Surviving the Confederacy Trade cloth - 2002

Details

• Title Surviving the Confederacy
• Author Waugh, John C.
• Binding Trade Cloth
• Edition First Edition
• Pages 384
• Language EN
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York
• Date 2002-09-09
• ISBN 9780151003891

CHAPTER 1
Roger
Nottoway Court House was a serene, prosperous little southside Virginia village and county seat. It was cocooned in a deep and placid nineteenth-century tranquility that was disordered only on court days or by political meetings on the town square. Any new mechanical wonder imported by a local planter was a bugle blast in an otherwise church-quiet existence.6
It lay on the banks of the Nottoway River in Nottoway County 67 miles southwest of Richmond and 189 miles from the Federal capital in Washington. The stage from Petersburg bound for North Carolina rolled through daily. The village counted fifteen dwellings, one mercantile house, one hotel, a saddler, a tailor, a blacksmith shop, and a population of seventy people, including a physician and a lawyer. Supplementing the courthouse was a clerk's office and a jail for debtors and criminals, and there was a flour mill on the river. The town, the river, and the county were named alike for a tribe of Virginia Indians long since displaced.7
There, in the town where his father was the Presbyterian pastor at Shiloh Church, Roger Atkinson Pryor grew up.
On his father's side Roger descended from two long and upstanding ancestral lines, the Blands and the Pryors, both deep-rooted in the old Virginia gentry and with strong pedigrees in revolution and politics.8 The Blands could look back on nearly two centuries as landed gentry in young America, to the year Theodorick Bland purchased an estate on the James River in 1654. In both fortune and understanding this first Bland was said to be inferior to no man of his time in the country, that "with his personal graces, his literary accomplishments, and his distinguished career," he was "a brilliant star set in the early skies of Virginia history," a star that gleamed brightly as one of the King's Council for the colonial commonwealth.9
As the Bland line eddied and branched down through succeeding generations, it produced an abundance of Theodoricks and Richards, many of them estimable men in their time and place. One of the Richards was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and a political writer and thinker of the first rank. It was said of him that "his intellectual calibre was capacious, his education finished, his habits of application indefatigable." His distinguished contemporary Thomas Jefferson thought him "the wisest man south of James River."10 He was seen as "staunch and tough as whitleather" with "something the look of old parchments, which he handleth and studieth much."11
That "whitleather" Richard had a nephew named Theodorick, another brilliant star in the Bland line, one of the first patriots to rouse the colonies to resistance against the British in the Revolution. Born about 1742, the only son among several daughters and delicate in health from birth, he was sent at age eleven to England for an education. He returned to Virginia more than a decade later as a physician, one of the first Virginians to devote himself to the study of medicine. By 1771 his frail constitution had turned his aspirations into longings for the rural life of a planter, with its quiet, peaceful seclusion and studious repose-a "sighing for some sequestered Abyssinian happy valley."12 But Revolution loomed, and that did not lend itself to tranquility. So he went to war instead, a captain of the first troop of Virginia cavalry and then a colonel of the First Continental Dragoons. He fought at Brandywine and later commanded the post at Charlottesville. George Washington thought well of him, and he was a friend of Thomas Jefferson, of the Marquis de Lafayette, and of Patrick Henry.
That same Theodorick became a member of the Virginia convention that met in June 1788, after the Revolution, to ratify a new constitution for the confederation of states. He voted against the Constitution, believing it repugnant to the interests of his country. But when it was adopted over his opposition, he was elected by his district in Virginia to the first Congress that convened under it. He was never for long permitted to live the life of leisure and serenity he so prized, but was occupied to the end of his forty-eight-year lifetime with unrelieved public service, civil and military. He was described as tall, somewhat corpulent in his later days, and of a noble countenance, his manners being "marked by ease, dignity and well-bred repose." He was seen as "virtuous and enlightened" in character and "estimable for his private worth and respectable for his public services."13 Much the same might be said of other Blands. And as the line branched, it interconnected with other pedigrees of merit in Virginia, such gold-plated names as the Lees and the Randolphs.
The Pryor line was no less blue-blooded than that of the Blands. Pryors had come to Britain from Normandy, with William the Conqueror in 1066. The first Pryor in the New World was John, who came from England in the early 1700s and also became a friend of Patrick Henry. Roger's grandparents, Richard Pryor and Anne Bland, merged the two lines in 1805 and produced yet another Theodorick, the oldest of six sons, who was to become Roger's father.14
Theodorick Pryor's early education was at academies in Dinwiddie and Brunswick Counties. In 1823, when he was eighteen years old, he entered Hampden-Sydney College, a southside Virginia institution of high repute. Patrick Henry had sent seven sons to the college and had been on its board with James Madison. Theodorick graduated in three years with the highest distinction and as a member of that school's elite Union Society. He matriculated to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, studied law for a year, and became a lawyer.
He then married Lucy Atkinson, who brought to the union yet a third line rich in church, law, literature, and education, and which would give Roger his middle name when he entered the world on July 19, 1828. He was followed soon by a sister, Lucy. But in 1830, when Roger was less than two years old, their mother died.
Too grief stricken to continue in the law, Theodorick entered the Union Theological Seminary at Hampden-Sydney, in 1831, and a year later became an ordained Presbyterian minister and was installed at Shiloh Church. In December that same year, he eased his sorrow with a second wife, Frances Epes, giving Roger and Lucy a new mother, and eventually two stepsisters and a stepbrother.
Theodorick's God-serving life was in the Bland tradition. He said, "To me it is a source of much comfort and of praise, that, in looking up the long line of my forefathers, I find so many Ministers of the Most High God."15 It was true. There had been nearly as many pastors and ministers in his accumulated ancestry as there had been Theodoricks.
One admirer said of Roger's father that he was "a man cast in the mould of which martyrs were made in the olden time, and whether roasted, broiled, or boiled, he would never have yielded one iota in the confession of that faith which he so long held and so strongly defended."16 As a pastor he was considered "eminent for piety, eloquence, and usefulness."17 He was a man of sturdy common sense, who had a strong mind and a way with words. Another admirer said of him that he "fulfills my idea of a model pastor."18
He also fulfilled his family's idea of a model father; they believed that "his life stood for all that was true and fine." Young people confided to him both their joys and sorrows. He made of his home, one of them later wrote, an "atmosphere of culture and true religion," and "there was no excuse for being late for family prayers morning or night." The one noteworthy fault they found in him was his impatient, quickly excited, blunt-speaking nature, a trait he was to hand down to his son.19
Roger was later to say that the Pryors got their brains from the Blands. His father said, however, that he thought they had some brains even before they merged with the Blands.20 Wherever the brains came from and however much of them he had inherited, Roger planned to put them to optimum use. When he was only twelve years old he vowed, "I am going to make my mark at whatever I do; if it is blacksmithing, I will be a good blacksmith."21
But blacksmithing was not his ambition. He began his education at the Classical Academy of Ephraim Dodd Saunders, in Petersburg, near where he was born, an institution not noted for producing blacksmiths. Then in 1843, following the precise path pioneered twenty years before by the father he admired, he entered Hampden-Sydney College, became a member of the elite Union Society, and fell in love with books. He had early read Boswell's Johnson, later confessing to his own son that it had given him a taste for literature and the habit of reading. Those were his signature traits at Hampden-Sydney.22
Hampden-Sydney College was made to order for the love of reading, rural serenity, and studious repose that Roger had inherited from the Bland line. It was a little all-male academy housed in a building on a hill among the chinquapins, a tree-shrub of the chestnut family common throughout the South, particularly southside Virginia. A well-armed student at Hampden-Sydney was obliged to carry a pocketful of chinquapin nuts, not just for munching but as weaponry. The country about the little college was also a kingdom of pine barrens and scrub oak groves, rooted in red clay soil. The open field around the academy building was scarred by gullies, weed filled, and teeming with cows and hogs belonging to professors, who raised them to supplement their meager incomes. The cows, with bells clanging, working their cuds, grazed up to the windows of the academic building, creating a discord that often challenged study. It was a cow-pasture college. But in its time it had sent out into the workaday world many useful, even great, men.23
By the summer of 1845 Roger, almost seventeen years old, was nearly the man he had been growing up to be. He was a lanky six feet tall and "erect as a shaft," with the elastic step of an Indian, and he walked with "a restless, rapid gait." He had a striking and graceful presence, an ingratiating manner, and irresistibly charming speech. His hair, raven and glistening, hung long, loose, and straight to his shoulders, framing a classic face. There was a fire in his eyes, which were steel gray, but there was also in him a moderating strain of gentleness. He had a high forehead, a pronounced nose, and prominent cheeks. His face was innocent of hair and always would be. His features were mobile and expressive. His mouth was strong, large, and "strangely nervous." He was restless by nature and ruled by an "impetuous temperament," but he bore himself as if born to distinction, which indeed he was. He was ambitious, with a bulldog passion to master thoroughly whatever he undertook.
His salient characteristic was his voice, well-pitched and penetrating and capable of torrents of eloquence when deeply stirred. At such times the words came cartwheeling out so rapid-fire that they defied stenographic report, and his voice vibrated "like a trumpet." Few who heard or saw him, even at this early age, forgot him.24
There was a meeting of Presbyterian divines in Charlottesville in the summer of 1845, and Theodorick attended with Roger. To see Charlottesville was to understand why Thomas Jefferson chose to live there and only reluctantly ever left. Its setting blended mountains, fields, woodlands, and running streams into "a landscape of quiet, but uncommon beauty." To the west of the little village soared the Blue Ridge Mountains, one of the boldest and most beautiful horizons in the world. Theodorick and Roger approached Charlottesville from the east over a level landscape where, one writer has written, "nature seems to sleep in eternal repose." Another wrote that "there was almost a sense of pain at the stillness which seemed to reign." It was a place, yet another writer said, "where earth herself seemed struggling heavenward."25
Cradled in this scenic grandeur, Charlottesville was a village of "simple belfries" piercing the mists of surrounding green, and dominated by the classic pantheon and tall colonnades of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson's legacy to his beloved state. There were four churches in the village, two bookstores, several dry-goods establishments, and a female seminary.26
There was also in Charlottesville at that time hospitality to spare. It was, in fact, an age in Virginia when visiting and being visited had been elevated to an art form, and when hospitality was considered "the chief of virtues."27 It was said that all Virginia houses were "built of elastic material capable of sheltering any number of guests, many of whom remained all summer." Indeed, that was rather expected when a visit was promised.28
It was said also that "the Virginia gentleman of those days was hospitable, as men are truthful, for his own sake first. His hospitality was spontaneous, unconscious, and free as heaven itself with its favors. All it asked in return was that you should come when you pleased, go when you pleased, stay as long as you pleased, and enjoy yourself to the top of your bent."29
Whenever large conventions of clergymen came to Charlottesville-and they came often-the visiting divines were taken into the town's elastic and hospitable homes. No man's house in the village was more elastic or more valued for its hospitality than the warm and welcoming home of Dr. Samuel Pleasants Hargrave, a physician. Any large religious or literary meeting coming to town caused the doctor to send the chairman a note asking how many guests he might be permitted to host. He had done this in advance of that summer's meeting of Presbyterian clergymen, and he had drawn Theodorick Pryor. So the Pryors, father and son, made their way out to the Hargrave house, which sat on one of the terraced hills overlooking the Blue Ridge.
After they entered the house, Roger, ever exuberant, bounded up toward his assigned room two stair steps at a time, and for the first time, saw Sara Agnes Rice. She was fifteen years old. She was brown eyed, with auburn hair plaited into long braids-and she was beautiful.

Copyright © 2002 by John C. Waugh

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"Magnificent--a greater work of history than Gone With the Wind is a novel. By far the fullest account I have ever read of a man and his wife and their family during the Civil War."--Grady McWhiney, Professor Emeritus of History, Texas Christian University