It’s a classic American tale: A family member passes away, and relatives discover their long-lost historical artifacts in the attic.
In Nancy Woodward’s case, the artifacts are the personal diaries of her ancestor, a Civil War Union cavalry officer, Capt. Benjamin Tolbert Humphrey.
On Tuesday, Woodward donated her great-great-grandfather’s diaries to the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History in Little Rock.
What stands out about the discovery of the diaries is that Humphrey’s firsthand observations have given historians a new personal account of the Civil War in Arkansas.
Many soldiers kept diaries during the Civil War, but a testimony of the war west of the Mississippi is more rare, given most of the key fighting took place east of the Mississippi River, according to Ron Fuller, a chairman of the MacArthur Museum’s heritage board.
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Humphrey’s account is a rare telling of many of the engagements overlooked by some historians and Civil War buffs more fascinated with the decisive battles such as Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and Vicksburg, Miss.
Woodward and her family spent decades carefully transcribing their Civil War ancestor’s diaries, which detail campaigns he and the Union’s 7th Missouri Cavalry Company M experienced during the war.
Subduing the rebellion in Arkansas was not a major strategic objective for the Union Army during the war, but fighting took place near Arkansas’ border with Missouri and along its banks of the Mississippi River.
Humphrey’s account is a rare telling of many of the engagements overlooked by some historians and Civil War buffs more fascinated with the decisive battles such as Gettysburg, Pa., and Vicksburg, Miss.
“Civil War diaries are extremely hard to come by,” Fuller said. “They’re very, very rare and they’re even rarer for diaries that are west of the Mississippi [River].” How the MacArthur Museum came to possess a unique account of the Civil War in Arkansas is a case of serendipity as Fuller and Woodward got in touch online through a mutual love of history.
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It was Fuller and Woodward’s fascination with old cemeteries and the Civil War that led them to connect over Facebook. Woodward told Fuller she had an ancestor who was a Civil War veteran who fought in Arkansas, something that piqued Fuller’s interest.
“I’m just happy it’s got a safe home to go to,” Woodward said. “It’s been worrying us.” Maybe most interesting to historians and history buffs alike is that Humphrey’s diaries contain a first-hand account of one of the most remembered and contentious events of the Civil War in Arkansas — the execution of David O. Dodd.
Dodd, born in Texas in 1846, moved to Little Rock with his family as a child. During the Civil War, while just a teenager, Dodd was arrested for spying for the Confederacy and was convicted and condemned to death in a court martial.
On Jan. 8, 1864, the 17-year-old Dodd was hanged on the grounds of St. Johns' College in Little Rock, according to CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
Confederate sympathizers seized on Dodd’s death and turned him into a martyr, eventually giving him the moniker of the “boy hero of Arkansas,” according to Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
After the Civil War, his death was used to push a pro-Confederate narrative.
Humphrey was a witness to Dodd’s execution and wrote a small entry in his diary taking note of Dodd’s “courage and fortitude” before his execution while also noting he was “a traitor spy and by the laws of war he must die.” “Yet he was so young and yet so brave,” Humphrey wrote. “I could not help but feel sorry and regret his untimely end.” Dodd’s legacy has left a mark on Arkansas, and on Little Rock in particular, with works of art, a poem, a play and a silent movie being made about him. An elementary school and road in Little Rock were also named in his honor.
Dodd is buried in Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock, where members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans still memorialize him.
For Stephan McAteer, executive director of the MacArthur Museum, Humphrey’s first-hand account of Dodd’s execution cuts through some of the postwar myth-making, instead noting his death as just another tragedy in the nation’s bloodiest war.
“There are very few — that I have seen — first-person accounts of the hanging of David O Dodd,” McAteer said. “And as you may or may not be aware, there is a lot of embellishment that have happened over the years to that story.” The museum plans to build a display for the diaries, likely placing it close to the museum’s stained glass window depicting Dodd, McAteer said.
For the diaries, it is a return to a place Humphrey likely would have been familiar with during his short time in Little Rock as the MacArthur Museum was once a building for the U.S. Arsenal.
Born in Crawfordsville, Ind., in 1826, Humphrey was a farmer in Putnam County, Mo., when the Civil War broke out in 1861. He enlisted in the Union Army and was commissioned as a captain.
“They were a bunch of farmers that got together,” Woodward said of Humphrey and his company.
In his diaries, Humphrey describes the long marches, the intense Arkansas heat and rain, the boredom and the horrors of battles and campaigns throughout the state.
Humphrey’s unit marched through the Ozark Mountains fighting in the battles of Prairie Grove and Van Buren and later taking part in the Little Rock Campaign where the Union Army, under Maj. General Frederick Steele, marched on Little Rock in 1863.
“I enjoyed not just the David O. Dodd entry, but his several days about being a part of the Little Rock Campaign at Brownsville, coming in crossing the Arkansas River the evening of Sept. 10 [1863], the next day chasing [Confederate General Sterling] Price’s troops as they were high-tailing it down south,” McAteer said.
Humphrey’s marriage was a “casualty of the war” as he returned home in 1864 and vaguely noted how things at home had changed, according to a website dedicated to his journal. In 1866, Humphrey married again and moved to Kansas.
Humphrey’s first-hand telling of the Civil War was not known until Woodward’s grandmother died in the 1980s and Woodward’s father discovered the diaries in her home in Kansas.
Woodward, who was studying history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock at the time, barely knew she had an ancestor who fought in the Civil War and was shocked to learn what her father had found.
The diaries’ age, brittle condition, faded ink and pencil marks made it an arduous task for Woodward’s family to transcribe it.
“Immediately we started working on it,” Woodward said. “But again, you know, it was magnifying glasses and a word at a time.” For years, Woodward’s family began the careful and painstaking work of transcribing the diaries, eventually publishing it into a book in 2015 titled “Missouri Volunteer: The Civil War Journal of Benjamin T. Humphrey.” In the basement of the MacArthur Museum, where the U.S. Army used to store gunpowder, Woodward questioned whether she had anything in common with her Civil War ancestor.
“It’s such a different time now,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine going by foot through the Ozark Mountains.” But after giving it a few more minutes she noticed one thing she has in common with her great-great-grandfather: “A dedication to recording history.” “You know, to understand this is noteworthy to save something,” she said. “I’m sure he would be very happy to know it’s here.”
CORRECTION: St. Johns' College was misspelled in a previous version of this story.
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Civil War diaries donated to MacArthur Museum
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