A century later, while examining one of the lithographed broadsheets of the address, Hall completed the solution to the puzzle. The London lithographer who worked with the papers in 1864 transferred the closing lines of the address and the signature to the bottom of page two in order to better fit the photographed document he was working from onto one piece of paper. Then, to produce an overall legible look to the finished broadsheet, he retouched the show-through area. When he cleaned up the signature–never having seen the name Dahlgren before–he made it what it looked like to him: Dalhgren.

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It is unlikely that anyone looking only at the photographic set in 1864 and knowing Colonel Dahlgren’s identity would have made this mistake–and that includes Admiral Dahlgren. The name is hard to read in the photographic copy, to be sure, but to the initiated no misspelling is noticeable. But the admiral saw only the lithographic copy, where the misspelling is obvious. As for his insistence that Ulric always signed his full first name, that may have been true enough with his general correspondence, but in the case of formal official documents such as addresses to the troops, officers commonly used their initials. This was the only such address that Colonel Dahlgren ever composed, and he chose the customary form for his signature.²⁵

Admiral Dahlgren went to his grave believing he had rescued his son’s memory from infamy and no doubt was comforted by that conviction. In fact, however, every claim of forgery ever applied to the Dahlgren papers, then and since, quickly unravels upon investigation. This is no less true of the case for forgery recently set forth in The Dahlgren Affair.

The notion that the Confederates forged the Dahlgren papers from scratch–that in fact no papers at all were found on Dahlgren’s body–is contradicted by no less an authority than Judson Kilpatrick, who admitted that he had seen such an address by Dahlgren on the eve of the raid. Kilpatrick simply denied that what he read and approved included the offending passage. In any case, the address, instructions, and pocket notebook contained scores of details of the raid and of its planning that the Confederates had no way of knowing. Thus any forgery plot had to have been limited to alterations of the existing documents.

The inflammatory sentence in the address calling for arson and murder falls toward the end of the first page of the document. If this was a forged interpolation, it would have required copying the entire two-and-a-half-page document–but only after obtaining new stationery created in imitation of the Federal Cavalry Corps letterhead. The same procedure needed to be followed for the sheet of instructions–entire recopying to include the murderous passage, on newly printed stationery. After that the documents had to be folded, creased, and soiled to the condition evident in the photographs.

The pocket notebook would require similar alteration. There is no photographic or other record of the notebook’s contents beyond what appeared in the Richmond Examiner of April 1, 1864, and beyond the testimony of those who saw and described it, so it is not known how difficult that forgery process might have been. Certainly it was more complicated than simply making a few additions to Dahlgren’s writings.

It is readily apparent that any program of forgery would require additional changes to the documents after they reached Richmond. The various lieutenants, captains, and colonels who saw the papers in the field had neither motive nor opportunity to carry out so sophisticated a ruse. Above everything else, they lacked access to a print shop to run off the necessary Federal army stationery. Therefore the entire forgery operation needed to have occurred in Richmond on March 4. More exactly, between noon on March 4, when Lieutenant Pollard handed the Dahlgren papers to General Fitzhugh Lee, and early evening, when copies were turned over to the Richmond editors in time for them to meet their printing deadline for the next day’s morning editions. These factors cause any and all of the forgery theories to collapse irretrievably. There was simply no time to carry out a forgery plot.

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