Yancey B. Shapard belongs in the second group.

I first noticed him while looking into the political background of the 1872 Pope County Militia War. On May 11 of that year, Pope County Republicans met at Center Valley and elected three delegates to the Republican state convention in Little Rock.

Two of them immediately caught my attention: County Clerk Wallace H. Hickox and School Superintendent W. A. Stuart, both of whom would become deeply involved in the violence that erupted in Pope County only weeks later.

The third delegate was Yancey B. Shapard.

At first, he was just another name.

He isn’t anymore.

The records I’ve found trace Shapard from a slaveholding Southern family through a Virginia college education, a prewar law practice, Democratic politics, service as a wartime judge, apparent Confederate military service, congressional removal of his political disabilities, and finally to leadership of the very Republican Party he had once helped denounce.

It is one of the more remarkable political transformations I’ve encountered in researching nineteenth-century Pope County.

More remarkably, I haven’t found any involvement by Shapard in the Pope County Militia War hostilities.

From North Carolina to Tennessee and Virginia

Yancey B. Shapard was born April 28, 1826, in North Carolina, according to the inscription on his gravestone at Elmwood Cemetery in Morrilton.

His family later moved to Haywood County, Tennessee.

A December 3, 1840, record concerning Thomas and Frances Bailey Shapard, identified in Shapard family material as Yancey’s parents, lists 32 enslaved people in their possession.

They ranged in age from Hannah Puryear, 56, to Willie, an infant only eleven days old.

Yancey would have been fourteen.

That places his childhood firmly within the slaveholding society of the antebellum South.

Four years later, his name appears among the 1844 alumni of Emory and Henry College in Virginia.

The college record spells his name “Yancy B. Shapard.”

At eighteen, he had already completed his college education.

A young lawyer in Tennessee

By the 1850 federal census, Shapard was back in Haywood County, Tennessee.

The census identifies Yancey B. Shapard, age 25, born in North Carolina, and gives his profession simply as:

Law.

His gravestone birth date would actually make him twenty-four at the official census date, but small age discrepancies are common in nineteenth-century census records.

The important part is clear.

By 1850, Shapard had entered the legal profession.

Sometime during the following decade, he moved to Pope County, Arkansas.

A Democrat in Dover

By January 1860, Shapard was established enough in Pope County politics to be chosen for an important role at a Democratic political gathering.

On January 23, 1860, a “large and enthusiastic mass meeting of the democracy of Pope county” assembled at the courthouse in Dover, then the county seat.

The proceedings were published in the True Democrat of Little Rock on February 8.

Shapard was appointed to a six-man committee with William McElwee Sr., John Brown, J. G. Brewton, John Petray and Roof H. Howell.

Their job was to draft the meeting’s political resolutions.

And those resolutions leave no doubt about where the meeting stood.

They condemned Northern Republicans as:

“black republicans”

and accused them of threatening the Southern states and their “domestic institutions.”

The language was intensely partisan. Republicans were described as sectional, dangerous, and hostile to Southern interests.

Shapard was one of the men selected to formulate those resolutions.

The 1860 census index also places “Yancy B. Sheppard” in Dover, Pope County, confirming his residence there that year.

Then, on August 13, 1860, Y. B. Shapard married Kate Lewis in Pope County.

So on the eve of the Civil War, Shapard was a Dover lawyer, a married Pope County resident, and an active Democrat participating in organized opposition to the Republican Party.

Judge Shapard during the Civil War

Shapard subsequently served as an Arkansas circuit judge during the Civil War.

A historical listing of Arkansas judges places Y. B. Shapard on the bench beginning in 1863.

That office matters greatly to what happened after the war.

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment barred certain people who had previously taken an oath to support the United States Constitution and later participated in insurrection or rebellion from holding public office.

Congress could remove that disability by a two-thirds vote.

And Congress eventually had to do exactly that for Yancey B. Shapard.

There may also be evidence that his Confederate involvement went beyond holding judicial office.

A Confederate military service index contains an entry for:

“Taney B. Shapard”
Private
Company A
7th Regiment, Arkansas Cavalry

The 7th Arkansas Cavalry drew recruits from Pope and surrounding counties and served in the Confederate Army.

The unusual surname, matching middle initial, Arkansas connection, and Pope County recruiting area make it quite possible that “Taney” is an indexing or transcription error for Yancey.

Shapard’s name is frequently mangled in historical records—Shapard, Shepard, Sheppard, Shappard, Yancy, and Yancey all appear.

Still, I haven’t found enough in the underlying military service record to state positively that Private “Taney B. Shapard” was Yancey.

For now, I consider it probable but not proven.

Back to practicing law in Dover

Whatever Shapard’s complete wartime record, he returned to civilian legal practice after the war.

A federal internal-revenue assessment from March 1866 lists:

Sheppard Yancy B — Dover — Lawyer

The following year, Sheppard’s Mississippi State Gazetteer and Shippers’ Guide for 1866–67 again lists him among the attorneys at law in Dover.

That is significant because Dover wasn’t simply another small community. It was the county seat of Pope County, home to the courthouse, county government, and much of the county’s legal and political activity.

Shapard had returned to the center of that world.

Congress restores his political rights

Then comes one of the key documents in Shapard’s story.

On December 14, 1869, the Memphis Daily Appeal published a report headed:

DISABILITIES REMOVED

The article described legislation removing legal and political disabilities imposed by the Fourteenth Amendment because of “participation in the late rebellion.”

Under the heading ARKANSAS, the first person listed was:

“Yancey B. Shapard, of Pope.”

The official federal statute confirms it.

Congress specifically named Shapard among the people whose legal and political disabilities were removed.

This wasn’t a vague later claim that he had once supported the Confederacy.

It was an act of Congress.

By law, his political eligibility had been restored.

A prosperous Dover lawyer in 1870

The 1870 federal census provides an unusually detailed snapshot of Shapard only six months later.

He lived in Dover Township, with Dover listed as the post office.

The census records:

1. B. Shapard, 44, lawyer, born in North Carolina.

His property was substantial:

Real estate: approximately $7,000
Personal estate: approximately $4,000

His household included his wife Kate, age 30, and their children:

Stephen D., 9
Grace, 3
Charles M., 2
Sue Vesta, six months

Margaret King, age 39, was also living with the family.

The census marks Shapard as a male citizen over twenty-one, eligible to vote—exactly what we would expect after Congress removed his political disabilities.

Formerly enslaved Black residents also appear in the Shapard household, including people identified in domestic service.

By 1870, Shapard was not an obscure or impoverished former Confederate trying to rebuild his life.

He was a prosperous lawyer in the county seat with substantial property, a family, and restored political rights.

What happened next is what makes his story extraordinary.

Chairman of the Republican Party

On May 11, 1872, Pope County Republicans gathered at Center Valley.

The proceedings appeared ten days later on page one of the Little Rock Daily Republican.

And the man who called the convention to order was:

Judge Y. B. Shapard.

The newspaper identified him as chairman of the Pope County Republican Central Committee.

Think about that for a moment.

In 1860, Shapard had helped Pope County Democrats draft resolutions attacking the “black republicans.”

Congress later removed his political disabilities because of his participation in the rebellion.

Now, twelve years after that Democratic meeting, he chaired the Republican Party organization in Pope County.

The convention elected Shapard its president.

1. A. Stuart was elected secretary.

While committees worked, speakers urged Republicans to remain united against the party’s enemies.

Then the convention selected three delegates to the Republican state convention in Little Rock:

Yancey B. Shapard
Wallace H. Hickox
W. A. Stuart

The convention proceedings document Shapard’s leadership directly.

The former political opponent

The resolutions adopted at the convention make Shapard’s transformation even more interesting.

The Pope County Republicans endorsed President Ulysses S. Grant, former Arkansas governor Powell Clayton, and acting governor Ozra A. Hadley.

They supported the Republican state administration, praised Republican officeholders, backed the public-school system and condemned Republicans who were trying to divide the party.

But one resolution is especially striking.

The convention extended the “right hand of fellowship” to former political opponents who had now joined the Republican Party.

We cannot say that resolution was written specifically about Shapard.

But we can now demonstrate something we couldn’t when I first found it:

Shapard himself was unquestionably a former political opponent.

The 1860 newspaper proves it.

The man presiding over the Republican convention had once helped draft resolutions condemning Republicans themselves.

Shapard, Hickox and Stuart

The identities of the three state-convention delegates become particularly important when placed against what happened next.

Within two months, Wallace Hickox and W. A. Stuart would be involved in the events that triggered the Pope County Militia War.

On July 8, Sheriff Elisha Dodson, Hickox, and Stuart arrested Nicholas Hale, William Hale, Joseph Tucker, and Isham Liberty West.

During the nighttime journey that followed, William Hale and Tucker were killed near Shiloh Creek.

The conflicting accounts of those deaths helped ignite a violent political crisis.

Hickox was killed at Dover on August 31.

Martial law eventually followed.

The May Republican convention therefore provides something exceptionally valuable: a picture of Pope County’s political organization before the shooting started.

Hickox and Stuart weren’t simply officeholders who happened to become involved in the crisis.

They represented the organized Republican establishment in Pope County.

And Yancey B. Shapard was chairing that establishment.

Prosecuting attorney

Shapard continued in public life after the Militia War.

On May 2, 1873, the Daily Gazette of Little Rock reported:

“Y. B. Shapard, of Pope,”

had been appointed prosecuting attorney for the Sixteenth Judicial Circuit.

That corrects later secondary listings that suggested the appointment occurred in 1874.

The contemporary newspaper establishes that it had happened by May 1873.

An 1875 federal official register still listed Yancey B. Sheppard as residing in Dover.

That register gives his birthplace as Tennessee, which conflicts with the 1850 and 1870 censuses and his gravestone, all of which support North Carolina. Since Shapard spent much of his youth in Tennessee, the register’s birthplace likely reflects an error.

Historical records contain lots of those.

From Dover to Lewisburg

By 1880, Shapard had moved from Pope County to Lewisburg in Conway County.

The federal census identifies him — indexed as “Jancey Sheppard” — as a lawyer.

He was living with three children:

Grace, about 13
Vesta, about 10
Ben, about 5

Grace and Vesta match the young daughters in the 1870 Dover household.

Kate does not appear in the 1880 household, suggesting she may have died before then, although I haven’t yet found documentation establishing what happened to her.

Shapard was still practicing law.

More than thirty years after the 1850 census had described his profession simply as “Law,” he was still a lawyer.

His death

Yancey B. Shapard died in Conway County in March 1885.

The probate record is more precise than the cemetery index.

The Conway County Letters of Administration state that Y. B. Shapard, late of Conway County, died intestate “on or about” March 5, 1885.

Thomas Davis was appointed administrator of his estate, and letters of administration were issued April 16.

Shapard was buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Morrilton.

His gravestone records:

Yancy B. Shapard
Born April 28, 1826

and his death in 1885.

A life that doesn’t fit neatly into a label

It would be easy to reduce nineteenth-century Pope County politics to simple categories.

Republicans on one side.

Former Confederates and Democrats on the other.

Shapard demonstrates why that doesn’t work very well.

He grew up in a slaveholding Southern family.

He was educated at a Virginia college.

He became a lawyer.

He helped Pope County Democrats draft resolutions attacking Republicans in 1860.

He served as a judge during the Civil War.

There is strong, though not yet conclusive, evidence that he also served as a Confederate cavalry private.

Congress later specifically removed his political disabilities because of participation in the rebellion.

And then:

He became chairman of the Pope County Republican Central Committee.

Not merely a Republican voter.

Not merely someone willing to cooperate with Reconstruction officials.

The chairman.

He presided over a convention supporting Grant, Clayton and Hadley. He represented Pope County at the Republican state convention. And he led a meeting that welcomed former political opponents into the Republican Party.

He certainly knew something about that last category.

Twelve years earlier, he had been one of them.

That’s what makes Yancey B. Shapard worth remembering.

His story doesn’t fit comfortably into the usual shorthand descriptions of Reconstruction Arkansas.

And it leaves one very interesting question still unanswered:

What happened between the anti-Republican Yancey Shapard of 1860 and the Republican chairman Yancey Shapard of 1872?

The records establish that the transformation occurred.

They haven’t yet told us why.

And that’s the next rabbit hole.

Sources consulted

• True Democrat (Little Rock, Arkansas), February 8, 1860, “Mass Meeting at Dover,” p. 3.
• Little Rock Daily Republican, May 21, 1872, “Pope County. Republican County Convention—Delegates—New County Central Committee—Resolutions—Etc.,” p. 1.
• Daily Gazette (Little Rock, Arkansas), May 2, 1873.
• Memphis Daily Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), December 14, 1869, “Disabilities Removed.”
• United States Statutes at Large, act removing Fourteenth Amendment disabilities, December 14, 1869.
• 1850 United States Census, Haywood County, Tennessee.
• 1860 Arkansas Federal Census Index, Dover, Pope County.
• 1870 United States Census, Dover Township, Pope County, Arkansas.
• 1880 United States Census, Lewisburg, Conway County, Arkansas.
• Arkansas County Marriages Index, Y. B. Shapard and Kate Lewis, August 13, 1860.
• United States Internal Revenue assessment records, Arkansas, 1866.
• Sheppard’s Mississippi State Gazetteer and Shippers’ Guide, 1866–67.
• Emory and Henry College alumni register, class of 1844.
• Conway County probate records, Letters of Administration for Y. B. Shapard, 1885.
• Elmwood Cemetery gravestone record, Morrilton, Arkansas.
• Confederate service index, “Taney B. Shapard,” Company A, 7th Arkansas Cavalry — identification with Yancey B. Shapard remains probable but unconfirmed.

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I researched the material in this post using traditional sources such as contemporary newspapers, US census records, and other references, as well as ChatGPT.

The image shows a collection of log buildings, fences, and cleared ground beneath wooded hills. A large leafless tree stands in the foreground. The photograph is preserved in an elaborate gold-colored mat and case.

It has been identified as the original Dwight Mission near Russellville, Arkansas, supposedly photographed around 1845 by the painter and early photographer John Mix Stanley.

That identification would make the image historically significant. Photography had reached Arkansas only a few years earlier, and an outdoor view from 1845 would be exceptionally early.

One substantial problem remains: the evidence points to the other Dwight Mission—the one established in the Cherokee Nation in what is now Oklahoma.

Two places called Dwight Mission

The original Dwight Mission was established in 1820 on Illinois Bayou, several miles west of present-day Russellville. Missionaries opened its school for Western Cherokee children on January 1, 1822.

It became a sizable settlement. By the time it closed, the grounds included residences, school buildings, workshops, barns, and other structures.

The Cherokee ceded their Arkansas land in the Treaty of 1828. The mission closed in 1829, and its personnel moved west with the Cherokee people.

A new Dwight Mission was then constructed along Sallisaw Creek in the Cherokee Nation, near present-day Marble City, Oklahoma. Its school opened in 1830.

That distinction is crucial. By 1843, the Arkansas mission had been abandoned for approximately fourteen years. The Oklahoma mission remained an active school with maintained buildings, fences, cultivated land, employees, and pupils.

Although the Arkansas mission closed in 1829, its property was not necessarily deserted. At least one early session of the Pope County quorum court was held at Old Dwight, and some of the mission buildings were later sold and removed. Consequently, the maintained appearance of the photographed compound cannot by itself distinguish Arkansas from Oklahoma. The Oklahoma identification must rest primarily on the photograph’s institutional history and specialist attribution, not on the apparent condition of the buildings.

What the Oklahoma Historical Society says

The Oklahoma Historical Society possesses the cased image. Its catalog identifies the scene as Dwight Mission on Sallisaw Creek in present-day Sequoyah County, Oklahoma.

The catalog dates it to April 1843 and assigns it local control number 697.

That is not merely a modern geographical guess. In their 2005 reference work, Pioneer Photographers from the Mississippi to the Continental Divide, photographic historians Peter E. Palmquist and Thomas R. Kailbourn discussed this exact image and OHS number.

They identified the scene as the Oklahoma Dwight Mission and reported that the original exposure was made sometime between the last week of April and the first week of May 1843.

They also directly addressed the Arkansas identification, describing it as incorrect.

Their information came from Chester Cowen of the Oklahoma Historical Society. Unfortunately, the published catalog does not reveal the original donor, the complete chain of custody, or the evidence behind that unusually narrow date range.

The Oklahoma identification is nevertheless much better documented than the Arkansas one.

How the Arkansas identification developed

Tracing the Arkansas claim produced the most revealing part of the research.

The image has been attributed to Cephas Washburn’s Reminiscences of the Indians. Washburn helped establish the original Arkansas mission and later served at the new mission in the Cherokee Nation.

His book was published posthumously in 1869.

I examined the original 1869 edition. It contains no photograph of Dwight Mission. In fact, it contains no photographic illustrations.

The disputed picture did not enter Washburn’s book until editor Hugh Park produced an illustrated reprint in 1955.

Park placed the photograph near the end of the book and described it as what was “believed” to be the oldest photographic print of Old Dwight Mission in Arkansas. He thanked Dwight Presbyterian Mission, Inc., of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for allowing him to use it. He also acknowledged Oscar E. Payne of Tulsa for helping him obtain the picture.

The 1955 book provided no photographer, date, ownership history, or explanation of how the buildings were identified. Its wording showed that the identification was tentative.

Decades later, Arkansas Made: A Survey of the Decorative, Mechanical, and Fine Arts Produced in Arkansas reproduced the same image. Its caption called it a circa 1845 daguerreotype of the Dwight Cherokee Mission near Russellville and attributed it to John Mix Stanley.

The source listed in that caption was Washburn’s Reminiscences—meaning the 1955 illustrated reprint, not Washburn’s original 1869 book.

A tentative statement from 1955 had gradually become an asserted fact in Arkansas.

Could Stanley have taken it?

John Mix Stanley and Caleb Sumner Dickerman are plausible candidates, but neither has been proved to be the photographer.

They were working around Fort Gibson and Van Buren in 1843 and were taking daguerreotypes in the Cherokee Nation by June.

An intriguing contemporary clue also emerges. On April 8 and 15, 1843, merchant Lorenzo Delano advertised a complete daguerreotype apparatus for sale at Park Hill in the Cherokee Nation. The equipment included plates, cases, and everything needed to take likenesses.

That advertisement appeared shortly before the Oklahoma Historical Society’s reported date for the Dwight Mission image.

Someone in the area therefore had the necessary camera and materials. We do not know who purchased the apparatus—or whether Stanley, Dickerman, or someone else used it at Dwight.

The photographer should remain listed as unknown unless a letter, diary, receipt, or newspaper account is discovered.

Is the object really an 1843 daguerreotype?

Another uncertainty involves the photographic process itself.

The Oklahoma Historical Society describes the cased object as a daguerreotype. Palmquist and Kailbourn, however, identified it as a ferrotype—or tintype—copy of a quarter-plate daguerreotype.

That distinction matters because tintypes did not appear until the 1850s. If the specialists were correct, the plate now in the case is a later copy of a lost or unidentified 1843 original.

A digital scan cannot settle that question. A conservator would need to examine the physical plate and determine whether the image rests on silvered copper, as a daguerreotype would, or on an iron sheet characteristic of a tintype.

The decorative gold-colored surround proves nothing about the photographic process.

The most defensible conclusion

Based on the available evidence, I would identify the image this way:

Dwight Mission on Sallisaw Creek in the Cherokee Nation, in present-day Oklahoma. The underlying photograph was reportedly made in late April or early May 1843. The photographer is unknown. The surviving cased image may be a later tintype copy of an original daguerreotype.

I place the probability that the scene is the Oklahoma mission at approximately 90 percent.

The exact 1843 date is less certain, and the attribution to John Mix Stanley remains speculation.

The Arkansas identification appears to have resulted from a reasonable but mistaken assumption made for a 1955 book. Later publications repeated and strengthened that assumption without establishing its provenance.

This is how historical errors become accepted facts. A cautious caption loses the words “believed to be.” A possible date becomes a definite date. A plausible photographer becomes the photographer.

Then, seventy years later, somebody finally follows the footnotes backward.

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I researched the material in this post using ChatGPT over several hours

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The place was Shiloh.

The name is much older than the park many of us remember. There was a Shiloh Church and a Shiloh community, with the name also attached to Shiloh Creek. In July 1872, that little country church became the stopping point in a chain of events that left one man dead, another mortally wounded, and helped push Pope County deeper into what became known as the Pope County Militia War.

The trouble had been building.

On July 5, Deputy Sheriff John Williams returned to his farm after warning officials that he believed his life was in danger. According to Capt. James Fitch, someone fired on Williams near his home. One bullet passed through his hat and another struck his belt clasp, knocking him down.

Sheriff E. W. Dodson organized a posse.

On July 8, the group went to Williams’ neighborhood. Dodson and County Clerk Frank Hickox later said they had 28 men, including four Black men. They arrested N. J. Hale, his son William T. Hale, and Joe Tucker.

Then Isham L. West got involved.

West was a blacksmith at Scottsville. He saw the armed party pass through with the Hales under arrest. The prisoners told him they did not know why they had been arrested.

Mrs. Hale was reportedly distraught. West agreed to ride to Dover and find out what was happening.

It was a decision that nearly got him killed.

West asked Dodson to keep the prisoners at Dover long enough to arrange a local hearing. Instead, according to West, Dodson became angry and arrested him too. West, the two Hales, and Tucker were then taken south, supposedly toward Dardanelle.

Somewhere along the way the plans changed.

The party stopped at what West called Shiloh Church, three or four miles from Russellville on the Dover-Russellville road.

That is where this story becomes especially interesting.

The prisoners were ordered off their horses and taken inside the church under guard. Dodson said he was going to find forage for the horses. West said that while Dodson was outside, he watched Dodson, Hickox, and several other men gathered together, apparently discussing something.

Eventually Dodson returned.

There would be no overnight stay at Shiloh, he said. They were going on to Russellville.

They brought the prisoners outside and put them back on their horses. West and Tucker were positioned together. The Hales rode behind them. Dodson and Hickox were toward the front.

West noticed something else.

A lot of the posse had disappeared.

According to West, Dodson looked back and remarked that it appeared “half our men are gone.”

Then he laughed.

The little column rode away from Shiloh Church into the darkness.

They had gone only a short distance when someone remarked that it was “dark as Egypt.”

Another voice answered:

“Egypt has no eyes.”

Then the shooting started.

West said gunfire came from the woods, but what he saw bothered him. The gun flashes appeared to be pointed upward. He also said Dodson and Hickox did not fire toward the supposed attackers.

Then the guards behind the prisoners began shooting.

West immediately threw himself down against the side of his horse, hoping anyone shooting at him would miss. The saddle slipped. The horse bucked, and West fell to the ground.

He crawled into the brush.

And stayed there.

From his hiding place he could hear men talking and laughing. He heard Dodson asking where the prisoners were. Then came more gunfire.

West heard a man crying out in pain. He heard a voice he identified as Dodson saying, “Now… I’ve got you.”

More shotgun blasts followed.

Then the cries stopped.

William Hale told much the same story from another position.

Hale said that just after the “dark as Egypt” remark, a gun fired near him. He was then shot in the right shoulder. He got off his horse, made his way away from the road and sat beside a tree.

From there, he too heard a man crying out and heard a voice he believed was Dodson’s.

Hale survived the night.

He did not survive the wound.

They took his sworn statement three days later, on July 11. He subsequently died.

Joe Tucker died along the road that night.

Dodson and Hickox told a very different story.

They said someone fired from the brush and the prisoners attempted to escape. Their guards had previously been instructed that if the party was attacked, or if the prisoners tried to escape, they could shoot them if necessary. According to their account, the horses became unmanageable, the guards fired, Tucker was killed, and the other prisoners escaped.

They denied accusations that the whole thing had been arranged to provide an excuse for killing the prisoners.

That leaves us with two radically different versions of what happened on that dark road near Shiloh.

Was it an attempted rescue followed by confused gunfire?

Or was the supposed attack staged, allowing prisoners to be shot while claiming they were escaping?

More than 150 years later, there is probably no way to prove every detail.

But West’s statement is hard to read without questions. The unexplained disappearance of much of the posse. The conversation outside Shiloh Church. The strange exchange about Egypt. Gunfire apparently directed into the air. Guards firing from behind the prisoners. And afterward, West hiding in the woods listening to men laughing while shotgun blasts and cries came from the darkness.

Those are not the kinds of details normally associated with a routine prisoner transfer.

And that is what makes Shiloh important.

For many of us, Shiloh brings to mind a road, a creek, an old park or the reclaimed strip-mine country north of Russellville.

But there is another Shiloh buried underneath the familiar landscape.

On a July night in 1872, armed men gathered around a little country church. Four prisoners were taken back onto the road. Minutes later the darkness erupted in gunfire.

Joe Tucker never came home.

William Hale made it out of the woods, but his wound eventually killed him.

Isham West survived because he fell from his horse, crawled into the brush, and stayed very still until the moon went down.

The road eventually became quiet again.

But Pope County did not.

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But Cotton has a problem that shouldn’t be ignored.

A new Talk Business & Politics–Hendrix College poll has Democrat Hallie Shoffner at 47.7% and Cotton at just 44%.

Maybe the poll is an outlier. Another recent poll has Cotton comfortably ahead, and nobody should pretend one survey predicts what will happen in November.

But forget for a moment about who’s ahead.

Look at Cotton’s 44%.

Tom Cotton isn’t an unknown candidate. Arkansans have had plenty of time to decide what they think of him. He served two years in the U.S. House and has represented Arkansas in the Senate since 2015. He’s one of the most recognizable Republican senators in Washington.

And this is Arkansas—not Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin.

An established Republican senator in this state should not be sitting at 44% in a credible Arkansas poll.

Maybe Cotton ultimately wins by 15 points. Maybe he wins by 20.

But when you’ve spent 12 years representing one of the reddest states in America and a poll finds that fewer than half its voters are ready to send you back to Washington, that’s worth noticing.

Arkansans know Tom Cotton. That may be precisely the problem.

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The good news is that they’re rare, and they’re much rarer today than they used to be.

That’s because medicine learned an important lesson. Good surgeons aren’t enough. Good systems matter just as much.

Today, before an operation begins, the patient’s identity is checked repeatedly. The procedure is confirmed. The correct surgical site is usually marked while the patient is still awake. Then, just before the first incision, the entire operating room pauses for what’s called a “time out.” Everyone in the room confirms they’re about to perform the right procedure on the right patient and the right body part.

It may seem repetitive. It’s supposed to be.

The checklist isn’t there because anyone expects the surgeon to forget which knee to operate on. It’s there because human beings make mistakes, especially in busy, stressful environments. Aviation learned that decades ago. Medicine followed.

That’s why cartoons about “wrong-side surgery” resonate. They exaggerate the absurdity of confusion at exactly the moment when there shouldn’t be any. We laugh because the situation is ridiculous—and because we know the consequences wouldn’t be.

Most safety rules exist because someone, somewhere, learned a painful lesson the hard way. Wrong-site surgery is one of them.

Sometimes the most important words spoken in an operating room aren’t the technical ones.

They’re the simple ones:

“Let’s make absolutely sure we have the right patient, the right procedure, and the right side.”

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Changing the clocks twice a year is stupid.

Apparently, Tom Cotton disagrees.

The U.S. House has passed legislation to make daylight saving time permanent. The vote wasn’t particularly close — 308 to 117. Republicans voted for it. Democrats voted for it.

Donald Trump wants it.

Tom Cotton doesn’t.

Cotton has said he will “always oppose” permanent daylight saving time. His argument is that it would mean darker winter mornings, particularly for schoolchildren.

That’s a legitimate argument. There are legitimate arguments for permanent standard time, too.

But here’s where Cotton loses me.

He admits changing the clocks twice a year is a problem. He doesn’t particularly like doing it either. But he doesn’t want permanent daylight saving time, and he doesn’t want permanent standard time because that would mean giving up those long summer evenings.

So his solution is basically:

Keep doing the thing everybody agrees is stupid.

This is also one of those rare issues where Cotton finds himself on the opposite side from Trump. Trump wants permanent daylight saving time. A large bipartisan majority in the House wants permanent daylight saving time.

Cotton wants Arkansas to keep springing forward and falling back.

Every. Damn. Year.

Sometimes Washington makes complicated problems complicated.

Sometimes Tom Cotton manages to make a simple problem complicated.

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