John Dooley's Civil War: An Irish American's Journey in the First Virginia Infantry Regiment

Introduction

Introduction History of a Journal In the early 1940s Joseph Durkin, S.J., discovered the papers of John Edward Dooley in the archives of Georgetown University, where Dooley had been a student and, later, teacher. In 1945 Durkin published John Dooley, Confederate Soldier: His War Journal. Excerpts from this edition have been widely used by historians, particularly those relating to the Maryland, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg campaigns. Durkin presumed at the time that he had reproduced virtually all of an original diary (so it was thought) that Dooley had kept from August 1862, when he joined the First Virginia Regiment at the Orange Court House, to July 1863, when he was captured at Gettysburg. Durkin supplemented this from what he described as “Series 2,” reflections on his wartime experience that Dooley had put down in the years after he entered the Society of Jesus in 1865. The “War Diary,” recent events have shown, was not Dooley’s original diary but a partial, modified copy of the original that Dooley made, most likely in the summer of 1865, before he entered the Jesuits.1 The original, we now know, ran from August 1862 to March 1865. It came into the possession of Dooley’s youngest sister, Josephine, probably just after Dooley’s death in 1873 (Josephine, along with her mother and James, Dooley’s brother, had been at his deathbed at Georgetown). It almost certainly was still in her possession when Joseph Durkin interviewed Introduction xiv her in the early forties. Josephine gave him access to various artifacts of her brother, including letters written from prison and a photograph, but for some reason, perhaps loss of memory (she was well into her eighties at the time), she did not show him the diary. That, along with much other Dooley family memorabilia, eventually became the property of a great-great-grandniece, who, not realizing what she had (her great-grandmother had been estranged from the rest of the family), virtually gave the diary, along with many other Dooley Civil War artifacts, to an auction house that in 1997 sold the diary to a still unknown buyer for $6,000.2 Among the Dooley papers at Georgetown are well over six hundred handwritten pages, including the fifty-five pages of “The War Diary,” related to his war experience. In a precomputer age, it was virtually impossible to reconstruct the order of Dooley’s writings. Large segments of his “War Notes,” as much as two-thirds of the total corpus, Durkin simply omitted, which raises the question of whether he ever had access to all of Dooley’s writings. The Georgetown archives were not professionally organized until the 1970s, nearly thirty years after Durkin discovered Dooley’s papers. Even now, the papers, as originally put together after Dooley’s death in 1873, are in what can only be described as a helterskelter arrangement, with pages concerning one campaign, for instance, Sketch of Josephine Dooley Houston, Dooley’s youngest sister, who retained posssession of his original diary for many years. Courtesy of the Maymont Foundation. Introduction xv promiscuously intermingled with those of several others. The result is to render Dooley’s writings on the war a nearly impenetrable maze. Durkin’s absolute reliance on pencil and paper in copying Dooley’s massive notes also had several unfortunate results, including a tendency to produce synopses of Dooley’s material, which he presents as the original text itself, and the inconsistent use of ellipses to indicate omissions in the text. The 1945 edition fails, in the end, to capture the full scope of Dooley’s wartime experience, the oscillating rhythm of life on the campaign trail, in camp, prison, and on parole. It also does not recognize Dooley’s utilization of his reminiscences as a testament to the Lost Cause. Too often the result is the re-creation of Dooley’s experience as a series of snapshots. Lacking an adequate body of literature, particularly on Civil War prisons, the edition also falls short in putting Dooley’s story within a larger context. Experience and Memory Dooley’s diary originated as a journal. Early in 1863, while in winter camp around Fredericksburg, John Dooley began to recapitulate, in quite general terms, what he had experienced over the past five months. There are few dates. Dooley is recalling the main features of the three campaigns (Second Manassas, Maryland, and Fredericksburg) in which he had been a participant. There...