Rev. Dodd

The case of William Dodd is very strange. He lived in the absurd style called maccaroni, even though he was a clergyman, and even more oddly achieved great popularity for his preaching, which I would have thought at odds with his unpopular fashion. His luxurious life far exceeded his real means, and in time he forged a note for the enormous sum of 4,200 pounds, which at a minimum would be $400,000 in present money. He was gently punished by public hanging.

Johnson tried hard to have Dodd's sentence commuted to transportation, even going so far as to write Dodd's final address to be delivered in Dodd's name. Dodd showed the same thoughtless, self-centered character to the very end, not bothering to let the world know what papers Johnson had written for him, even after it could no longer harm his cause to let it be known; that selfish omission very much bothered Johnson later. The ludicrous reverend did at least write Johnson a letter of thanks, though crammed with emphases (italics in print, maybe underlining in the original?) and exclamation points, far beyond what mere impending death could justify. (When writing the night before being hanged, the number of exclamation points granted is double that of the next highest allotment, the announcement of the birth of one's first child, so, two per page. But a good man will not abuse that license.) Had Dodd lived in the age of email, his final note would have been scarcely visible through the crowd of upset faces. Apart from his regrettable style, though hanging is a brutal punishment for forgery, Dodd comes across as a very creepy and hypocritical man, whose absence would have to improve the world. Johnson in fact only argues that Dodd be made to disappear by transportation to the most distant colony available.

Johnson, in his final letter to Dodd, makes a surprisingly callous argument:

Be comforted: your crime, morally or religiously considered, has no very deep dye of turpitude. It corrupted no man's principles; it attacked no man's life. It involved only a temporary and reparable injury.

But this was in an age when arrest and imprisonment for debt was so routine that Johnson himself once was saved from arrest only by an immediate payment from a friend. The sum of money was so large that the man who paid out on the forged bond must have risked bankruptcy, since Dodd squandered the money and the nobleman whose name had been forged preferred to prosecute Dodd rather than pay. Bankruptcy then did not mean several years of unpleasantness and some embarrassment, but utter collapse of life and probably imprisonment, during which the man's wife and children would have no protection except for the meager help afforded to paupers. The saintly Dodd may well have done less harm just to stab a man and take his purse, though a common mugging may not have commanded such public support. To be fair to Johnson, it is of course possible that the bond purchaser was so extraordinarily rich that he could absorb even so large a loss; neither Boswell nor wikipedia describe the purchaser.

Johnson was not opposed to trade and famously said "a man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is getting money," but he also said, of a man who had shot a Scottish nobleman in self-defense but was convicted anyway, that a commoner has no honor to defend. Clergy were often noble, and bishops were honorary lords; Johnson seems to treat all clergy as honorary minor gentry at least. A banker or money-lender would not have that distinction, even though Johnson would have no special prejudice against them. It is hard to follow the thought of a man who could be passionately against slavery, when that position was still uncommon, but just as passionately for the subservience of nearly all men to a few.