On 21 October 1869, William Edward Dodd was born in Clayton, North Carolina. His father, John Dodd, was from a hard-scrabble clan of respectable yeoman. His mother, Evelyn Creech Dodd, was from a modestly affluent family of antebellum slave owners. After the war, the Creech family was still wealthy enough to give Evelyn and John a piece of land to call their own. Such financial wealth was a rarity in postwar North Carolina, as it was throughout the South. The mixed-class background of his parents was the first of many paradoxes that would define the life of young William.
When the Reconstruction period officially came to an end in the 1870s, Conservatives promised a “New South.” Prophets of this new order promoted diversification of the economy and the establishment of an industrialized society. The reality was that more and more Southerners were becoming tied to the land through a cruel cycle of debt. The forces of rising costs and falling cotton prices made Southern farmers work twice as hard as before to keep their heads above water. Many farmers had to borrow against their crops and land from their suppliers. John Dodd fell prey to these forces as he gradually became a tenant farmer. Only generous credit supplied by Evelyn’s uncles (local merchants Sam and Ashley Horne) allowed the family, to keep their home.
William E. Dodd was exposed to conflicting historical interpretations at an early age. From his father, William learned of Northern wrongs and how the salvation of the South lay in White Democracy. Another factor in Dodd’s early education, and a far more influential one, was his mother. Although her family owned slaves before the war, Evelyn was an enigma among well-to-do white Southerners of the time. While others taught history according to unreconstructed veterans and embittered civilians, Evelyn lectured her children on how emancipation was part of the divine will, and how “[s]laveholders . . . were wholly to blame for the great war.” Dodd was aware of the impact his mother and father’s differences had on him. “I am conscious that some of these things . . . influenced my thinking if not my writing,” Dodd said in 1913.
John Dodd imbued in his children the ethic of hard work and young William took this admonition to heart. In school, Dodd gained a reputation as Clayton’s most studious child. Upon finishing public school, William was educated alongside the children of Clayton’s elites at Professor E. G. Beckwith’s “moderately priced” Utopia Institute. When Professor Beckwith left Clayton in 1888 to teach mathematics at Wake Forest College, the nineteen-year-old Dodd was asked to help run the school. Dodd knew that his escape from his father’s fate lay in furthering his education. His uncle, Samuel Horne, revered education and encouraged William to pursue it as a vaccine against poverty. Dodd initially tried to gain admission to the United States Military Academy. The tenant farmer’s son scored well on the entrance exam and managed, through his influential uncles, to garner endorsements from two state senators, the Johnson County Sheriff, and powerful Raleigh newspaper editor Josephus Daniels. However, Dodd was unable to secure the appointment. In 1891, Dodd enrolled at Virginia A&M; College (later Virginia Polytechnic Institute) at Blacksburg.
Like other A&M; schools of the time, student life at Virginia A&M; was structured around military drill and discipline. Despite the rigors of cadet life, Dodd excelled as a student. He joined the Y.M.C.A. and became the president of his college chapter. One of Dodd’s most notable extracurricular accomplishments was his revival of the school’s defunct literary magazine. Dodd’s ability as a writer became apparent when he won the college essayist’s medal for his article, “Abuses of the English Language.” During this time, William began to formulate the ideals that would stay with him throughout his career. He contributed essays on the causes and remedies of Southern poverty. According to the budding writer, education and the return of the small independent farmer would serve to alleviate the South’s troubles. Dodd pondered a career in journalism when he graduated in 1895. The lack of job offers in that field quickly dissuaded him. Dodd looked to graduate study and teaching for his salvation.
During his years in Blacksburg, Dodd studied under Professor Edward E. Sheib. Sheib, who held a PhD from Germany’s prestigious Leipzig University, was highly impressed with Dodd’s scholastic abilities and believed in his potential as a historian. He urged Dodd to pursue a doctorate from Leipzig as it had produced such American historians as Henry Adams, Herbert Baxter Adams, and John W. Burgess. Dodd’s only obstacle was the cost of attending a university nearly halfway around the world, as his meager savings would not suffice. Dodd petitioned his uncle Sam Horne for the money to attend Leipzig. Horne lent his nephew more than fifteen hundred dollars with unlimited time to repay. In June of 1897, Dodd departed for Europe.
Erich Marcks and Karl Lamprecht, Leipzig’s most notable graduate instructors, were famous in European academic circles. Marcks, the biographer of England’s Queen Elizabeth and Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, believed that biography and history were practically one in the same. Lamprecht had an opposite philosophy. Lamprecht’s Kulturgeschichte, or “Cultural Psychology,” theory was the idea that “history has not so much to do with great personages of the past as with the currents of thought, feeling or passion which produced those personages.” The influence of these two instructors, combined with Dodd’s yeoman background influenced the young scholar to research and write a dissertation about Thomas Jefferson and the origins of the Democratic party.
For source material, Dodd turned to American state papers in London and Berlin. Dodd’s thesis challenged the conventional notion that Thomas Jefferson spent the years after retiring from George Washington’s cabinet organizing and directing an opposition party. Instead, Dodd pointed to a widespread popular movement that pushed the reluctant Jefferson back into public service. The conclusions presented in Dodd’s 88-page doctoral thesis retained their validity well into the twentieth century.
When Dodd returned to America in November of 1899, he faced the daunting task of finding gainful employment. Despite holding a degree from one of Europe’s most prestigious universities, Dodd was hard-pressed to find work. He accepted a position at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, the only offer of employment he received. Dodd’s attempts to gain recognition in the academic world quickly established him as one of the profession’s most promising newcomers. He quickly rejected the dominant view of American history that came from the Federalist-Whig perspective. Dodd also sought to break the monopoly on Southern historical interpretation that was fiercely guarded by Confederate patriotic societies. The demand, “that teachers of history . . . subscribe to two trite oaths: 1) that the South was altogether right in seceding in 1861 and 2) that the war was not waged about the Negro.” was main impediment Dodd felt hampered the critical study of Old South.
Reflecting the influence of Erich Marcks, Dodd’s first foray into professional scholarship was the biography, The Life of Nathaniel Macon. Macon, a U.S. Representative and Senator from North Carolina who served from 1791 to 1827, was “vaguely known,” despite the fact that “every southern state has either a town or a county, or both, called by his name.” Dodd assessed Macon as, “no great man in the ordinary sense of the word, but . . . he served . . . the people of North Carolina . . . more faithfully and more satisfactorily . . . than any other man who ever represented them.” Macon would have been a flawless politician if not for his defense of slavery, “the basis of Southern wealth, and necessary as a weapon with which to fight the free states.” To Dodd, Macon almost fit the mold of Thomas Jefferson: an aristocrat who shunned the privileged status of his birth to champion populist democracy and common-folk values. Through this paradigm, Dodd would come to assess not only the subjects he studied, but the politicians he would involve himself with.
The Life of Nathaniel Macon
contained minor factual errors and grammatical weaknesses, characteristics that would plague all of his writings. However, it would remain the foremost Macon biography well into the twentieth century. One reviewer found Dodd’s pro-Democratic bias a little too apparent. Paul S. Peirce, however, called the work, “a welcome contribution to American political biography.” The Life of Nathaniel Macon brought Dodd moderate notoriety. The New York Times asked him to contribute to its “Saturday Review of Books,” but the most significant result of his work came when Professor Ellis P. Oberholtzer of the University of Pennsylvania asked him to write a biography of Jefferson Davis. Dodd tackled the project with zeal, but with a great deal of trepidation as well.
Dodd encountered little resistance from southern archivists in his search for source material. The one setback was the denial of access to the archives at the Confederate Memorial Hall in New Orleans. In a titanic irony, the Sons of Confederate Veterans condemned the obstruction of, “so worthy a purpose as the presentation of an authentic [Davis] biography.” “It is not an easy thing,” Dodd wrote, “to think and speak dispassionately of Jefferson Davis.” However, Dodd promised, “to steer a middle course,” in the hopes that both the, “ardent nationalist,” and the, “follower of ‘Jeff’ Davis,” would be able to learn something from the work. Dodd was not overly critical of his subject and at times even showed sympathy. In discussing the criticism of Davis in the Southern press, Dodd commented that, “three of the greatest journals were from the outset hostile to Davis, indulging daily in the most unseemly abuse.” Dodd’s assessment of the planter class was far more judgmental. “[E]very one in the South who exercised any influence,” Dodd stated, “was a master or mistress of slaves.” In passages tinged with populist/progressive social commentary, Dodd chastised these, “monopolists of 1860 . . .[who] were ready for war at any time to avoid a surrender of their privileges, or franchises – to use a more modern term.” These, “princes of the plantation,” easily rallied poorer allies to their cause as, “the small planter saw his beau ideal . . . [in the] charmed circle of Southern aristocracy.”
Despite Dodd’s even handed treatment of Davis, the historian-general of the Virginia United Daughters of the Confederacy dismissed the work as having “not done President Davis justice.” Professional reviewers however, were more impressed. Charles Francis Adams criticized Dodd’s inaccuracy and his “rather sweeping generalizations,” but he praised Dodd for being “thoroughly sympathetic with his subject; yet throughout judicial in tone.” An anonymous reviewer wrote that Dodd, “displays . . . a passion for truth and a certain mental delight in compelling its acceptance.” The Davis biography helped establish Dodd as a respected scholar in his field. By 1908, Dodd’s reputation was solid enough to garner offers from the Universities of Chicago, Wisconsin, and California. The promise of increased prestige, higher salary and more academic freedom loomed large in his decision to leave Virginia. In the end, Dodd chose Chicago, despite its endowment from oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. “I think the work there would suit me with the single exception that I would be grazing in Rockefeller’s pasture,” Dodd said of Chicago.
The initial products of Dodd’s work at Chicago created a stir within the profession. The first, presented in 1911, was a study of the presidential election of 1860. In “The Fight for the Northwest, 1860,” Dodd explained that, “[t]he local institutions of most of the states north of the Ohio were Southern.” Dodd asserted that foreign immigration to the Old Northwest by people who “brought with them opinions and ideals hostile to slavery and to the South,” helped to secure the election of Lincoln in 1860. “The election of Lincoln,” he concluded, “and, . . . the fate of the Union [was] thus determined . . . by voters who knew the least of American history and institutions.” Although Dodd’s thesis would be challenged in later years, he showed, “how real history might be made,” according to Charles Beard.
Dodd’s next project was Statesmen of the Old South; or, from Radicalism to Conservative Revolt. The progression of antebellum Southern history is personified in three individuals: Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, and Jefferson Davis. Dodd presents Jefferson as the ideal, a man of elite origins who shuns privileged interests to champion, “the full and complete application of democracy.” Calhoun is presented as a man who initially embraced Jeffersonian principles, but gradually gave himself over to proposing “that property in Negro slaves was more sacred than the rights and ideas,” of Jefferson. As a challenge to convention, Dodd asserts that Calhoun was not, “an arch-conspirator, seeking the overthrow of the government.” Rather, Calhoun was, “a nationalist . . . to the day of his death.” Calhoun sought not to overthrow the government as much as he sought, “to weld together his people on a basis of economic interest,” so that they, “would decide all great questions in [their] favor.” In concluding his study, Dodd presents Jefferson Davis as, “the representative of property, of the ‘interests’ not of the struggling masses of common mankind.” Like historians of the progressive school of interpretation, Dodd saw antebellum Southern history as a gradual slide into the abyss of secession and war.
In 1911, James Harvey Robinson of Columbia University presented an essay titled “The New History.” Robinson professed the belief that historians should depart from nineteenth-century scientific methodology and integrate the tools of social science to create more comprehensive studies. Two years later, Dodd answered Robinson’s call with the essay “Profitable Fields of Investigation in American History, 1815-1860.” Dodd brought a Marxist, class-struggle interpretation to bear on the history of the antebellum United States. “The principal subject which the student of this period . . . must appreciate is the development of a dominant interest,” Dodd began. This dominant interest was, “a distinct civilization with definite ideals which was . . . nationalist only in so far as the general government offered a guarantee of its existence and property.”
This thesis was put forth by Karl Marx in 1861 when he stated that the planters sought, “not a dissolution of the Union, but a reorganization of it . . . under the recognized control of the slaveholding oligarchy.” In addition, the manufacturing class gradually emerged to challenge the planters. The, “nature of their business made them the masters of many densely populated communities,” which, “gave them a power in Congress next to that of the planters.” This thesis is a restatement of Marx’s assertion that the, “struggle between the South and the North [was] . . . nothing but a conflict between two social systems.” After presenting his interpretation, Dodd proposed that historians study the “tobacco and cotton planting industries,” the transportation revolution, and Southern religious denominations that “were the most ardent protagonists of . . . the feudal system which had grown so rapidly during the half century under consideration.” Remaining true to the influence of Erich Marcks, Dodd also encouraged biographical studies of such individuals as William Yancey, Howell Cobb, Andrew Johnson, Stephen A. Douglas, Edmund Ruffin, and Robert Barnwell Rhett as a means to achieve these ends. Dodd’s paper was immediately controversial. Ulrich B. Phillips called the paper, “highly suggestive and admirable,” but in his view, race was far more influential in determining Southern policy than economics.
Dodd’s fourth book, Expansion and Conflict, was a repetition of the themes touched upon in his two articles and in Statesmen of the Old South. Expansion and Conflict covers American history from the ascension of Andrew Jackson to the end of the Civil War. Expansion and Conflict contains detailed maps that show voting patterns, the growth of the tobacco and cotton industries, and suggestions that readers compare the two to see correlations. Dodd stated that his purpose was to help those students, “who may be desirous of knowing why things happened . . . as well as how they happened.” Further expounding on his Marxist interpretation, Dodd focused on the struggle that pit the Northern manufacturing class against the Southern agrarian class for dominance of the West, with the North winning out through economic factors such as the expansion of the railroad.
Dodd’s third book as a professor at Chicago was The Cotton Kingdom. In a concise, 30,000-word study, Dodd examines the general state of the lower South in 1850. Dodd showed a stratified society dominated by the philosophy, “that men were not equal, . . . some men were fit only for the hard toil of the field while others were plainly designed for the easier task of managing and directing the labor of others.” Furthermore, [t]here were no natural rights; rights were prescriptive and they implied . . . a service rendered to society.” There are also many quotes from leading pro-slavery philosophers of the day, who proposed the belief that, “the lowest class . . . are necessarily on a low moral plane.” Dodd quoted Chancellor William Harper of the Supreme Court of South Carolina who stated that the, ” ‘want of chastity among slaves hardly deserves a harsher name than weakness.’ ” Dodd also detailed the religious and educational establishment and how they were pillars of this philosophy. According to Dodd, “[p]reachers owned slaves, planters guided the polity of the church, and the Bible became the arsenal from which the best pro-slavery arguments were drawn.” The Cotton Kingdom also includes a section on the literature of the planters, where Dodd points out that, “The Cotton Kingdom was immediate and long-term. Prior to the appearance of Southern history surveys, it was used as a textbook. Fifty years after its publication, J.G. Randall and David Donald called The Cotton Kingdom, “brilliant.” In 1992, the work was judged “an old but still useful survey of the antebellum South,” by James McPherson
Statesmen of the Old South, Expansion and Conflict, and The Cotton Kingdom were written to serve as the basis of a multi volume, comprehensive study of the Old South. However, Dodd’s lingering involvement with politics would hamper this effort.
“industrial-financial” interests for the defeat of Bryan. Dodd’s boldest political action was demanding a meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 to discuss the dismissal of a postmaster in Hanover, VA whose removal Dodd thought highly unjust. The President granted an appointment, was immediately intrigued with Dodd, and scheduled a second meeting. Despite cultivating a friendship with Roosevelt, Dodd withdrew his support of him in 1912 over Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” philosophy. I prefer bad government by the people,” Dodd wrote, “to good government by a great master.” In 1912, Dodd gave his support to New Jersey governor and fellow exiled Southern academic Woodrow Wilson. Dodd’s eventual involvement with Wilson would radically alter his scholarship and life.
Dodd first formulated the idea of a Wilson biography in 1917. His intent was not, “to eulogize or criticize, but to analyze and understand.” However, Dodd did reveal that he regarded his subject, “as the greatest man who has ever held the office of President.” Dodd first met Wilson in 1916, after requesting an appointment to discuss the preparedness campaign of General Leonard Wood. Upon meeting Wilson, Dodd concluded that he was, “a politician and a statesman combined – as were his masters Jefferson and Lincoln.” A few months later, Dodd interviewed Wilson for the biography and concluded once again that Wilson was, “a very great man.” All semblances of Dodd’s objectivity were lost. In Woodrow Wilson and His Work, Wilson is cast as a man who, “received the best of training in home, church, and school,” and would grow to, “reform the industrial order in the hope of restoring somewhat of the democracy that had been lost in the turmoil of the civil war.” Drawing comparisons to both Jefferson and Lincoln, the “third great American dreamer,” fought against the interests of privilege until his downfall at the hands of “the great reaction.” In addition to the privileged class, various ethnic groups were blamed for Wilson’s downfall. Dodd wrote, “[t]he negroes, who can hardly be expected, as a race, to rise to higher levels of public wisdom than the whites, thought Wilson their . . . enemy.” Dodd further blamed Italian, Irish and German elements in America “whose primary instincts were foreign.” Reaction to Woodrow Wilson and His Work was extremely negative. An associate of William Dunning proclaimed that Dodd, “ought not be permitted to teach in an American college.” Edward S. Corwin criticized Dodd for, “a task taken prematurely,” and for not crediting any opposition to Wilson, “with a worthy purpose or moral conviction.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review chastised Dodd for, “placing a label of greatness upon a man whose time has not yet been judged historically.”
The 1920s were marked by Dodd’s gradual abandonment of scholarly projects in favor of political ones. Dodd crisscrossed the United States speaking to civic groups, university students, and state legislatures. His speeches covered a variety of topics, but all managed to follow a pattern that put Wilson at a central place in American history. Following Wilson’s death, Dodd collaborated with Ray Stannard Baker to edit The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson scholar Arthur S. Link would call the work, “an indispensable tool.” What writing Dodd did during the 1920s consisted of popular articles for such periodicals as the New York Times, Century, and American Mercury. A compilation of three of these articles was published in 1927 as the book Lincoln or Lee. Dodd stated that the purpose is to, “strengthen the appeal of history to a generation too little prone to think or assess.” The work, although not a scholarly work, was praised by authors Carl Becker and Carl Sandburg.
Into the 1930s, Dodd still intended to finish his comprehensive history of the Old South. In 1933, fate intervened. A longtime friend of powerful Democrat Daniel Roper, Dodd, complaining of his workload, asked Roper if their might be “a minor diplomatic post . . . available – where I could finish the history of the South before it’s too late.” Dodd, who spoke fluent German and held a degree from one of Germany’s most prestigious universities, best represented the Wilson idealism which the Roosevelt administration sought to build its foreign relations on. On 8 June 1933, Franklin Roosevelt asked Dodd to serve as ambassador to Germany. Dodd was a well-respected scholar, but was completely unprepared for the demands and protocols of an ambassadorship. He was constantly at odds with his staff and the officials of his host country. Dodd saw himself as a new type of ambassador who would depart from the, “past etiquette and behavior . . . of Louis XIV and Queen Victoria times.” He offended Nazi officials by boycotting the massive Nuremberg rallies, and speaking critically of political systems built on, “the control of society by privilege seekers.” Dodd also spent considerable time warning the Roosevelt administration of how Hitler held, “in the back of his mind the old German idea of dominating Europe through warfare.” In the last years of his life, Dodd would be an ardent prophet of the impending danger of Adolf Hitler.
During his final year in Germany, Dodd finished what was supposed to be the first volume of his long-anticipated history of the Old South. The Old South: Struggles for Democracy covered the history of the colonial South from the founding of Jamestown to the close of the seventeenth century. Dodd’s work casts English aristocrats Lord and Lady Berkeley and their allies in a struggle against the democratic “small farmer-trading colonies.” Reviewers were lukewarm in their response to the work. Curtis Nettles called it, “descriptive and narrative rather than analytical.” Nettles further criticized Dodd for, “not [taking] into account the indentured servants and slaves,” in addition to having, “little to say about . . . growing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.” Dodd envisioned three more volumes of his work, but Old South: Struggles for Democracy turned out to be the swan song of Dodd’s career.
When William Edward Dodd passed away on 9 February 1940, the New York Times called him, “the world’s foremost authority on the history of the American South.” A testament to the quality of Dodd’s works is that many of them retained their validity well beyond his life. Dodd also directed the work of over fifty doctoral candidates, including the Agrarians Herman C. Nixon and Frank Lawrence Owsley.
Dodd’s life and work were defined by paradoxes. He was a white Southerner who rejected the romantic defense of the Old South, a Southerner in a field dominated by Northerners, and a man who distrusted the powerful, but whose work was made possible in part by the social groups he denounced. Dodd’s wealthy uncle funded his graduate study and much of his Southern research was made possible by the preservation efforts by Confederate groups. Dodd was also enigmatic within his profession. He rejected progressive assessments of the New South and instead saw a, “new industrial slavery gradually taking the place of negro servitude.” Like Karl Marx, Dodd emphasized the importance of class struggle and economic factors in writing history, yet he rejected a strict interpretation along these guidelines with his emphasis on biography, and his belief that [t]here is something in the life of men, associated together for common purposes, which defies tabulation and which escapes the closest scrutiny of the historians who seek to show conclusively that a single cause produced certain results.” Dodd’s life was paradoxical, but without that dynamic, Dodd’s work would not have had the same impact. He pioneered the critical study of the Old South, and challenged conventional interpretations of American history.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Charles F. Review of Jefferson Davis by William E. Dodd. American Historical Review 13 (1908): 878-80.
Bailey, Fred Arthur. William Edward Dodd: The South’s Yeoman Scholar. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997.
Corwin, Edward S. Review of Woodrow Wilson and His Work by William E. Dodd. American Historical Review 27 (1922), 334-37.
Dodd, William E. “The Place of Nathaniel Macon in Southern History.” American Historical Review 7 (1902): 663-76.
________ . “The Status of History in Southern Education.” Nation 75 (1902): 109-11.
________ . “Karl Lamprecht and Kulturgeschichte.” Popular Science Monthly 63 (1903): 419-26.
________ . “Freedom of Speech in the South.” Nation 84 (1907): 383-84.
________ . Jefferson Davis. New York: Russell & Russell, 1907.
________ . “The Fight for the Northwest, 1860.” American Historical Review 16 (1911): 774-88.
________ . Statesmen of the Old South; or, From Radicalism to Conservative Revolt. New York: MacMillan, 1911.
________ . “Profitable Fields of Investigation in American History, 1815-1860.” American Historical Review 18 (1913), 522-36.
________ . Expansion and Conflict, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915.
________ . Economic Interpretations of American History.” Journal of Political Economy 24 (1916): 489-95.
________ . The Cotton Kingdom: A Chronicle of the Old South. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919.
________ . Lincoln or Lee. Gloucester, MA, The Century Company, 1927.
________ . Woodrow Wilson and His Work, 2d.ed. New York, Peter Smith, 1932.
________ . The Old South: Struggles for Democracy. New York: MacMillan, 1937.
Dalleck, Robert. Democrat and Diplomat: The Life of William E. Dodd. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Marx, Karl. The Karl Marx Library, vol. 2, On America and the Civil War, Saul K. Padover, ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 1972.
Mixon, Wayne. “William E. Dodd,” Clyde N. Wilson, ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography vol. 17, Twentieth Century American Historians. Detroit, MI: Bruccoli Clark, 1983, 135-41.
Nettels, Curtis. Review of The Old South: Struggles for Democracy by William E. Dodd. American Historical Review (1938), 138-139.
O’Brien, Michael. “C. Vann Woodward and the Burden of Southern Liberalism,” American Historical Review (1973), 589-604.
Peirce, Paul S. Review of The Life of Nathaniel Macon by William E. Dodd. American Historical Review 10 (1904), 191-92. contained minor factual errors and grammatical weaknesses, characteristics that would plague all of his writings. However, it would remain the foremost Macon biography well into the twentieth century. One reviewer found Dodd’s pro-Democratic bias a little too apparent. Paul S. Peirce, however, called the work, “a welcome contribution to American political biography.” The Life of Nathaniel Macon brought Dodd moderate notoriety. The New York Times asked him to contribute to its “Saturday Review of Books,” but the most significant result of his work came when Professor Ellis P. Oberholtzer of the University of Pennsylvania asked him to write a biography of Jefferson Davis. Dodd tackled the project with zeal, but with a great deal of trepidation as well.
