The Dooleys of Richmond: An Irish Immigrant Family in the Old and New South by Mary Lynn Bayliss (review)

Mary Lynn Bayliss's The Dooleys of Richmond: An Irish Immigrant Family in the Old and New South adds to the growing literature on the impact of European immigrants on the history of the nineteenth-century South. The book is a chronicle of the lives of Irish immigrant John Dooley (1811–1868) and his son James Henry Dooley (1841–1922), who shaped and helped transform the economic and industrial development of Richmond, Virginia, in the antebellum and post–Civil War eras. The scope of the book ranges from John Dooley's arrival in Richmond in 1836 to James Henry Dooley's death in 1922. Upon his arrival in Richmond, John Dooley quickly established himself as a hat manufacturer and an investor in Virginia's budding railroad industry. James Dooley gained his first business experience as caretaker of his father's hat manufacturing business while his father briefly served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. By 1880, James Dooley and two other Richmond men had started to build an investment empire in industrial and land development and in railroads that were intended to reach into the far West, the Caribbean, and Central America, which, according to Bayliss, was instrumental in creating the New South. By the beginning of the twentieth century, James Dooley was one of Richmond's richest men and had become a major benefactor of the arts and various Richmond area hospitals and colleges.

Bayliss's story of the lives of John and James Dooley and their families is organized in strict chronological order and is largely descriptive in nature. Her major concern is to chronicle the Dooleys' business activities from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century. However, the Dooleys' business success and their elevated standing in the civic and social life of Richmond were tightly interwoven with their quick acculturation to the political and racial realities in the South. John Dooley was a slave owner a mere four years after his arrival in the city, and during the sectional crisis of the 1850s, he threw his lot in with supporters of southern states' rights. In the election of 1860, the elder Dooley supported John C. Breckinridge at a time when most native-born Virginians still hewed to more moderate political positions. At the same time, John Dooley was an activist for Irish independence, hosting Irish revolutionaries such as John Mitchel and raising money for the Friends of Ireland.

Similarly, James Henry Dooley put much of his political energy toward defeating Reconstruction politics after the war. He joined the Conservative Party in 1867 to defeat Virginia's Reconstruction constitution, and in 1868, in what Bayliss calls Dooley's first public political speech, he resoundingly defended white supremacy during a "'Grand Conservative Irish Mass Meeting'" (p. 93). In the South, both John Dooley and his son James could be Irish Catholic and Confederate at the same time, when a similar dual identity would have been largely unacceptable in the North. Bayliss never really explores this connection, perhaps because it could cloud the largely celebratory tone of the book. Readers interested in the connection between Irish and Confederate nationalism need to consult David T. Gleeson's The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America (Chapel Hill, 2013).

This criticism aside, Bayliss has produced an elegantly written and deeply researched account of the contributions that the Dooley family made to Richmond's industrial and economic development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book should be indispensable to anyone interested in the history of Richmond and the economic history of the New South.