“One of the best primary accounts of the Civil War by a Confederate. John Dooley was the youngest son of Irish immigrants to Richmond, Virginia, where his father prospered, and the family took a leading position among Richmond’s sizeable Irish community. Early in 1862, John left his studies at Georgetown University to serve in the First Virginia Infantry Regiment, in which his father John and brother James also served. John’s service took him to Second Manassas, South Mountain, Sharpsburg (Antietam), Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg; before that last battle, Dooley was elected a lieutenant. On the third day at Gettysburg, Dooley swept up the hill in Pickett’s charge, where he was shot through both legs and lay all night on the field, to be made a POW the next day. Held until February 27, 1865, Dooley made his way back south to arrive home very near the Confederacy’s final collapse. Dooley’s account is valuable for the content of his service and because most of the material came from his diary, with some interpolations (which are indicated as such) that he made shortly after the war’s end when his memory was still fresh. Dooley’s health seems to have been permanently compromised by his wounds; he entered a Roman Catholic seminary after the war and died in 1873 several months before his ordination was to take place.”-Print Ed.

Among the finer soldier-diarists of the Civil War, John Edward Dooley first came to the attention of readers when an edition of his wartime journal, edited by Joseph Durkin, was published in 1945. That book, John Dooley, Confederate Soldier, became a widely used resource for historians, who frequently tapped Dooley’s vivid accounts of Second Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, where he was wounded during Pickett’s Charge and subsequently captured. As it happens, the 1945 edition is actually a much-truncated version of Dooley’s original journal that fails to capture the full scope of his wartime experience—the oscillating rhythm of life on the campaign trail, in camp, in Union prisons, and on parole. Nor does it recognize how Dooley, the son of a successful Irish-born Richmond businessman, used his reminiscences as a testament to the Lost Cause. John Dooley’s Civil War gives us, for the first time, a comprehensive version of Dooley’s “war notes,” which editor Robert Emmett Curran has reassembled from seven different manuscripts and meticulously annotated. The notes were created as diaries that recorded Dooley’s service as an officer in the famed First Virginia Regiment along with his twenty months as a prisoner of war. After the war, they were expanded and recast years later as Dooley, then studying for the Catholic priesthood, reflected on the war and its aftermath. As Curran points out, Dooley’s reworking of his writings was shaped in large part by his ethnic heritage and the connections he drew between the aspirations of the Irish and those of the white South. In addition to the war notes, the book includes a prewar essay that Dooley wrote in defense of secession and an extended poem he penned in 1870 on what he perceived as the evils of Reconstruction. The result is a remarkable picture not only of how one articulate southerner endured the hardships of war and imprisonment, but also of how he positioned his own experience within the tragic myth of valor, sacrifice, and crushed dreams of independence that former Confederates fashioned in the postwar era.

"The story of an Irish Catholic immigrant family who came to Richmond, Virginia, in the nineteenth century and established a large hat manufacturing enterprise, becoming leaders in business, education, politics, and philanthropy in Virginia"--Provided by publisher.

Describes the events of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 as seen through the eyes of two actual participants, nineteen-year-old Confederate lieutenant John Dooley and seventeen-year-old Union soldier Thomas Galway. Also discusses Lincoln's famous speech delivered at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg.

When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, it was woefully unprepared to wage a modern war. Whereas their European counterparts already had three years of experience in using code and cipher systems in the war, American cryptologists had to help in the building of a military intelligence unit from scratch. This book relates the personal experiences of one such character, providing a uniquely American perspective on the Great War. It is a story of spies, coded letters, plots to blow up ships and munitions plants, secret inks, arms smuggling, treason, and desperate battlefield messages. Yet it all begins with a college English professor and Chaucer scholar named John Mathews Manly. In 1927, John Manly wrote a series of articles on his service in the Code and Cipher Section (MI-8) of the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) during World War I. Published here for the first time, enhanced with references and annotations for additional context, these articles form the basis of an exciting exploration of American military intelligence and counter-espionage in 1917-1918. Illustrating the thoughts of prisoners of war, draftees, German spies, and ordinary Americans with secrets to hide, the messages deciphered by Manly provide a fascinating insight into the state of mind of a nation at war.

The crime that shocked post-Civil War America and inspired the folk song that became The Kingston Trio’s hit, “Tom Dooley.” At the conclusion of the Civil War, Wilkes County, North Carolina, was the site of the nation’s first nationally publicized crime of passion. In the wake of a tumultuous love affair and a mysterious chain of events, Tom Dooley was tried, convicted and hanged for the murder of Laura Foster. This notorious crime became an inspiration for musicians, writers and storytellers ever since, creating a mystery of mythic proportions. Through newspaper articles, trial documents and public records, Dr. John E. Fletcher brings this dramatic case to life, providing the long-awaited factual account of the legendary murder. Join the investigation into one of the country’s most enduring thrillers. “Fletcher has spent a great deal of time researching almost all of the characters involved with the Foster homicide and has gone further than any researcher I know in establishing the relationships—blood, marriage and social—between the major actors in the tragedy.”—Statesville Record & Landmark