Dorsey joined his father's law firm in Atlanta in 1895. He was made a partner along with Arthur Heyman and the firm became Dorsey, Brewster, Howell and Heyman. as were most established Whites in the South after
Reconstruction. In 1913, Dorsey was
prosecuting attorney (serving as the solicitor general of the Fulton County Superior Court) at the trial of
Leo Frank, who was indicted for the murder of young factory worker
Mary Phagan. Historians widely agree that Frank was wrongly convicted in an unfair trial. Some historians claimed that Dorsey was under pressure for a quick conviction because of recent unsolved murders and made a premature decision that Frank was guilty, a decision that his personal ambition would not allow him to reconsider. It is alleged that Dorsey "suppressed evidence" favorable to Frank, intimidated and bribed witnesses, "drilled [witness] Conley in false testimony", "may have lacked the moral strength to back down" as contradictory evidence was uncovered, and feared that if he reversed himself he would have "ruined his career" and be accused of "having sold out to the Jews." Historian Leonard Dinnerstein wrote, "He had recently prosecuted two important accused murderers and had failed each time to convict them." A local newspaper said another failure would be "the end of Mr. Dorsey as solicitor." "Among reporters, the consensus was that the Phagan prosecution represented nothing less than a last chance for him." Achieving conviction amid intense media coverage, Dorsey became famous. Subsequent to the 1921
Williams Plantation Murders, and the trials of John S. Williams and Clyde Manning, Dorsey gave a speech on April 22, 1921 titled "A Statement from Governor Hugh M. Dorsey as to the Negro in Georgia." It was near the end of his final term as governor; he had also just badly lost a race for the U.S. Senate to his former ally
Tom Watson, by that point a vocal white supremacist. Dorsey's speech recited a list of abuses by Georgia whites against African Americans: lynchings, banishments, slavery-like peonage, and physical cruelty. "To me it seems that we stand indicted as a people before the world," he said. "If these charges should continue, both God and man would justly condemn Georgia more severely than man and God have condemned Belgium and Leopold for the Congo atrocities." Dosey subsequently reiterated his position in a small pamphlet, published as
The Negro in Georgia. These were astonishing admissions from any white Democratic governor in the
Jim Crow South — much less one who'd made his name with the Leo Frank prosecution. His already-elected successor,
Thomas W. Hardwick, called it "an infamous slander on the State." Historians have debated Dorsey's motivations — from an honest desire for reform to slowing the early stages of the
Great Migration to improving Georgia's perception in the eyes of Northern capitalists. ==Death and legacy==