David Owen Dodd

David Owen Dodd (November 10, 1846 – January 8, 1864) 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 minimal defense offered for his actions. Dodd was found guilty of spying and was sentenced to death. He was hanged on January 8, 1864. While 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". His parents, who were Baptists, had married in a village south of Little Rock 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.

On December 24, 1863, he sent David Dodd—a minor and therefore assumed neutral—to Little Rock to deliver letters to former associates seeking investments for the tobacco deal. Confederate Gen. James F. Fagan or Confederate Col. William A. Crawford issued the boy a pass. Dodd rode a mule to Little Rock, carrying a birth certificate showing he was a minor at 17 years of age, along with his pass. The court-martial lasted four days. Dodd stood on the tailgate of a wagon under the noose. The executioner, named Dekay, fixed the rope around David's neck and the prop was knocked from under the tailgate. The rope stretched and the boy dangled, strangling to death over a full five minutes. Onlookers and Union soldiers became ill. in the southeast portion of Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock, in a grave donated by a Little Rock resident.

In 1908 the Arkansas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy started raising funds for a stained-glass window in Dodd's honor. The window was made by the Charles F. Hogeman Co. in New York City and depicts Dodd as a Southern saint and martyr with curly blond hair, even though the only known photograph of him shows him with straight black hair.