Robert F. Bunting, chaplain of the Rangers, voiced similar anger. Bunting kept Texans informed about the regiment’s activities by sending regular reports to the Houston Telegraph. On March 4, writing from Rome, Georgia, Bunting aroused the entire state with a highly charged account of Dodd’s “fiendish murder.” The execution, insisted Bunting, as he spoke on behalf of the Rangers, “brings to the heart more bitterness than any calamity which has overtaken us.” Even some Northern newspapers, including the New York Tribune, expressed outrage.

Why did the Federals execute Dodd? Bunting thought he knew the answer. He insisted some rabid eastern Tennessee Unionists, notable among them William G. “Parson” Brownlow, were seeking revenge for the hanging deaths of several “bridge-burners” early in the war. The bridge burners were Unionists who had attempted to disrupt Confederate communication and supply lines by destroying railroad bridges in eastern Tennessee. The gallows where one or more of them died was supposedly the one used to execute Dodd. “Here was a Texas Ranger in their power,” reasoned Bunting, “and it would be double gratification of fiendish delight to execute him.” Perhaps, but House noted in her diary on January 1 that Brownlow, for one, had been keeping “very quiet” at the time of Dodd’s arrest and trial–”have not seen or heard anything of him.”

Of course, there are other possibilities. It seems that when Longstreet aborted his siege of Knoxville, he left in his abandoned lines two Yankee spies dangling at the ends of hanging ropes. “It never ought to have been done,” House wrote. “They ought to have been quietly buried and not left hanging to taunt the Yankees.” House also thought the Federals in Knoxville were anxious because of Longstreet’s continued presence northwest of the city, especially in light of his ongoing raids against Federal patrols and supply trains. “They are frightened here,” House reported. “I think they are expecting him [Longstreet] in here and that is one reason that Mr. Dodd’s sentence is to be carried into execution so soon. They are afraid of his being rescued.”

Finally, addressing House’s last observation, and touching on a point suggested by Bunting, Major General John G. Foster, commanding the Department of the Ohio and the Union garrison at Knoxville, believed it was time to crack down on Rebel spies in eastern Tennessee. On January 8, the day of Dodd’s execution, Foster complained about the large number of Union pickets and outposts recently “overpowered and captured by the enemy’s troops, disguised as Federal soldiers.” He ordered all corps commanders “to cause to be shot dead all the rebel officers and soldiers (wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army) captured within our lines.” Furthermore, on January 17, Foster took the extraordinary step of forwarding a copy of the proceedings and findings of Dodd’s trial to Longstreet. He clearly intended this as a warning to the Rebels.

Dodd seems to have been a classic victim of circumstance, a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was sacrificed to make a point: the new, tough Federal policy in eastern Tennessee was for real. His misfortune made him one of just 19 Confederates to be hanged legally as spies during the war. Whatever the reasoning of Federal commanders, Dodd’s execution, save for the death of Benjamin Terry, himself, lives as perhaps the saddest moment in Texas Ranger history–and one of the more poignant personal tragedies of the war.

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Daniel E. Sutherland, a history professor at the University of Arkansas, is the author of several books about the Civil War. His most recent work is Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865.

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