Re-examining Irish America through John Dooley
Georgetown Emeritus Professor, R. Emmet Curran, has performed a masterful editing job in pulling together the various writings of Confederate Virginian John Dooley into a lucid narrative. Dooley, the son of an Irish immigrant milliner in R...

Gleeson, David T.

English

LSU Scholarly Repository (Louisiana State Univ.)

Civil War Book Review Fall 2012 Article 6 John Dooley's Civil War: An Irish American's Journey in the First Virginia Infantry Regiment. David T. Gleeson Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.lsu.edu/cwbr Recommended Citation Gleeson, David T. (2012) "John Dooley's Civil War: An Irish American's Journey in the First Virginia Infantry Regiment.," Civil War Book Review: Vol. 14 : Iss. 4 . DOI: 10.31390/cwbr.14.4.07 Available at: https://repository.lsu.edu/cwbr/vol14/iss4/6 ReviewGleeson, David T.Fall 2012Curran, Robert Emmett (ed.) John Dooley’s Civil War: An Irish American’sJourney in the First Virginia Infantry Regiment.. University of Tennessee Press,$59.00 ISBN 978-1-57233-822-7Re-examining Irish America through John DooleyGeorgetown Emeritus Professor, R. Emmet Curran, has performed amasterful editing job in pulling together the various writings of ConfederateVirginian John Dooley into a lucid narrative. Dooley, the son of an Irishimmigrant milliner in Richmond, was studying at Georgetown University whenVirginia seceded, but he only joined the Confederate army in 1862. He had beenconsidered too sickly and slight to serve in 1861 and stayed in Richmond, but thethreat to his native city posed by General George McClellan’s forces on thePeninsula in the summer of that year brought him into the militia. Having copedwith local service he decided to join his many friends in the 1st Virginia InfantryRegiment. Eventually elected to officer status in Company C, the Irish AmericanMontgomery Guards, once commanded by his father, Dooley saw action in theArmy of Northern Virginia from the battle of Second Manassas to Gettysburg.Participating in “Pickett’s Charge" with his regiment, Dooley received a seriouswound and was captured. He spent most of the rest of the war a prisoner onJohnson’s Island, Ohio.Dooley has left interesting accounts of his soldierly life and a much shorter version of his diary had been published by another Georgetown University academic in 1945 (Joseph T. Durkin, ed., John Dooley, Confederate Soldier: His War Journal, Georgetown University Press). Curran, however, discovered numerous versions and other writings in the Georgetown archives. John Dooley, it seems, revised his journal on a number of occasions and through Curran’s fine detective work we can see the clash of reality between the war itself and the struggle to interpret it after it had ended. In the description of the 1862 Maryland campaign, for example, (given a full chapter in this edition) Curran found that1Gleeson: John Dooley's Civil War: An Irish American's Journey in the FirstPublished by LSU Scholarly Repository, 2012while Dooley’s “War Diary" ran to only ten pages in manuscript on the subject,another document entitled “The Maryland Campaign" was fifty pages long. As aresult one can observe Dooley adding more information to the work hecompleted during the campaign. Many of these additions enhance Dooley’soriginal record. His description of an artillery attack in his original diary, forexample, expanded to analyze what he felt rather than just what he saw and did.“I tell you: I was frightened! For these balls (round shot), not content withmaking the ordinary scare, bounding over and above and around and among us,go crashing into the crags on our left splintering into a thousand pieces" was howhe remembered the difference between an ordinary enemy assault and oneinvolving cannon (40).Political feelings could be added too, often reflecting his opinions ofpost-war reconstruction than what he actually thought when he was a soldier. Inhis description of the battle of Fredericksburg, for example, in a laterreminiscence he adds a diatribe against the “brave but doomed foreigners," in theUnion army, particularly General Thomas Francis Meagher’s Irish Brigade(107). Sympathetic to their plight from his belief that they were, in large part,forced to sign up for economic reasons, he nonetheless blames them for theultimate Confederate defeat. Dooley thus bought into the one of the main “LostCause" arguments that the South only lost because it was outnumbered by largenorthern armies filled up with immigrants. Here Dooley reflected just howVirginian he was.Yet, he remained an Irish American and a devout Catholic. His writings arefilled with Catholic apologetics and provide good insight into the social activitiesof a bourgeois Irish-American family in the Old South. He and his kin moved inclose-knit Catholic circles and his connections to clergy, laity, and fellowGeorgetown students, stood him in good stead while serving as a soldierthroughout the South and as a prisoner in the North. Indeed, the most interestingaspects of this book are his descriptions of prison life as well as his exchangetoward the end of the war. In the former he provides good insight into the life ofa Confederate officer in a Union prison. Johnson’s Island was not the worst placeto be incarcerated. Indeed, it may have been the best in the northern states, butfood shortages and the harsh winters took their toll. Nevertheless, the prisonersfound time to read, take language classes, play sports, and perform amateurdramatics, akin to scenes we may be familiar with from World War II POWcamps. His exchange and release in March 1865 meant the war was almost overfor him at that stage. Yet, after the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender at2Civil War Book Review, Vol. 14, Iss. 4 [2012], Art. 6https://repository.lsu.edu/cwbr/vol14/iss4/6DOI: 10.31390/cwbr.14.4.07Appomattox in April, Dooley managed to escape capture. He therefore was ableto go on an odyssey, which Curran entitles appropriately, “In search of theCSA," to reconnect with the remaining Confederate government and militaryforces in the Carolinas. As a result, one gets a fascinating view of the desperatehope still remaining that the new nation could survive, along with the reality ofthe “confusion and panic," as Dooley described it, of the crumbling Confederatestate.Dooley ultimately accepted the Confederacy’s doom in early May and wentback to an occupied Richmond. He eventually took the oath of allegiance and,while becoming a critic of reconstruction did not, like his brother James, take anactive part in politics. The war, and particularly his imprisonment where he hadplenty of time to read, imbued him with a sense of clerical vocation. He returnedto Georgetown University, but this time as a seminarian. He died in 1873 fromtuberculosis, probably picked up during the war, before he could become a fullmember of the Society of Jesus. His writings remain, however, and thanks to thisnew edition of them, those interested in Irish America, prisoner of war life, andthe collapse of the Confederacy will find much of use here. Curran’s editing is arole model for future efforts to pull together disparate writings from differenttime periods into a coherent whole.David T. Gleeson is a member of the Department of Humanities atNorthumbria University and is the author of The Irish in the South, 1815-1877.3Gleeson: John Dooley's Civil War: An Irish American's Journey in the FirstPublished by LSU Scholarly Repository, 2012

John Dooley\u27s Civil War: An Irish American\u27s Journey in the First Virginia Infantry Regiment.

https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2144&amp;context=cwbr

John Dooley\u27s Civil War: An Irish American\u27s Journey in the First Virginia Infantry Regiment.

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