David Owen Dodd
| David Owen Dodd | |
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| Born |
November 10, 1846 Lavaca County, Texas |
| Died | January 8, 1864 (aged 17) St. Johns' College Little Rock, Arkansas |
| Buried |
Mount Holly Cemetery Little Rock, Arkansas |
| Religion | Baptist |
David Owen Dodd (November 10, 1846 – January 8, 1864), also known as David O. Dodd, was an Arkansas youth executed for spying in the American Civil War.
In December 1863 Dodd carried some letters to business associates of his father in Union-held Little Rock, Arkansas. While traveling to rejoin his family at Camden, Arkansas, he mistakenly re-entered Federally-held territory. Discovering that he did not have a pass, U.S. soldiers questioned him and found that he was carrying a notebook with the locations of Federal troops in the area. He was arrested and tried by a military tribunal, with little defense offered for his actions. It found him guilty of spying and sentenced him to death. He was hanged on January 8, 1864. Though he did not reveal the source of the information, a young girl named Mary Dodge and her father were summarily escorted back to their home in Vermont. These events have led to him being called the "Arkansas Boy Martyr of the Confederacy".
David Owen Dodd was born in Lavaca County, Texas, to Andrew Marion and Lydia Echols (née Owen) Dodd. His parents, who were Baptists, had married in a village south of Little Rock, Arkansas, and moved to Texas with their first daughter Senhora, where David and his sisters Leonora and Ann Eliza were born. David's third sister, Ann Eliza, died before the Civil War.
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. His father left the family to serve as sutler with the 3rd Arkansas Cavalry. In 1862 David went to Louisiana and worked as a telegraph operator until crossing the river to join his father and assist him in his sutlery. In the fall of 1863, after the Union Army occupied Little Rock, David returned to escort his mother and sisters to Mississippi but never left Arkansas. In December his father Andrew arrived and the entire Dodd family moved south to journey to Mississippi to be near Andrew.
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.
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