Roger Atkinson Pryor (July 19, 1828 – March 14, 1919) was an American newspaper editor, lawyer, politician and judge. He served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1859 to 1861.
Biography A journalist and U.S. Congressman from Virginia known as a Southern "fire eater" for his fiery oratory in favor of slavery and later secession from the United States and belligerence toward abolitionist colleagues, during the American Civil War Pryor served as a general in the Confederate Army as well as in the Confederate Congress. Following the conflict, Pryor moved to New York City, and in 1868 and resumed his legal practice. He is considered among influential southerners in the North sometimes called "Confederate carpetbaggers."David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 90
Pryor's law partner became Boston-based Benjamin F. Butler, hated in the South for his service as a Union general during the conflict. Their partnership was financially successful, and Pryor also became active in the Democratic Party in the North. In 1877 he was chosen to give a Decoration Day address, in which he vilified Reconstruction and promoted the Lost Cause, while reconciling the noble soldiers as victims of politicians.Blight (2001), Race and Reunion, pp. 90-91 In 1890 he joined the Sons of the American Revolution, one of the new heritage societies that was created following celebration of the United States Centennial.
Appointed as judge of the New York Court of Common Pleas from 1890 to 1894, and justice of the New York Supreme Court from 1894 to his retirement in 1899. On April 10, 1912, he was appointed official referee by the appellate division of the state Supreme Court, where he served until his death. Particularly after raising their children described below, his wife Sara Agnes Rice published several histories, memoirs and novels, as well as helped found heritage societies and organize fundraising for historic preservation. Her memoirs have been important sources for historians doing research on southern society during and after the Civil War.
Early and family life Pryor was born near Petersburg, Virginia, at Montrose, in Dinwiddie County as the second child of Lucy Epps Atkinson and Theodorick Bland Pryor, the minister at Petersburg's Washington Street Presbyterian Church (after the Tabb Street Church built in 1844 became overcrowded). He had an older sister Lucy, but his mother died when the boy was three years old. His father remarried and moved his family to "Old Place" near Crewe in Nottoway County about thirty miles away.https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/026-0031_Montrose_2004_Final_Nomination.pdf p.8 of 14 Since the second marriage produced two daughters (Frances and Ann) and a son (Archibald), Pryor had half-siblings.
Ancestry Pryor could trace his ancestry to the First Families of Virginia. His father was a grandson of Richard Bland II.Scott pp. 585-590 Other paternal ancestors included Burgesses Richard Bland I, Theodorick Bland of Westover, and Governor Richard Bennett. His mother was descended from Roger Pleasants Atkinson (1764-1829), whose English-born father was a wealthy Petersburg merchant during the Revolutionary War and whose brothers and cousins also attained distinction in learned professions.Peter V. Bergstrom, Roger Atkinson (1725-1800) in Dictionary of Virginia Biography vol.1 (1998), pp. 241-142 Her mother was Agnes Poythress, whose father was patriot Peter Poythress (1715-1787) and whose ancestors had arrived in the earliest days of the Virginia colony.
Education Pryor received a private education appropriate to his class. He graduated from Hampden–Sydney College in 1845 and from the law school of the University of Virginia in 1848.
Personal life
On November 8, 1848, Pryor married Sara Agnes Rice, daughter of Samuel Blair Rice and his second wife, Lucy Walton Leftwich, of Halifax County, Virginia. One of numerous children, she was effectively adopted by a childless aunt, Mary Blair Hargrave and her husband, Dr. Samuel Pleasants Hargrave, and lived with them in Hanover, Virginia.Sara Agnes Rice Pryor, "Dedication to Mary Blair Hargrave", in The Colonel's Story, New York, Macmillan, 1911 They were slaveholders.Sara Agnes Rice Pryor, My Day: Reminiscences of a Long Life, Macmillan Company, 1909, at Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina, pp. 8-9 When Sara was about eight, the Hargraves moved with her to Charlottesville where she completed her formal education. Sara Pryor shared her husband's struggles during their early years of poverty in Virginia (where they lived in various rented houses later demolished), and in New York. She sewed all the children's clothes, gained school scholarships, and helped her husband with his law studies.Pryor (1909), My Day, pp. 336-339, accessed 23 April 2012 Realizing that other women and children needed help, she raised money to found a home for them.
Like her husband, Sarah Pryor helped found lineage and heritage organizations, including the Society for Preservation of the Virginia Antiquities (since 2009 named Preservation Virginia); the National Mary Washington Memorial Association; the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR); and the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America.Pryor (1909), My Day, p. 420, accessed 13 April 2012. Note: White Sulphur Springs was a traditional resort for the planter class of the South since the antebellum years. She became a productive writer, after 1900 through the Macmillan Company publishing two histories on the colonial era, two memoirs and novels. Her Reminiscences of Peace and War (1904), was recommended by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to its membership for serious study.Sarah E. Gardner, Blood And Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937, University of North Carolina Press, 2006, pp. 128-130
Sara and Roger A. Pryor had seven children together:James pg. 103 Maria Gordon Pryor (called Gordon) (1850 - 1928), married Henry Crenshaw Rice (1842 - 1916) and had daughter Mary Blair Rice, who authored several books under the pen name of Blair Niles. Theodorick Bland Pryor (1851 - 1871), died at the age of 20, likely a suicide, as he had been suffering from depression. Admitted to Princeton College at an early age, he was its first mathematical fellow; he also studied at Cambridge University, and had been studying law.Thomas Danly Suplee, The Life of Theodorick Bland Pryor: First Mathematical-Fellow of Princeton College, Bacon, 1879 Roger Atkinson Pryor, became a lawyer in New York."THE PRYOR FAMILY" , Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Volume 7, Number 1, July 1899, pp. 75-79, carried at Tennessee Pryors website, accessed 13 April 2012 Mary Blair Pryor, married Francis Thomas Walker and, as documented in *"Mary Blair Destiny".Richman, Erin Mary Blair Destiny, Two Goddesses Publishing, page 41-42 . she had daughter Mary Blair Walker Zimmer Erin L. Richman, Mary Blair Destiny, Two Goddesses Publishing, 2019. Buried in Princeton Cemetery. William Rice Pryor (b. c.1860 - 1900Pryor (1909), My Day, pp. 347-348, accessed 23 April 2012), became a physician and surgeon in New York and died young. Lucy Atkinson Pryor, married the architect A. Page Brown; in 1889 they moved to San Francisco, California. Francesca (Fanny) Theodora Bland Pryor (b. 31 December 1868), Petersburg, VA, married William de Leftwich Dodge, a painter; they lived in Paris and New York.
Roger and Sara Pryor's great-great-great-granddaughter is Erin Richman, author of *"Mary Blair Destiny".
Career
In 1849, Pryor was admitted to the bar, but ill health caused him to (temporarily) abandon his private legal practice. He started working as a journalist, serving on the editorial staffs of the Washington Union in 1852 and the Daily Richmond Enquirer in 1854. The latter was one of the leading papers in the South for 50 years.
President Franklin Pierce appointed Pryor, who had become involved in Virginia politics, as a diplomat to Greece in 1854. Upon returning to Virginia, in 1857 Pryor established The South, a daily newspaper in Richmond. He became known as a fiery and eloquent advocate of slavery, southern states' rights, and secession; although he and his wife did not personally own slaves, they came from the slaveholding class. His advocacy of the institution was an example of how, in a "slave society" like Virginia, slavery both powered the economy and underlay the entire social framework.Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 7-13
In May 1859, US Representative William O. Goode from Virginia's 4th congressional district died. Pryor won the special election to fill the vacancy on 27 October. He served until 3 March 1861.
During his term in the House, Pryor became a particular enemy of Republican Representative Thaddeus Stevens, an abolitionist from Pennsylvania.Waugh pg. 55 He also quarreled with other anti-slavery Republicans.
Pryor got into a fierce argument with Representative John F. Potter from Wisconsin, and challenged him to a duel.Wilson pg. 131 Having the choice of weapons according to duel protocol, Potter chose Bowie knives. Pryor backed out, saying that the knife was not a "civilized weapon". The incident was widely publicized in the Northern press, which portrayed Pryor's refusal to duel as a coup for the North — and as a cowardly humiliation of a Southern "fire eater".Carl Schurz, Reminiscences, New York: McClure Publ. Co., 1907, Volume II, pp. 166-167.
On 5 Apil 1860, during a ferociously anti-slavery speech by Illinois Republican Owen Lovejoy, Pryor and some other Democrats became enraged and threatened him with canes and pistols; several Republicans rushed to Lovejoy's defense.
American Civil War In early 1861, Pryor agitated for immediate secession in Virginia, but the state convention did not act. He went to Charleston in April, to urge an immediate attack on Fort Sumter. (Pryor asserted this would cause Virginia to secede.) On April 12, he and Sara accompanied the last Confederate party to the fort before the bombardment (but stayed in the boat). Afterward, while waiting at Fort Johnson, he was offered the opportunity to fire the first shot. But he declined, saying, "I could not fire the first gun of the war."Waugh pg. 88 Pryor almost became the first casualty of the Civil War - while visiting Fort Sumter as an emissary, he mistook a bottle of potassium iodide in the hospital for medicinal whiskey and drank it; his mistake was realized in time for Union doctors to pump his stomach and save his life.Foote, Shelley. The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville. Page 50
At this time, Virginia held congressional elections in May of odd years, so Pryor had not been a candidate for re-election when Virginia declared secession. The 1861 elections were held anyway, and Pryor was re-elected, but of course did not serve. He served in the provisional Confederate Congress in 1861, and also in the first regular Congress (1862) under the Confederate Constitution.