On September 14, 1862, Confederate Brig. Gen. James Chalmers, commanding a brigade in Braxton Bragg’s Army of the Mississippi, launched an ill-advised, spur-of-the-moment assault on the Federal works at Munfordville, Kentucky. Expecting an easy victory, Chalmers sent several waves of attackers against formidable Union fortifications before falling back with heavy casualties. Among them was the Scottish-born Col. Robert A. Smith of the 10th Mississippi, a son of the founder of the Smith & Wellstood stove manufacturing concern. When Smith fell mortally wounded, his close friend and brother-in-law, Capt. George Dobson of Company D, abandoned his shattered men in order to help carry him to the rear. Dobson remained at the makeshift field hospital throughout the rest of the day tending to Smith. Union soldiers captured him there. Paroled after the battle, Dobson did not report his predicament at headquarters. Indeed he disappeared from the ranks in order to return Smith’s body to Mississippi. He only returned to his regiment in late December, later stating that he assumed that he must have been exchanged by then. A month passed before the 10th Mississippi’s acting commander, J. H. Walker, suddenly had Dobson arrested, charging him with absence without leave and allowing himself to be captured. Dobson himself proclaimed that he not only had acted correctly and honorably by helping his kinsman, but also had remained at the hospital only because the regimental surgeon ordered him to do so. He also felt a moral obligation to remain away from the army until exchanged. The charges, he insisted, were merely an attempt by Walker to deflect allegations of cowardice during the Battle of Murfreesboro. The case against Dobson, seemingly tight on the surface despite his defense, soon fell apart. Despite his reputation for severity, Bragg himself came to Dobson’s defense, ordering the captain’s release from arrest because he had acted under “proper motives.” When the trial finally took place, no witness would testify against Dobson, and the charges were dropped. It was Walker, not Dobson, who paid for the episode, resigning his command.

This paper will relate the events of Dobson’s capture, arrest, and trial while seeking to understand why Dobson acted as he did, and why a famously harsh commander such as Bragg, as well as the rank and file of the 10th Mississippi, supported the captain’s apparent dereliction of duty and desertion. The army punished enlisted men for abandoning the battlefield and shot them for going home. Why not Dobson? The paper will also discuss how post-war chroniclers explained away or completely erased the episode as part of a larger campaign, led in part by Dobson, to memorialize Colonel Smith, a family-based effort that not only placed a marker in Smith’s native Scotland, but also erected what is still today the only monument at the Munfordville battlefield.