discovered that Mary Dodge was involved, and that he would not be able to hang a 16-year-old girl.[5]



On December 31, 1863, Dodd's trial began in Little Rock by a military tribunal of six Union officers. Brigadier General John M. Thayer presided with Captain B. F. Rice as Judge Advocate. Other members were Colonel John A. Garrett, Major Phineus Graves, Major H. D. Gibson and Captain George Rockwell.[5][6] The Court Martial lasted four days.[2]



The official charges were read by the Judge Advocate:



"In this, that said David O. Dodd, an inhabitant of the State of Arkansas, did as a Spy of the so-called Confederate States of America, enter within the lines of the Army of the United States, stationed at Little Rock, Arkansas, and did there secretly possess himself of information regarding the number, the kind, and position of the troops of said Army of the United States, their commanders, and other military information valuable to the enemy now at war with the United States, and having thus obtained said information did obtain a pass from the Provost Marshal General's office, and endeavor to reach the lines of the enemy - therewith; when he was arrested at the cavalry outposts of said Army - and did otherwise lurk, and act as a spy of the Rebels now in arms against the United States - This at the Post of Little Rock, and the encampments of the Army of Arkansas, on or about the 29th and 30th of December, 1863."[6]



To these charges, David pleaded "Not Guilty".[6]



On January 1, 1864, the trial continued with Dodd represented by attorneys T. D. W. Yonley and William Fishback, who was pro-Union and later became Governor of Arkansas. The defense attorneys proposed amnesty, which was rejected by the tribunal after an adjournment to deliberate the matter. Court was adjourned until the next day.[6]



On January 2, 1864, witnesses were called to testify against Dodd. Private Daniel Goldberg testified that he tore up Dodd's pass because "he did not need a pass anymore". Sergeant Frederick Miehr testified that he arrested Dodd after the boy could not produce a pass. 1st Lieutenant C. F. Stopral found Dodd's memoranda book, discovered that the Morse code reported the positions and armaments of the 3rd Ohio Battery and 11th Ohio Battery, and sent him to the guard house. Captain George Hanna testified that he interrogated Dodd, and discovered that Dodd was carrying one pocketbook containing Louisiana money, Confederate money, ten dollars in greenbacks, and some Confederate postage stamps; one postal currency holder, one loaded Deringer pistol, and a package between his shirts containing letters. Captain John Baird testified that, per Hanna's orders, he took the prisoner and the papers into Little Rock the next morning to General Davidson. Captain Robert C. Clowery testified that he interpreted the Morse code as containing detailed information about the locations and strengths of Union forces and armaments. First Lieutenant George O. Sokalski then testified about the actual Union troop strength and weaponry, which was a match of Dodd's coded message.[6]



During the trial, Dodd was asked several times to name the Union traitor who gave him the troop information; each time he remained silent. The defense tried to explain the Morse Code information as something Dodd did to exercise his telegraph skills. Dodd did not testify, although his written deposition was submitted.[5] Only character witnesses were called.[6]



By a 4–2 vote,[5] David Dodd was convicted of spying for the Confederacy and was sentenced to be hanged. He was taken back to the State Prison. General Steele designated Friday, January 8, 1864 for the execution day.[2]



Hanging



Union General Steele set the date for hanging.On January 8, 1864, David O. Dodd was brought to the grounds of his former school, St. John's, just east of the Little Rock Arsenal, for his hanging.[1] A crowd of five or six thousand gathered to watch the hanging.[7] Dodd stood on the tailgate of a wagon under the noose. The executioner, named Dekay, fixed the rope around David's neck, and the prop was knocked from under the tailgate. The rope stretched and the boy dangled, strangling to death over a full five minutes. Onlookers and Union soldiers became ill.[1][2][5]



The record is unclear about exactly how Dodd died. Some contend that one or two soldiers grabbed his legs to add weight and hasten his death. Others told that a soldier shinnied up the gibbet to grab the noose, twist the rope and raise the condemned off the ground.[1][5] Military doctors who examined Dodd's body reported death due to "a disrupted spine."[2]



Just prior to the funeral, Union Headquarters ordered no spoken or sung words at the memorial service, and that only Dodd's relatives in Union-held territory (two aunts and their husbands) would be allowed to attend. The town was tense; a riot was possible; there was fear that a Confederate raid would take advantage of the situation. Security around General Steele's Headquarters was increased; no one was allowed to see him except on official business.[5] Calm prevailed, and David O. Dodd was buried in plot Elm 355[8] in the southeast portion of Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock, in a grave donated by a Little Rock resident.[1][4] This cemetery was also the eventual resting place of R.L. Dodge and General Fagan.[5]



At a time when Union sympathies ran high in Arkansas and a constitutional convention was in session to enable the state to rejoin the Union, Dodd's execution fueled renewed divisions between Union and Confederate factions. Dodd quickly became a folk hero and a force behind renewed Confederate dissension.[7] After hearing the news of their son's execution, Andrew and Lydia Dodd spent the remainder of their lives in ill health. Andrew died of yellow fever in 1867, while Lydia died in Pascagoula, Mississippi in 1885.[5] In March 1864, General Steele was relieved of responsibilities in Little Rock and was replaced by a harsh anti-southern commander.[5]



Legacy

Dodd's story has been told in the poem The Long, Long Thoughts of Youth by Marie Erwin Ward, a full-length play and a 1915 silent Hollywood movie whose film has not survived.[1]



There are more monuments to David O. Dodd in Arkansas than to any other of its war heroes, including General Douglas MacArthur.[5] A monument marks the spot of Dodd's hanging, now in the corner of the parking lot of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's School of Law.[5] Dodd's grave is marked by an eight-foot marble monument, engraved "Here lies the remains of David O. Dodd. Born in Lavaca County, Texas, Nov. 10, 1846, died Jan. 8, 1864." Nearby is a marble scroll with the words "Boy Martyr of the Confederacy."[1] David O. Dodd Elementary School in southwest Little Rock is located on land that was once a part of Washington Dodd's Farm. A stone marker on school grounds, believed to be the place where he was captured, was erected by the David O. Dodd Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and is dedicated to "Arkansas' Boy Hero of the War Between the States."[9]



In 1908, the Arkansas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy starting raising funds for a stained-glass window in Dodd's honor. The window was built by the Charles F. Hogeman Company in New York City and depicts Dodd as Southern saint and martyr with curly blond hair, even though his only known photograph shows him with straight black hair.[5] The David O. Dodd window was unveiled at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia on November 7, 1911 where it was displayed for several years. In 1988, it was found in storage and was moved back to Arkansas. The David O. Dodd window debuted at the Arkansas Museum of Science and Industry in January 1990. The Dodd window was returned to Richmond in 1998. In January 2004, the Museum of the Confederacy again loaned the Dodd window to Arkansas to commemorate the 140th anniversary of Dodd's trial at the renamed MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History (formerly the Little Rock Arsenal).[1][10]



Each January, the Sons of Confederate Veterans honor Dodd in a ceremony at his grave site.[1] In November 1984, the Sons of Confederate Veterans awarded the Confederate Medal of Honor to Dodd, one of only twenty-two persons so honored.[10]



See also

Biography portal

American Civil War portal

References and notes

1. "The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture". http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=2536. Retrieved 2008-02-18.

2."ASMS - The Story of David O. Dodd". http://asms.k12.ar.us/armem/montgom/dodd.htm. Retrieved 2008-02-18.

3. "Documenting Arkansas". http://www.ark-ives.com:8012/cdm4/results.php?CISOOP1=any&CISOFIELD1=CISOSEARCHALL&CISOROOT=/docarkansas&CISOBOX1=Dodd. Retrieved 2008-02-18.

4."David Owen Dodd". Find a Grave. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=9825. Retrieved September 2, 2010.

5."Southern Heritage: Boy Hero of the Confederacy". http://www.southernheritage411.com/truehistory.php?th=086.

6."Online Little Rock Historic Places Guide, David Owen Dodd - Boy Hero". http://www.onlinelittlerock.com/content/historic/civil-war-david-o-dodd.htm. Retrieved 2008-02-18.

7.Goss, Kay Collett (1993), The Arkansas State Constitution: A Reference Guide, Greenwood Press

8.34°26′33″N 92°10′01″W / 34.44241°N 92.1669°W / 34.44241; -92.1669 Location of David Owen Dodd's grave

9."Dodd Elementary School". http://www.lrsd.org/schoolindex.cfm?sccode=32. Retrieved 2008-02-19.

10."Arkansas Military Heritage". http://www.arkmilitaryheritage.com/exhibits/dodd.htm. Retrieved 2008-02-18.

Boy Hero Of The Confederacy

From Arkansas Road Stories.com:

Instead of listing my sources at the bottom, I'm putting my bibliography here at the head of the article because it consists of one book only. The book is Boy Hero of the Confederacy: The Life, Legend and Execution of David Owen Dodd by Jim Lair, Oak Hill Publishing Company, Springfield, MO. 2001. Everything else I found on Dodd was also in this book. It's got everything on Dodd from transcripts of the trial right down to the biographies of the members of the court that tried him. It's the most complete compilation of Dodd research I've come across -- one-stop shopping for David O. Dodd history.




"BOY HERO OF THE CONFEDERACY"

David O. Dodd

Of all the war heroes in Arkansas' history, this is the one with the most monuments in the state -- more even than Douglas MacArthur. The short version of his story goes like this. During the Civil War, 17-year-old Dodd, in southern territory, went to Federally occupied Little Rock on a business errand for his dad. On his way back to South Arkansas, troops at a Federal checkpoint found a notebook in his shoe which contained in morse code in Dodd's own handwriting, a thorough, detailed and perfectly accurate list of all the Union forces in Little Rock.



Ten days later he was hanged as a spy. The heroic part is that he never divulged the source of his information or the name of his spymaster. He was hanged in front of the college he had briefly attended and was buried in a borrowed grave.



Here's a picture of that borrowed grave and of twenty-one guns going off in his honor at the annual observance of his execution. That eight-foot-tall obelisk to the left of the center of the photograph is his tombstone. There's nothing on the stone to mark Dodd's status as a folk hero. It's just name, place of birth (Lavaca County, Texas), and dates of birth and death. The giant obelisk was put here in 1911 at a cost to the state of $3000. It also contains a grammatical error. "Here lies the remains...."



Also in 1911, this stained glass window was built and sent to the old Confederate White House in Richmond, VA, which was was being converted into a museum devoting one room to each of the eleven confederate states. The window was built in New York and depicts Dodd as Southern saint and martyr and somehow a curly-haired blonde, even though his only known photograph shows him with straight black hair. I guess that's part and parcel of being immortalized in stained glass. No matter your appearance in real life, you end up a curly headed blonde looking pleasantly oversedated like a local meteorologist. And check out the posture. He looks weak as a willow, and note the angle of the wrists. This isn't the real Dodd. By all reports he was something of a ladies man. This isn't the actual window, but a replica that you can see at the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History. All this Dodd mania was probably associated with the last big reunion of the United Confederate Veterans, held in Little Rock in 1911. Two or three thousand aging veterens were expected to attend. Over a hundred thousand visitors showed up.





The Only Known Photograph of David O. Dodd

 Dodd's family was upper middle merchant class on both sides, and his father, Andrew, was about the least successful member of the family. Nevertheless, he was always in there plugging, buying and selling and moving from one opportunity to the next. The Dodd family was residing in Little Rock when the war broke out. David himself was a cadet at St. John's Masonic College, just over a hundred yards from the Little Rock Arsenal. David and his father were in Mississippi in September of 1863 when Little Rock was taken by the Federals. Father sent Son to fetch Mother and Sisters away from Little Rock to the safety of the South. Mom and sisters got on a riverboat, but the boat was jammed with Yankee troops, and the ladies found this so unpleasant that they got off the boat and refused the ride. Some sources said the soldiers were abusive, others contend the ladies were just virulently anti-Yankee. Dad had to come to Little Rock to fetch the ladies away himself.



While waiting for Dad, David took jobs clerking in stores that sold goods to the Yankee troops. That created a minor irony in that David was serving as a suttler to northern troops while his father was a suttler to southern troops. Around December 1st, Andrew arrived, packed up his family in a wagon and took them south to Camden.



Andrew hatched a plan to buy tobacco, which was becoming ever rarer as northern troops destroyed southern fields, and store it for sale as its rarity increased. He needed cash for his enterprise. The more you buy, the better price you get and so the more profit you make upon retail sale. But the war had put a border inconveniently in between himself in Camden and his closest business associates in Little Rock.





David O. Dodd Elementary School. Red Circle shows location of monument.

He decided to send David, a minor and therefore assumed neutral, back to Little Rock to deliver business correspondence to former associates soliciting investments in Andrew's big tobacco deal. They went to a Confederate General named Fagan to get passes that would allow David to pass confederate pickets. At the conclusion of the meeting, Fagan said jokingly something like, "Of course, I'll expect a full report upon your return." Either David did not understand this as a joke, or he decided on his own to undertake the gathering of intelligence. Of course, General Fagan might have been joking-but-not-joking, planting the notion in the boy's head while absolving himself of blame for placing a noncombattant in grave danger.



On Christmas Eve, David reentered Little Rock. He delivered his letters and enjoyed the holiday season attending parties and dances and keeping company with a girl of sixteen named Mary Dodge. This little girl was an ardent supporter of the Southern cause, while her dad, R. L. Dodge was a Vermont native on friendly terms with the northern troops. Northern officers were quartered in the Dodge home. It is suggested that Mary Dodge is the source of the information that David carried in his notebook, and that she obtained the information from the officers. Various historians and epic poets have tried to make Mary and David into sweethearts for literary purposes. While that's possible, David attended dances that holiday season with at least two other girls we know by name (Mary Swindle and Minerva Cogburn).



December 29, David left Little Rock riding on a mule and carrying a Federal pass that he'd obtained from the provost marshall at St. John's Masonic College. As he left Union territory, the guard tore up the pass, telling David that since he was now in confederate held land, he wouldn't need the pass any more. Instead of heading toward Benton at that point, he detoured toward Hot Springs to spend the night at an uncle's house.



The next day David backtracked and took a cross road to get back on the Benton road. Apparently that cross road crossed back into Union territory, because David ran into Federal pickets. Today that spot is the site of David O. Dodd Elementary School, and the fateful track connecting the Hot Springs Road to the Benton Road is approximated by David O. Dodd Street. The pickets found David's behavior suspicious. He didn't have a pass and they arrested him. There's a marker near the front door of the school declaring this to be the approximate location of the arrest.





Text of monument reads, "DAVID OWEN DODD -- Arkansas' boy hero of the War Between the States was captured at this place Dec. 31, 1863. and executed in Little Rock, Jan. 8. 1864. -- 'He died to save. We live to serve.' -- Erected by David O. Dodd Chapter UDC Pine Bluff, Ark." David was taken to regimental headquarters, which was this place, known as "Ten Mile House" because it's ten miles from downtown Little Rock on the old Stagecoach Road to Benton. I visited the building behind the house which served as Dodd's cell that night, but the owner preferred that I not post a photo of it. Ten Mile House is billed as the oldest brick building in Arkansas (built circa 1820), and not so very long ago it was a restaurant. It changed hands in 2000 and I don't know what the new owner is doing with it.



David was questioned a couple of times that evening by the senior officers at the post. He had not been searched by the arresting soldiers; and when he finally was, that's when the notebook with the ciphered information was discovered.



The next day, David was taken to Little Rock to face Brigadier General Davidson, who was commanding the Union occupation forces in General Steele's absence. A telegraph operator translated the morse code to discover the full extent of the information held in the notebook. David was then formally charged as a spy and was hustled off to the military prison, which was on the site of the present state capitol building.



Dodd was tried by a military tribunal of six Union officers. His defenders, assigned by the court, didn't put up much of a fight. They first played some word games with the definition of spying. The law said that a spy was someone who, among other things, "lurked" and concealed himself or assumed a false identity in order to gather information. Since Dodd had not done any of these things, they argued that technically he was not a spy.



The court didn't buy the argument. He was caught red-handed attempting to enter confederate territory carrying a coded message written in his own handwriting detailing all the military units under General Steele's command. Dude was so busted!



Concerning what was going on behind the scenes during the trial there is much conjecture based on few facts. General Steele was in no hurry to hang a seventeen-year-old kid in his own home town. That's like asking for a riot. Rumors were flying that General Fagan was mounting a rescue attempt.



For two days, David was interrogated by Union officers who were eager to discover the source of the information that Dodd had obtained.



On the third day, under personal orders from General Steele, Mary Dodge and her father were escorted under armed guard to a Union gunboat on the Arkansas. They were transported to Vermont, where Mary was kept until the end of the war. This event strongly suggests that General Steele had discovered that Mary Dodge was involved; and if he blanched at hanging a boy of seventeen, he certainly couldn't bring himself to hang a girl of sixteen.



Some say that David claimed General Fagan had made intelligence gathering a condition for obtaining the pass to Little Rock. Fagan is sometimes painted as the villain of the story, but there's no corroboration of any version of his involvement.



The official version is that Dodd never implicated anybody, but there is the matter of Mary Dodge's abrupt departure to the far far north. General Steele could have discovered her involvement in other ways, however. David was daily visiting her at her house where Union officers were billetted. Once David was caught, there's no way she would not be suspected. The officers living in the house would be interrogated and would soon realize that they had said quite a lot in front of this little girl.



I find myself sympathizing with General Steele at this point in the story. He's in a hell of a fix. His superiors frequently criticize him for being too friendly with the Southerners under his occupation, too easygoing and accommodating. Suddenly he discovers a nest of spies, and they're kids. It's a situation where he can't make a good decision. If he cracks down he looks brutal and he loses the goodwill of the populace. If he doesn't hang somebody for this most serious of offense, he's likely to lose his command. He found himself assuming the role of Pontius Pilate.



And like Pilate, he washed his hands. The ladies of the aristocratic classes of Little Rock appealed to General Steele for clemency. Steele said he had no authority to pardon Dodd or commute the sentence passed by the tribunal.



On the sixth and final day of the trial, the defense played its last desperate card. Dodd read a long prepared elocution begging for an exception on account of his youth and stating that the information in his notebook amounted to incidental notations like those a man might keep in a diary. The tribunal voted four-to-two to hang him.



In the corner of the parking lot of the University of Arkansas School of Law in Little Rock you can find the monument below, which marks the spot where David O. Dodd was hanged.





Monument at the site of Dodd's execution.


There was ice on the ground the morning of January 8th. Dodd's execution was a dark gothic spectacle. David put on the suit in which he was to be buried. He rode in an open wagon under close guard out of the gates of the military prison, straddling his own coffin, passing not far from his own grave in Mount Holly Cemetery. The wagon halted in front of St. John's Masonic College, where David had been a cadet just a couple of years earlier. Witnesses reported that he was a bit drawn and pale, but calm and resolute, practically indifferent. It was occasional in those days for a friend or family member to try to slip the condemned a dose of opium to ease his way to the gallows. There's no suggestion that this was done here, but it was sometimes done in cases like this.



As if the proceedings weren't macabre enough, the name of the executioner was Dekay.



The tailgate of the wagon was propped horizontal. David stood on it under a yoke which had been built for the occasion. The hangman took David's coat. The hangman noticed he had forgotton to bring a blindfold. David mentioned that there was a handkerchief in his coat. The blindfold was fastened. David's hands and feet were tied. Several of the soldiers in attendance turned their backs on the execution in silent protest of the hanging of a boy.



There are several versions as to what his last words were. Nathan Hale stuff mostly. Most of them agree in principal, if not in substance and length. I don't think any of them can be taken any more seriously than the others. This was an era in which last words were thought to be of great significance. People prepared last words in anticipation of their deaths and people embellished last words after the fact for the sake of the heroic ideal. Chances are that one of his reported last words is pretty close to factual, but I couldn't begin to guess which one.



The rope was fixed around David's neck, the prop knocked from under the tailgate.



The rope was either just a bit too long or just a bit too new and stretchy. David was slightly built, not heavy enough to generate a neck-snapping jolt falling from the low height of a wagon's tailgate. David's tiptoes touched the ground, and rather than having his neck snapped, he began slowly to strangle and twist and flail. One source says a soldier fainted at this point and several witnesses became nauseous.



There are two versions of what happened next.



Version one holds that one or two soldiers grabbed his legs to add weight and hasten his death. Version two holds that a soldier shinnied up the gibbet to grab the noose, twist the rope and raise the condemned off the ground. That shows how hard it is to get a grip on history sometimes. Here's something witnessed by a hundred or so people and there's not enough corroboration to pin down a detail like this.





Another Dodd monument, this one on the grounds of the Old State House David's body was taken down. A doctor pronounced him dead.



His body was kept under armed guard overnight in the home of Mrs. Barney Knighton on Rock Street. Somebody stole the rope. Family members surmised that officials had it destroyed to prevent it from becoming a southern patriotic relic.



Just before the funeral, a Federal officer arrived to convey orders from Federal HQ that no words were to be spoken or sung at the memorial service, and only Dodd's two aunts and their husbands (his closest relatives in northern held territory) would be allowed to attend the burial. The whole town was on alert. The place was a tinderbox. There was dissent in the Federal ranks over the execution. A riot was a real possibiltiy. Some feared that a Confederate force might take advantage of the situation to stage a raid. The guard was increased around General Steele's HQ, and nobody was allowed to see him except on official business.



Little Rock held its collective breath and nothing much happened. Dodd's body was buried in Mount Holly Cemetery, also the eventual resting place of R.L. Dodge and General Fagan.



News of the execution of their son absolutely wrecked Andrew and Lydia Dodd. That's not an unusual thing for the Civil War, or any war for that matter. They both spent the rest of their lives distraught and in ill health, Andrew dying of yellow fever just two years after the war and Lydia dying in Pascagoula in 1885. Other bad things happened related to the incident. In March, the kind-hearted General Steele was relieved of responsibilities in Little Rock (to lead the overland forces in the ill-fated Red River campaign) and was replaced by a harsh anti-southern commander. General Fagan was for the rest of his life vilified as the man who coerced David into spying, whether he actually was or not.



At least seven poets have attempted the material, usually adding whatever embellishments deemed necessary to make this tragic pileup into an heroic epic saga. Adding to the problem of reassembling the facts are the facts that 1) during reconstruction, folks in the south were reluctant to recount stories of southern heroism and 2) many who did recount the story had an agenda other than historical accuracy. Hollywood even took a shot at the story in 1915. No print remains.



In the end he didn't so much die for the southern cause but to protect his accomplice, who must have spent that first week of January sweating bullets.



RTJ -- 8/1/02





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Arkansas Travelogue home page

David Owen Dodd (1846-1864)

From the Arkansas Encyclopedia of History and Culture:

David Owen Dodd (1846–1864)




During the Civil War, seventeen-year-old David Owen Dodd of Little Rock (Pulaski County) was hanged as a spy by the Union army. He has been called the “boy hero of Arkansas” as well as “boy martyr of the Confederacy.” His story has inspired tributes such as the epic poem The Long, Long Thoughts of Youth by Marie Erwin Ward, a full-length play, and even reportedly a 1915 silent Hollywood movie, which has not survived. Historical markers, monuments, annual reenactments of his execution, and the naming of the David O. Dodd Elementary School in southwest Little Rock are among the state's recognitions of his life and death.



David Owen Dodd was born on November 10, 1846, in Lavaca County, Texas, to Lydia Echols Owen Dodd and the merchant Andrew Marion Dodd; he had two sisters, Leonora and Senhora. They moved to Little Rock to be closer to Senhora’s school, and young Dodd attended St. Johns' College, located on the grounds of present-day MacArthur Park. After less than a year, Dodd left St. Johns' when he became ill with malaria, but he hoped to return. Meanwhile, he worked as a clerk and learned Morse code at the telegraph office.



When the Union army occupied the city in 1863, the Dodd family evacuated south to Camden (Ouachita County), behind Confederate lines. On December 24, 1863, Dodd’s father sent him to Little Rock on business, thinking he would be safe since he was underage for the army. Confederate General James F.Fagan issued the boy’s pass and said, in what may or may not have been a joke, that he would expect a full report upon Dodd’s return.



Dodd rode a mule to Little Rock, carrying a birth certificate showing he was underage along with his pass. He attended holiday parties, where he met the teenage Mary Dodge, described by one of her descendants as an “ardent little Rebel.” Union officers were quartered in the Dodge home, which Dodd was invited to visit.



Dodd left Little Rock on December 29. Union sentries took his pass, as he did not expect to return. After spending the night with his uncle Washington Dodd southwest of Little Rock, Dodd traveled through the woods and found himself back behind Union lines.



He was stopped in what is now west Little Rock, near Ten Mile House on Stagecoach Road, and discovered to be without a pass. When he was asked for identification, Dodd showed his small leather notebook, where Union soldiers found not only his birth certificate but also a page with dots and dashes. A Union officer had worked for the telegraph office and easily read the Morse code message, which contained exact information about Union troop strength in Little Rock.



Dodd was arrested, convicted by a court-martial of being a spy, and sentenced to execution by hanging. He was taken to the Little Rock Arsenal, where Union General Frederick Steele repeatedly offered to release Dodd in exchange for the name of his informant. Dodd is said to have replied, “I can give my life for my country but I cannot betray a friend.”



On January 8, 1864, a bitterly cold day when the Arkansas River was frozen solid, Dodd was hanged on the grounds of his former school, St. Johns', just east of the Little Rock Arsenal. Before horrified onlookers who had crossed the river to witness his execution, the hangman's rope stretched and the boy dangled, strangling to death over a full five minutes. Onlookers as well as Union soldiers became ill at the tragic spectacle.



David O. Dodd is buried in the southeast portion of Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock, in a grave that was donated by a Little Rock resident at the time of the boy's death. Questions about his actions remain unanswered: Where did the information in the Morse-coded message come from? Whom was he protecting? Did he knowingly re-cross enemy lines or did he just get lost?



The Arkansas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy raised funds for a stained-glass window in his honor. In 1911, it was presented to the Confederate Museum in Richmond, Virginia, as a memorial window for the Arkansas Room. The window was loaned to the Arkansas Museum of Science and Industry in Little Rock during the 1990s and again in 2004 for a commemorative program at the renamed MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History (formerly the Little Rock Arsenal).



Each January, the Sons of Confederate Veterans honor Dodd at Mount Holly Cemetery in a ceremony concluding near the eight-foot marble monument at the boy’s grave, which is engraved, “Here lie the remains of David O. Dodd. Born in Lavaca County, Texas, Nov. 10, 1846, died Jan. 8, 1864.” Nearby is a marble scroll with the words, “Boy Martyr of the Confederacy.”



For additional information:

Arkansas Military Heritage. http://www.arkmilitaryheritage.com/exhibit/dodd (accessed September 14, 2005).



“David Owen Dodd—Boy Hero.” Online Little Rock Historic Places Guide. http://www.onlinelittlerock.com/content/historic/civil-war-david-o-dodd.htm (accessed September 14, 2005).



Fischer, LeRoy H. “David O. Dodd: Folk Hero of Confederate Arkansas.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 37 (Summer 1978): 130–146.



Herndon, Dallas. The Memorial to David O. Dodd, Arkansas Boy Hero. N.p.: 1913.

Lair, Jim. Boy Hero of the Confederacy: The Life, Legend and Execution of David Owen Dodd. Springfield, MO: Oak Hill Publishing, 2001.



Old Statehouse Museum. http://www.oldstatehouse.com (accessed September 14, 2005).



Ward, Marie Erwin. “The Long, Long Thoughts of Youth: The Story of David Owen Dodd.” Arkansas Democrat Sunday Magazine. November 9, 1958, pp. 3–5.



Nancy Hendricks

Arkansas State University



Related Butler Center Lesson Plans:

Arkansas Civil War Drama (Grades 7-12); Who's Who in Arkansas (Grades 5-8)

Last Updated 10/7/2009

The Trial Of David O. Dodd

My Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp (#619) is named in honor of David Owen Dodd.

From Online Little Rock:

The Trial of David O. Dodd




Footstone

David O. Dodd's grave is located on the left side of Mount Holly Cemetery between Maple & Elm. David Owen Dodd - Boy Hero

"There was one sad incident that occurred that winter [1863-1864], in February I think, that I was eye witness to. That was the hanging of young David O. Dodd as a spy. He was a mere boy, though a smart one, and while he was amenable under military law to his fate, yet his heroic bearing at the scaffold won my sympathy. I have no doubt that, raised as he had been, he thought he was in the right".



-- Pvt. John R. Martin, Company E, First Iowa Cavalry (Union)

Source: History of the First Iowa Cavalry





Andrew Marion Dodd, May 29, 1823 Alabama – November 16, 1867 Jackson MS, married Lydia Echols Owen, 1828 – 1885, on April 27, 1843 in Collegeville, Saline County, AR. To them was born Sarah Lydia Senhora DODD b: 18 JAN 1845 in Collegeville, Saline Co, AR; David Owen DODD b: 10 NOV 1846 in Lavaca Co, TX; Leonora DODD b: 28 JAN 1850 in Longpoint, TX; Ann Eliza DODD b: 28 JUL 1852 -- Dodd family geneaolgy



December 31, 1863 - Military Commission appointed by Major General Frederick Steele meets in Little Rock with Brigadier General John M. Thayer presiding. Other commission members are: Colonel John A. Garrett, Major Phineus Graves, Major H. D. Gibson, Captain George Rockwell and Captain B. F. Rice as Judge Advocate.



The prisoner, David O. Dodd, was then arraigned upon the following Charges and Specifications, which were read to him by the Judge Advocate as follows:



"In this, that said David O. Dodd, an inhabitant of the State of Arkansas, did as a Spy of the so-called Confederate States of America, enter within the lines of the Army of the United States, stationed at Little Rock, Arkansas, and did there secretly possess himself of information regarding the number, the kind, and position of the troops of said Army of the United States, their commanders, and other military information valuable to the enemy now at war with the United States, and having thus obtained said information did obtain a pass from the Provost Marshal General's office, and endeavor to reach the lines of the enemy - therewith; when he was arrested at the cavalry outposts of said Army - and did otherwise lurk, and act as a spy of the Rebels now in arms against the United States - This at the Post of Little Rock, and the encampments of the Army of Arkansas, on or about the 29th and 30th of December, 1863."



David pled not guilty.







January 1, 1864 - The trial resumes with the youthful Arkansan represented by two attorneys: T. D. W. Yonley and William Fishback.



"The prisoner then offered to take the oath of allegiance, prescribed by the President of the United States, in his Proclamation accompanying his late message to Congress, and accept the Amnesty therein offered..."



The Judge Advocate objected to the defense offer stating the crime with which David was accused did not fall under the Amnesty provision. The courtroom was cleared while the commission deliberated the matter of amnesty. The commission ruled against the defense and court was adjourned till the following day.



January 2, 1864 - Witnesses are called:



Private Daniel Goldberg, Company E, 1st Missouri Cavalry, is called as a witness and asked when, where and under what circumstances he may have seen the prisoner. Goldberg testified, "I believe it was on the 28th of December, 1863. I was on picket on the Hot Spring road about eight miles from Little Rock. The prisoner came to where I was, and I halted him, and asked him for a pass. He gave his pass to me. It was from the Provost Marshal of Little Rock. I asked the prisoner where he wanted to go, and he said he wanted to go into the country fifteen miles to see some friends. I asked him which road he wanted to go, and he told me he wanted to go the Hot Springs road. I then told him he did not need a pass anymore, and I kept his pass; I tore up the pass on the post when I was relieved. I did not know he was arrested when I tore it up."



Sergeant Frederick Miehr, Company B, 1st Missouri Cavalry, is the prosecution's second witness. Asked the same question, he answers, "Either the 28th or 29th of last month I was on picket on the Benton road about twelve miles from Little Rock. I had been on picket only a short time when my inside vidette halted a man, and T looked up and saw the prisoner, that is I think it was him, coming into the main road. I went then to where the vidette was. I asked the prisoner if he had a pass, and he said he had not. He said he had had a pass for two days, and the picket on the Hot Spring road took it from him. I asked him where he lived, and he said at Little Rock. I asked him where he was going and he said he was going to a man's by the name of Davis. I asked him where Davis lived and he said he did not know whether it was the first or second house. I asked him where he was going from there, and he said he was going down on some creek to get him a horse. I forget the place. I then arrested him and sent one of the men into headquarters with him."



1st Lieutenant C. F. Stopral, Acting Adjutant of the 1st Missouri Cavalry, is called to testify and states, "On the evening of the 29th of last month I was in my office. The prisoner was brought before me by one of our pickets. I asked the prisoner if he had any pass, and he said not. I asked him if he had any papers whatever to be identified, and he said not. I told him he certainly must have something with him either books or papers, and he then produced a memoranda book, the one here shown me, marked "A", on the first page, is the one he showed me. Upon having the book examined I sent him to the guard house."



When asked about the memoranda book, Stopral said, "I translated some of the telegraphic writing at the time. That which I translated read, "the 3rd Ohio Battery has four guns. Brass. 11th Ohio Battery has six guns". The rest of it I could not make out, but I think it is eighteen pounder. The other telegraphic writing I did not translate for want of time." He said he gave the book to Captain George Hanna.



Captain George Hanna, Regiment Commander of the 1st Missouri Cavalry, was called to testify. He stated, "On the evening of the 29th of Dec. last about a half hour after dark he was brought to my headquarters. I was not in at the time, but came in soon after. When I came in the prisoner was standing by the table. Lieutenant Stopral had this memoranda book in his hand, and said he had taken it from the prisoner. I took the book and looked at it, and saw the characters there, and remarked that that looked suspicious, and commenced questioning the prisoner. I asked him his name. He said it was David O. Dodd.



"I asked him what he was doing out there. He said he was going out to see some man in that neighborhood. I forget the man's name. I said you had no pass when you were taken and he said "I had a pass when I came into your lines, and the pickets took it from me. I asked him if he should know the man that got his pass if he should see him again. He said he would. I sent him under guard out there, but the pickets had been relieved and the man was not here, but had come into camp. The prisoner wanted to go to a brick house nearby to get his supper and said he was acquainted there. I then sent for the sergeant of the guard and he took him down to my company and gave him his supper. I instructed the sergeant of the guard after he gave him his supper to take him to the guard house and not allow him to have any communication with any of the soldiers.



"I then asked Lieut. Stopral if he had searched the prisoner. He said he had got nothing from him but this book. I had the memoranda book examined and then went and searched the prisoner, and found one pocketbook the one here shown me in court, one postal currency holder, the same here shown, one Derringer pistol, loaded, the one here shown, and a package between his shirts. When I went down, he denied having anything of the kind, but in examining him I felt it and asked him about it, and he acknowledged having letters in them. He took them out and handed them to me, and these before the court, in pencil mark are the same he gave me.In the pocket book there was Louisiana money, Confederate money, ten dollars in green backs, and some Confederate postage stamps. How much I do not know. I did not examine the pocket book and papers minutely, but rolled them all up in one package sent them and the prisoner by Captain Baird, next morning into Little Rock to Genl. Davidson or the Provost Marshal. The prisoner said the pickets had taken up his pass in the morning."



Captain John Baird, Company E, 1st Missouri Cavalry, is called before the commission. He testifies, "Captain Hanna placed him in my charge and directed me to turn him over to Genl. Davidson. He also gave me a package of papers to turn over to Genl. Davidson with the prisoner. The memoranda book and other books here shown me are the same Captain Hanna sent by me; I had examined them since; before he sent them and after I delivered them to Genl. Davidson. I saw him examine them, and saw him take a pass out of the memoranda book before spoken of. The General read the pass, the one here shown me dated December 22d, 1863, at headquarters near Princeton and signed by W.A. Crawford, Lt. Col. Comdg. out post; looks like the same and the contents is the same.



"There was in the pocket book before spoken of a certificate signed by A.M. Dodd in regard to the age of David 0. Dodd, and also that he was not connected with the army. The certificate here shown me is the one that was taken out of the prisoner's pocket book. I delivered to General Davidson precisely the same papers that Capt. Hanna delivered to me, and General Davidson proceeded immediately in my presence to examine them."



Captain Robert C. Clowery, Assistant Superintendant of the United States Military Telegraph, is sworn before the commission to interpret the telegraphic code found in the memoranda book.



"3rd Ohio Battery has 4 guns - brass. 11th Ohio Battery has 6 guns - brass." That on the second page reads as follows: "Three brigades of cavalry in a division. Three regiments in a brigade, brigade commanded by Davidson. Infantry: 1st Brigade has 3 regiments. 2nd Brigade has 3 regiments, one on detached service - 1 battery 4 pieces Parrott guns. Brig. Genl. Soloman commands a division, two brigades in a division; three regiments in one brigade, two in the other. Two batteries in the division."



First Lieutenant George O. Sokalski, Assistant Adjutant General of General Steele, testifies about the actual Union troop strength and weaponry. It's virtually a match of Dodd's coded message.



Other papers found on the prisoner were introduced into evidence. With so much evidence and testimony against him, the defense attorneys could only call character witnesses.



Source: United States vs. David Owen Dodd, National Archives and Records Administration

Southern Shame, Southern Ghosts

From Rebellion:

Thursday, September 30, 2010


Southern shame, Southern ghosts



Authoritarian governments despise symbols of local pride and history. So another Southern symbol has been erased, and the implications are troubling.



Thanks to Jeff for the link!



posted by Old Rebel @ Thursday, September 30, 2010

From World Net Daily:
 
Southern shame, Southern ghosts




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted: September 30, 2010

1:00 am Eastern





By Franklin Raff

© 2010





The University of Mississippi has terminated its mascot, "Colonel Reb." The mascot, an archetypal Southern gentleman with a hat, cane, and a little bow-tie, is of course racist.



Affable, bearded and jaunty, with a bright costume that cleverly foiled his dark history on the plantation, Col. Reb, when he was alive, looked rather like that other infamous slave-driver, Col. Sanders, whose inscrutable and permanent smile these days (in markets where he still shows his face) offers only a faint clue as to the fortunes he's made in his long, post-war masquerade as a peddler of fried chicken.



"We just want it to be over," said one Mississippi student on the subject of Col. Reb's execution.



Watch your back, Sanders.



There is of course nothing sacred about a football mascot or a corporate brand, and nothing particularly sad about the disappearance of either one, except for the fact that now there is nothing left of Southern symbolism to erase. Some time ago, you see, most Southerners started believing that fried chicken, football games, NASCAR and maybe a handmade basket or two were among the only cultural 'treasures' they could, or should, be proud of.



And now we learn that what legions of Americans consider to be a transcendent symbol of extraordinary military leadership and valor, states' rights, indefatigable heroism, enduring pride and strength in the face of terrible odds and calamitous defeat – the Confederate battle flag – is now officially deemed a symbol of hate by the U.S. armed forces. Prospective members of all branches of the armed forces who happen to have a "Confederate flag" tattoo are automatically rejected.



Red crescents, Ankhs and the like are a "go" as are satanic pentagrams with bleeding goat-heads, inverted crosses, Vishnus and Virgin Mothers doing just about anything anywhere you can imagine, but not a star-studded blue cross (or saltire) over a red field. That image is un-American, hateful and now officially equivalent to the swastika.



Americans who sport the Confederate battle flag – many whose ancestors fell under the flag, who are buried with honor on American soil beneath the flag, whose fathers and great-grandfathers flew this flag with patriotic pride over homes, and seats of government, and even U.S. Navy ships at war – and who want to serve our country under arms, are no longer deemed compatible with our armed forces.



The Confederate battle flag has been appropriated by hate groups of one kind or another for racist reasons, but it is also, indisputably, the reigning symbol of Southern history and pride. Why would Southerners ever surrender this treasure? Why would they have it erased from a state flag, as Georgia did in 2001? Why would they allow America's "best and brightest" to ban it as a universal "symbol of hate" without even putting up a fight?



(Column continues below)









Historians disagree about whether the war would have happened "with or without slavery." Slavery was a national evil, the great mainstay of the agrarian South and a catalyst for polarized politics and violent action on both sides. But even Southerners have now forgotten about the enormous and complex roster of constitutionally based complaints regarding tariffs, direct and indirect taxation, the extraordinarily significant issue of nullification, innumerable federal impositions and more, and more, which led the Confederate states to draft their declarations of secession. These short, concise documents are not only fascinating, they are of obviously incalculable value to any free citizen whose aim is to know the history of his state, his country and his constitution. Do you know of even one young Southerner who has studied any of these documents in school?



It is commonly held even among schoolchildren in the South that the war was fought in the wake of a glorious national Emancipation Proclamation, when of course Lincoln's proclamation very belatedly only freed Southern slaves. Northern slaves were freed even later (the last in New Jersey at the very end of the war), as the cause of emancipation became a public-relations boon for Lincoln, for conscription and for the North internationally. To be sure, there were more slaves in the South than in the North, and the Emancipation Proclamation was a very important and effective document, but "The Great Emancipator" plainly admitted he would free all, or none, of the slaves if it would save the Union. Why must these truths be ignored?



All Americans understand that scores of Union soldiers fought proudly and honorably "to free the slaves," but now Southerners seem to have started to believe, en masse, that their Confederate ancestors raised their battle flag "to defend the institution of slavery." In fact only a miniscule percentage – I have seen estimates lower than 2 percent – of Confederate soldiers were members of slave-owning families, lived or worked on plantations, or were otherwise part of the "antebellum" life painted by Hollywood. Anyone who knows their history knows exactly what most Confederate officers would have told you in the field: "We have no desire for conquest and, as clearly stated by our political leaders, every wish for national reconciliation. The Confederate battle flag represents the fighting spirit of the citizens of these states who are proudly and patriotically rebelling against a central government which has become tyrannical."



Have you ever asked a Southern high-schooler or college student what the Confederate battle flag represented to the men who fought for the confederacy? I've done it many times. The answer is usually: Hatred. Slavery.



And who spoke out against slavery? Many on both sides, of course, and probably many more in the North than in the South, but also Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy; his secretary of state, Judah Benjamin; Gov. William Smith of Virginia; Reps. Barksdale and Kenner (once one of the largest slaveholders in the South) as well as the highest-ranking CSA generals Joseph Johnston and none other than General Robert E. Lee. The Confederate battle flag was Lee's flag, the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. On slavery, he said: "There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil."



The dirty, not so-little secret of the war, you see, is that slavery had become morally, politically, and (because of the industrialization of agriculture, labor disputes, etc.) financially untenable in both the North and the South, and it was on its way out. Still, Congress did not consider an abolition amendment until 1864. At that time, the Southern states were long absent from Congress. Even then, shamefully, it did not pass and was not adopted until after the war. The North was obviously as tragically intertwined with the institution of slavery as the South. But what Southern youngster knows it?



And who defended the freedom of the press and information in this terrible time? More than 300 Northern newspapers were suppressed during the war and the Northern press was known to have been heavily censored, while, for instance, even Jefferson Davis endured astonishingly dark personal attacks from even the Southern press, but unlike Lincoln, refused to limit their freedoms. In short, scholars agree that "dissenters" had freedom of speech only in the South.



It would seem important to keep these facts in mind as we review a tiny part of the historical record and ponder the present near-universality of the South's acquiescence to a comically simplistic and largely inaccurate "victor's history" of the war. But perhaps facts no longer matter.



The long, arduous road toward national reconciliation and equal rights need never have included cultural annihilation: historical, symbolic or otherwise. Yet that is what Southerners face today, and it is their own fault.



By failing to educate their children, or by allowing others to mis-educate their children, and as evidenced by their willingness to repeatedly allow the definition of their cultural symbols – from the Confederate battle flag down to a bow-tied, fancified Southern colonel in a funny suit – as symbols of "hate," they are ultimately, finally, characterizing their forebears – soldiers, yes, along with doctors, lawyers, philosophers, scientists, and farmers, free blacks (including slave-owners), businessmen and politicians (many of whom were abolitionists) – universally, as the simple, hateful hicks federal propagandists once made them out to be.



By abandoning these most sacred and most benign symbols of Southern heritage, they admit a deeper commitment to ignore and let others define, their past. Worse perhaps, they turn their backs on the legacies and souls of real American patriots and heroes.



When they once again encounter their ancestors, which I believe they will, how will so many Americans account for their feeble treachery?



Maybe, like the Mississippi student, they will say: "We just wanted it to be over."



I wonder what some of those old heroes might say in reply.



What about:



And here you are, my spiritually impoverished progeny, 300 years after the first war in which we fought and died that you might be free from a tyrannical central government, and almost 200 years after another great and terrible war, the worst imaginable, in which we fought our brothers and died for the very same cause. You have now willingly disgraced not just this cause – which might have been understandable given the terrible complexity of the time – but you have also disgraced almost every vestige of our memory, corrupting even the flags on our graves.

The degree to which you are now indebted to, and dependent on, your federal government is a most bitter reminder of our failure. But you have failed in a deeper sense. You, like many Americans, have in your ignorance abetted in the practical destruction our founders' Constitution. Having surrendered liberty, you are no longer entitled to its blessings. So please do not speak of slavery. You have stripped yourself of your knowledge, pride and heritage. You have shamed and prostrated yourself, and, to no small degree, it is you who are now enslaved.



I shudder to imagine what the ghosts of the past, black and white, will say to us when we join them.



And then again, maybe it won't be so bad. After all, you know what happens to those who do not remember their history.



One way or another, by reverence or ignorance, history is destiny.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Franklin Raff is a Virginian. He lives in Mount Vernon, Va., and Jerusalem, Israel.

Complaints Over Confederate Flag At Summerville, South Carolina Home

From SLM News Blog:

Complaints over Confederate flag at Summerville, SC homefrom SLMNews Blog by PalmettoPatriot'More than 80 Brownsville residents packed a meeting Tuesday night called by the community's District 1 Civic Association and a neighborhood Crime Watch. The group plans to march in protest, petition the town, pack the Oct. 13 Town Council meeting to present that petition, and set up a homeowners association to establish covenants to keep that sort of display from happening.




People who live in the neighborhood and at the meeting said they understand that some people consider the flag and other insignia symbols of heritage. But to the community, the connection is to slavery, servitude, lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. They have swarmed community and town leaders with phone calls and visits to complain.'



Notice how those opposed to our heritage are so quick to use government to aggress against people and force them to comply with their wishes. These are people who have no love of or respect for liberty.

Re-Writing History, American Style

From Lew Rockwell.com:

Rewriting History,


American Style

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo





In his book, Lincoln Reconsidered, Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer David Donald remarked that, after Lincoln’s death and "reincarnation" as a secular political saint, politicians of all stripes began attaching themselves to his legacy. Men who were his bitterest political enemies during his lifetime all of a sudden claimed to have been his closest friends and associates. The Communist Party U.S.A. adorned its New York City headquarters, writes Donald, with huge portraits of Lincoln and held annual Lincoln-Lenin Day parades.



No one, of course, has taken the worshipping of Abraham Lincoln to greater extremes than the Republican Party and some of its affiliated foundations and think tanks. The Republican Party has long sought to give its political agenda moral authority by reminding us all that it is, after all, "The Party of Lincoln." That is certainly true but, unfortunately, the Republican Party and some of its associated think tanks have apparently found it necessary to do what they once accused the Soviet Union of doing: rewriting history in order to enhance its prestige and power.



Take, for instance, a Washington, DC, outfit known as the "Declaration Foundation" that is purportedly devoted to the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence. It does so by lionizing Lincoln (as though he still needs more lionizing) and constantly reminding Republican politicians to do this or that because "Lincoln would have done it." One of its slogans is the Lincolnian phrase, "Liberty and Union Forever" (emphasis added).



The Declaration Foundation does some good work, judging by its Web site, but its very name is somewhat Orwellian. Consider the one principle of the Declaration of Independence that Thomas Jefferson is most noted for, the idea that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that whenever governments become destructive of liberty it is the duty of citizens to abolish that government and replace it with a new one.



The Declaration, after all, was a Declaration of Secession from England. The American Revolution was a war of secession, just as the War for Southern Independence was. Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering, who served as George Washington’s adjutant general, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State, once said that secession was "the" principle of the American Revolution – the very right that the revolutionaries fought for. The Declaration Foundation, on the other hand, preaches exactly the opposite with its "Union Forever" philosophy.



Lincoln’s political triumph was, if anything, a repudiation of the Jeffersonian philosophy of government and a victory for his political adversaries, the Hamiltonians, who by 1861 had morphed into the Republican Party. Like all the founding fathers Jefferson wanted the Union to thrive, but he also agreed with his colleague Timothy Pickering that secession was a fundamental right. In his First Inaugural Address he declared, "If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this union . . . let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." He was championing the right of free speech here, but also the right of secession.



In a letter to James Madison in 1816 Jefferson reiterated his support of the right of secession by saying, "If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation . . . to a continuance in union . . . I have no hesitation in saying, let us separate."



Alexis de Tocqueville, whom everyone regards as a brilliant observer and chronicler of the American system of government, wrote in Democracy in America that "The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality . . . . If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact . . . the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right." (Tocqueville could never have imagined that barely thirty years later an American president would commit the barbaric act of having his armies murder 300,000 fellow citizens and destroy their economy to deny them the right of secession).



Even Abraham Lincoln voiced support for the right of secession when it served his political purposes. He enthusiastically embraced (and orchestrated) the secession of western Virginia (a slave state) when it joined the Union. And on January 12, 1848, he announced that "any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. . . . Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit." Don’t look for this quote, though, in any of the materials produced by the Declaration Foundation.



As of 1860 most Northerners and Southerners believed in the Jeffersonian right of secession as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. In Northern Editorials on Secession Howard Cecil Perkins surveyed about 1,000 Northern newspapers and found that the majority of them agreed basically with what the Bangor Daily Union wrote on November 13, 1860: "The Union depends for its continuance on the free consent and will of the sovereign people of each state, and when that consent and will is withdrawn on either part, their Union is gone." A state that is coerced to remain in the Union becomes a "subject province" and can never be "a co-equal member of the American Union."



New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, a prominent Republican, editorialized on December 17, 1860, that if tyranny and despotism justified the Revolution of 1776, then "we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861." On February 5, 1861, Greeley continued on that "The Great Principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration is . . . that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed." Therefore, if he Southern states want to secede, "they have a clear right to do so." At this time, Northerners knew that if there was to be a war it was not a war "to free the slaves," but to deny Southerners the right of secession. In an 1862 letter to Horace Greeley Lincoln himself declared that his "paramount objective" in the war was to destroy the right of secession or, as he rephrased it, to "save the Union," and that if he could do that without freeing a single slave he would gladly do so.



The Declaration Foundation, the Claremont Institute, and other self-proclaimed beacons of the Lincolnian philosophy, preach exactly the opposite. They perpetuate the preposterous myth that there was never any such thing as a right of secession – in a country that was formed by a war of secession. In doing so they rewrite history to legitimize the highly centralized welfare/warfare state that Lincoln, more than anyone else, helped bring about in America. The Declaration Foundation, in other words, repudiates the principles of the Declaration of Independence while trying to convince the public that it is actually championing them.



The second most notable principle of the Declaration is the notion that "all men are created equal." The Declaration Foundation and the Claremont Institute portray Lincoln as an almost Christ-like figure because of his supposed embrace of this principle, but this is hard to square with many of Lincoln’s own lifelong beliefs and clear, unambiguous statements. In his 1858 Ottawa, Illinois debate with Stephen Douglas, for example, he stated that "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races . . . . I . . . am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary."



Lincoln went on to declare that he had never been in favor "of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people." He literally mocked the Jeffersonian dictum that "all men are created equal" by claiming that, with the possible exception of Siamese twins, "I am sorry to say that I have never seen two men of whom it is true."



On the topic of emancipation Lincoln said, "Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this . . . . We cannot, then make them equals."



It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Lincoln unequivocally denounced the principle of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, especially when it comes to men of the white and black races. Ever the slick politician, he rhetorically defended the "natural rights" of all people, but blacks could never enjoy such rights if they were denied all the rights that Lincoln would deny them. In his 1852 eulogy to Henry Clay Lincoln stated that he agreed with Clay that slavery was regrettable, but ending it would produce "a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself." Don’t look for this line, either, in any of the Declaration Foundation’s publications.



Lincoln’s career-long goal, which he clung to until the day he died, was colonization – to send every last black person in the U.S. to Africa, Central America, Haiti – anywhere but the U.S. This, said Lincoln, would be a "glorious consummation." They could be "equal" all right, but not here. This led America’s most prominent abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, to denounce Lincoln as "the President of African Colonization" and to declare that he "had not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins." Again, don’t look for this in any Declaration Foundation or Claremont Institute publications.



Although the Declaration Foundation and the Claremont Institute are "conservative" organizations, they join hands with prominent hard-core leftists in distorting the real meaning of the Declaration of Independence. In Lincoln at Gettysburg the far-left journalist Garry Wills celebrates this "open air sleight of hand" and Lincoln’s use of military force to "remake America" in a way that made egalitarianism, rather than liberty, the prevailing political philosophy.



Left-of-Center Columbia University law professor George P. Fletcher concurs with Wills in Our Secret Constitution, where he praises Lincoln for "reinventing the United States" government from one whose main goal was the defense of liberty to "nationalism, egalitarianism, and democracy."



Over the past century nationalism has been the chief source of the wars that have killed millions of civilians; egalitarianism has helped create socialist and welfare states that have destroyed economy after economy; and unbridled democracy has decimated liberty. The Republican and Democratic parties have championed all of these things over the past century, and they use what Joseph Sobran has called the "Fantasy Lincoln" to help prop up their corrupt regimes.





March 1, 2002



Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.



Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com



Thomas DiLorenzo Archives

Fighting Facts With Slander

From Lew Rockwell.com:

Fighting Facts With Slander


by Thomas J. DiLorenzo





Certain neo-conservatives have responded to the publication of my book, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, with quite hysterical name calling, personal smears, and slanderous language. The chief practitioners of this vulgar means of public discourse are Alan Keyes and employees of his Washington, D.C. based "Declaration Foundation."



On the Foundation’s Web site on Easter Sunday was a very pleasant, Christian blessing, located right below a reprinting of Paul Craig Roberts’s March 21 Washington Times review of my book ("War on Terrorism a Threat to Liberty?"). In a very un-Christian manner the Declaration Foundation accuses Roberts (and myself, indirectly) of "ignorance and calumny." According to Webster’s College Dictionary "calumny" means making false and malicious statements intended to injure a reputation, slander, and defamation. Let’s see if what Roberts said in his column fits that definition.



"Lincoln used war to destroy the U.S. Constitution in order to establish a powerful central government," says Roberts. This is certainly a strong statement, but in fact Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus; launched a military invasion without consent of Congress; blockaded Southern ports without declaring war; imprisoned without warrant or trial some 13,000 Northern citizens who opposed his policies; arrested dozens of newspaper editors and owners and, in some cases, had federal soldiers destroy their printing presses; censored all telegraph communication; nationalized the railroads; created three new states (Kansas, Nevada, and West Virginia) without the formal consent of the citizens of those states, an act that Lincoln’s own attorney general thought was unconstitutional; ordered Federal troops to interfere with Northern elections; deported a member of Congress from Ohio after he criticized Lincoln’s unconstitutional behavior; confiscated private property; confiscated firearms in violation of the Second Amendment; and eviscerated the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.



A New Orleans man was executed for merely taking down a U.S. flag; ministers were imprisoned for failing to say a prayer for Abraham Lincoln, and Fort Lafayette in New York harbor became known as "The American Bastille" since it held so many thousands of Northern political prisoners. All of this was catalogued decades ago in such books as James G. Randall’s Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln and Dean Sprague’s Freedom Under Lincoln.



"This amazing disregard for the Constitution," wrote historian Clinton Rossiter," was "considered by nobody as legal." "One man was the government of the United States," says Rossiter, who nevertheless believed that Lincoln was a "great dictator."



Lincoln used his dictatorial powers, says Roberts, to "suppress all Northern opposition to his illegal and unconstitutional acts." This is not even controversial, and is painstakingly catalogued in the above-mentioned books as well as in The Real Lincoln. Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward established a secret police force and boasted to the British Ambassador, Lord Lyons, that he could "ring a bell" and have a man arrested anywhere in the Northern states without a warrant.



When the New York City Journal of Commerce published a list of over 100 Northern newspapers that opposed the Lincoln administration, Lincoln ordered the Postmaster General to deny those papers mail delivery, which is how nearly all newspapers were delivered at the time. A few of the papers resumed publication only after promising not to criticize the Lincoln administration.



Lincoln "ignored rulings hand-delivered to him by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney ordering Lincoln to respect and faithfully execute the laws of the United States" says Roberts. Absolutely true again. Taney – and virtually all legal scholars at the time – was of the opinion that only Congress could constitutionally suspend habeas corpus, and had his opinion hand delivered to Lincoln by courier. Lincoln ignored it and never even bothered to challenge it in court.



Roberts also points out in his article that "Lincoln urged his generals to conduct total war against the Southern civilian population." Again, this is not even controversial. As pro-Lincoln historian Steven Oates wrote in the December 1995 issue of Civil War Times, "Lincoln fully endorsed Sheridan’s burning of the Shenandoah Valley, Sherman’s brutal March to the Sea through Georgia, and the . . . destructive raid through Alabama." James McPherson has written of how Lincoln micromanaged the war effort perhaps as much as any American president ever has. It is inconceivable, therefore, that he did not also micromanage the war on civilians that was waged by his generals.



Lincoln’s war strategy was called the "Anaconda Plan" because it sought to strangle the Southern economy by blockading the ports and controlling the inland waterways, such as the Mississippi River. It was, in other words, focused on destroying the civilian economy.



General Sherman declared on January 31, 1864 that "To the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is mercy." In a July 31, 1862 letter to his wife he said his goal was "extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people." And so he burned the towns of Randolph, Tennessee, Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi, and Atlanta to the ground after the Confederate army had left; bombarded cities occupied only by civilians in violation of the Geneva Convention of 1863; and boasted in his memoirs of destroying $100 million in private property and stealing another $20 million worth. All of this destroyed food stuffs and left women, children, and the elderly in the cold of winter without shelter or food.



General Philip Sheridan did much of the same in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, burning hundreds of houses to the ground and killing or stealing all livestock and destroying crops long after the Confederate Army had left the valley, just as winter was approaching.



"A new kind of soldier was needed" for this kind of work, writes Roberts. Here he is referring to my quotation of pro-Sherman biographer Lee Kennett, who in his biography of Sherman wrote that "the New York regiments [in Sherman’s army] were . . . filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World." Lincoln recruited the worst of the worst to serve as pillagers and plunderers in Sherman’s army.



Lincoln used the war to "remove the constraints that Southern senators and congressmen, standing in the Jeffersonian tradition, placed in the way of centralized federal power, high tariffs, and subsidies to Northern industries." Indeed, Lincoln’s 28-year political career prior to becoming president was devoted almost exclusively to this end. Even Lincoln idolater Mark Neely, Jr., in The Fate of Liberty, noted that as early as the 1840s, Lincoln exhibited a "gruff and belittling impatience" with constitutional arguments against his cherished Whig economic agenda of protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare for the railroad and road building industries, and a federal government monopolization of the money supply. Once he was in power, Lincoln appointed himself "constitutional dictator" and immediately pushed through this mercantilist economic agenda – an agenda that had been vetoed by president after president beginning with Jefferson.



Far from "saving the Union," writes Roberts, Lincoln "utterly destroyed the Union achieved by the Founding Fathers and the U.S. Constitution." The original Union was a voluntary association of states. By holding it together at gunpoint Lincoln may have "saved" the Union in a geographic sense, but he destroyed it in a philosophical sense.



Paul Craig Roberts based his column on well-documented facts as presented in The Real Lincoln. In response to these facts, in a recent WorldNetDaily column the insufferably sanctimonious Alan Keyes described people like myself, Paul Craig Roberts, Walter Williams, Joe Sobran, Charles Adams, Jeffrey Rogers Hummell, Doug Bandow, Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett, Jr., and other Lincoln critics as "pseudo-learned scribblers," with an "incapacity to recognize moral purpose" who display "uncomprehending pettiness," are "dishonest," and, once again, his favorite word for all who disagree with him: "ignorant."



"Ignorant" and "slanderous" is the precise language one should use to describe the hysterical rantings and ravings of Alan Keyes and his minions at the so-called Declaration Foundation.





April 3, 2002



Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.



Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com



Thomas DiLorenzo Archives

The Neo-Conservative Assault On The Constitution

From Lew Rockwell.com:

The Neo-Con Assault on the Constitution


by Thomas J. DiLorenzo





WorldNetDaily book editor Joel Miller recently authored one of the best common-sense constitutional arguments against the government’s failed “war on drugs” that I’ve seen (“Alan Keyes is Wrong!”, April 23). It was a response to neo-conservative Alan Keyes, who had written in support of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s use of the federal Controlled Substances Act to exert federal dominion over drug regulation by the states. Keyes was addressing Oregon’s “euthanasia laws” that permit the dispensation of lethal drugs, and Miller agreed with him that “killing yourself . . . is not medically legitimate.”



The bigger issue, though, is what constitutional right the federal government has to exert such control over drug regulation – or any kind of regulation for that matter – by the states. As Miller pointed out, Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which delineates the legitimate appropriations of Congress, does not include regulating drugs (or the vast majority of what the federal government does today, for that matter). The Tenth Amendment, moreover, reserves such powers “to the States respectively, or to the people.”



Miller interestingly quotes historian David Musto as having observed that until the late nineteenth century, the federal government laid no claim to such regulatory powers; such things were the responsibilities of the states, or the people. Miller is correct to invoke the Tenth Amendment in his argument, but this Amendment was all but destroyed during the War Between the States, after which federal political hegemony was established. As Dean Sprague wrote in Freedom Under Lincoln, “States Rights, which prior to 1860 had been as important a part of northern political beliefs as southern, were overturned.” This includes, first and foremost, the Tenth Amendment.



Miller also correctly observed that the “progressive era” federal regulatory agencies “were profoundly unconstitutional and un-American” and are “the elder bedmates of the coercive, expansionist politics of modern-day liberalism.” Exactly. This, however, is exactly the position that neo-conservatives like Alan Keyes hold.



There is a method in the neo-con assault on the Constitution: They routinely invoke the part of the Declaration of Independence about “all men are created equal,” but not the rest of the document, as our “national creed,” even if the policies they advance in the name of that creed are in deep conflict with the Constitution itself. For example, in Keyes’s article he bases his argument in support of federal drug regulation on the equality principle of the Declaration. He claims that the Constitution supposedly creates a “federal regime of ordered liberty” by which democratic mobs supposedly “govern themselves in dignity and justice” (I’m not making this up, honest).



To neo-cons like Keyes, the Constitution supposedly prohibits the interpretation of federal law by anyone but the federal government itself because the people of individual states are supposedly incapable of doing so; only “the people of the whole nation” are “competent” to perform this task. But his makes no sense, for there is no such thing as “the people as a whole” acting on this or any other issue. The fact that a small percentage of us votes every four years or so does not imply that we are acting with competence as “a whole people” on this or any other issue. A state referendum on a specific issue, on the other hand, is much more meaningful in terms of citizen participation.



Keyes barely ever makes a speech or writes a column anymore where he does not invoke the Declaration and make a not-too-subtle comparison between himself and Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, he frequently states that his main passion, the pro-life movement of today, is the equivalent of the abolition movement of the nineteenth century. (This comparison is not entirely accurate, however, if one acknowledges Pulitzer Prize winning Lincoln biographer David Donald’s statement that “Lincoln was not an abolitionist”).



The link between Lincoln and neo-con ideology is clear: Lincoln falsely claimed that the Union preceded the states, and was therefore not subject to their sovereignty. The neo-cons make the exact same argument in advancing whatever policy cause they happen to be involved in, whether it is drug regulation, abortion, censoring of television, waging war, etc. This is why so many neo-cons, such as the ones associated with Keyes and the Claremont Institute, are such slavish idol worshippers when it comes to Lincoln. They use his martyred “sainthood” to promote their political agenda through an ever more powerful federal government. That’s why they’re described as “neo-cons” and are not a part of the Old Right tradition: They are comfortable with Big Government, as long as it fights their wars and enacts their social and regulatory programs. This is one reason why there is such a large “Lincoln Cult” among conservative (but mostly left/liberal) academics and think tank employees.



But the alleged supremacy of the federal government over the states is a lie. It was established by the most violent means, a war that killed the equivalent of more than 5 million Americans (standardizing for today’s population), not logic, argumentation, or even legal precedent. It is a lie because:



Each American colony declared sovereignty from Great Britain on its own;

After the Revolution each state was individually recognized as sovereign by the defeated British government;

The Articles of Confederation said, “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence”;

The states then decided to secede from the Articles and dropped the words “Perpetual Union” from the title;

Virginia’s constitutional ratifying convention stated that “the powers granted resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression.” This right was also asserted for all other states;

In The Federalist #39 James Madison wrote that ratification of the Constitution would be achieved by the people “not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong,” flatly contradicting the contrary assertions of Keyes and other neo-cons;

The Constitution always speaks of “the United States” in the plural, signifying that the individual states were united in forming the federal government as their agent while maintaining their sovereignty over it;

The Constitution can only be amended with the authority of the states;

Until 1914 U.S. Senators were appointed by state legislatures so that the states could retain a degree of sovereignty over federal “officials,” who now have carte blanche to rule over us as they wish.

Only by endlessly repeating what Emory University philosopher Donald Livingston calls Lincoln’s “spectacular lie” that the federal government created the states (and not the other way around), and that the nation was supposedly founded by “the whole people” and not the people of the states in political conventions can the neo-cons continue to champion the further centralization of governmental power to serve their own political ends, whatever they may be.



Of course, it’s not only the neo-cons who perpetuate this lie. Liberals and other assorted leftists do so as well. The left-wing journalist Garry Wills, for example, praises Lincoln’s “open air sleight of hand” in effectively rewriting the true history of the founding (not unlike so many of the former communist governments rewrote their own histories during the twentieth century) because it enabled us to embrace “egalitarianism” and the massive welfare state in whose name it has been advanced (Lincoln at Gettysburg).



Columbia University law professor George P. Fletcher echoes the neo-con mantra in Our Secret Constitution, where he celebrates the fact that the centralized state that was imposed on the nation by the Lincoln administration has led directly to the adoption of myriad “welfare programs,” “affirmative action measures,” the New Deal, modern workplace regulation, etc. He is quite gleeful in his description of the Gettysburg Address as “the preamble of the second American constitution.” This is not necessarily a written constitution, however, but one that has been imposed by federal policy.



This transformation of American government from one in which federalism, states rights, and the rights of nullification and secession allowed the citizens of the states to retain sovereignty over the federal government to a consolidated, monolithic Leviathan, means that Americans now live under what historian Clinton Rossiter called a “constitutional dictatorship.” He used this phrase in a book of the same name which appropriately featured an entire chapter on the “Lincoln Dictatorship.”



April 25, 2002



Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.



Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com



Thomas DiLorenzo Archives





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