Sara Agnes Rice Pryor

Early life, lineage and education

Sara Agnes Rice was born in Halifax County, Virginia to Samuel Blair Rice, a Baptist preacher, and his second wife, Lucinda Walton Leftwich (1807–1855), who had more than 10 children together. At about the age of three, Sara was effectively adopted by her childless aunt, Mary Blair Hargrave, and her husband, Dr. Samuel Pleasants Hargrave, and lived mostly with this couple in Hanover, Virginia. They were slaveholders. When she was about eight, they moved to Charlottesville seeking a better education for her.

From her father side she was grandaughter of William Rice of "Greenwood", Charlotte county, Va., and Mary Bacon Crenshaw. Great-grandaughter of David Rice (Presbyterian minister), of Kentucky, and Mary Blair. David Rice acted in the capacity of clergyman and orator to the Hanover militia in 1775. He was, in 1792, a member of the convention which framed the first constitution of the State of Kentucky. From her mother side she was grandaughter of Rev. William Leftwich and Frances Otey. Great-grandaughter of Col. John Otey, of Bedford, Va., and Mary Hopkins. Col. John Otey served as colonel and captain of a battallion of riflemen. Also descendant of Col. William Leftwich, Samuel Blair (chaplain), and Maj. Gen. Joel Leftwich.

Marriage and family

On November 8, 1848, Sara Agnes Rice married Roger Atkinson Pryor, of an old Tidewater family. A journalist, he became a politician and was elected to both the US Congress and the Confederate Congress after secession. Although they were not slaveholders, each had grown up with slaves, and he was a fiery orator in support of the institution.

Sara and Roger A. Pryor had seven children together, the last born after the war.

Civil War

When her husband was commissioned as an officer in the Confederate Army, Mrs. Pryor traveled with his company and worked as a nurse. Their children were likely cared for by his family, as they had been living in Petersburg. After he resigned his commission to go with General Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry, she returned to Petersburg to keep their family together.

New York City

After the war, Roger Pryor moved to New York where he started a new law practice. Sara Rice Pryor and the children joined him, moving to Brooklyn Heights in 1868. Her second memoir describes their struggling through ten years of poverty (although she always had a domestic servant, first a former slave from Virginia who returned home, and then an Irish woman). Mrs. Pryor sewed all the clothes for her children, found places for the younger girls at the Packer School, got a loan from a family friend with her husband's war silver as collateral, and helped her husband with his law studies.

The couple became prominent among a number of influential southerners in the North, who were known as "Confederate carpetbaggers."

Civic organizing

Mrs. Pryor became active in the social life of New York in the late nineteenth century. While she and her family were struggling, Mrs. Pryor and her friends realized that other women and children needed help; many immigrants continued to arrive in New York. Together with other women in Brooklyn Heights, she raised money to found a home for women and children in need. Her petition to the state legislature gained the group $10,000 toward purchase of a building in Brooklyn for the home. After collecting an additional $20,000 through their own fundraising, they started the Home in the 1870s.

In her memoir, Mrs. Pryor noted that, following the 1889 United States Centennial celebration in New York, there was greatly increased interest in historic items, buildings and collections. She helped found the following organizations, at a time when fraternal, civic and lineage societies were forming quickly: Preservation of the Virginia Antiquities (since 2009 named Preservation Virginia), which came to own historic Jamestown among other properties; the Mary Washington Memorial Association, which raised funds to commission a memorial for the gravesite of the first president's mother; the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR); and the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. She organized a chapter of the DAR in New York. Among her fundraising activities, Pryor wrote that she "managed a great ball at the White Sulphur Springs to help build a monument over Mary Washington's grave." Such fundraising events were important to providing for the preservation of historic assets.

Literary career

Sara Rice Pryor also became a productive writer. She had kept journals for years and used them as a basis for her two memoirs published in the early twentieth century. She joined other Southern women who began to publish work with more of their own experiences and "contributed to the public discourse about the war." Nearly a dozen memoirs by Southern women were published around the turn of the century. Mrs. Pryor's status as the wife of a Confederate officer and politician gave her legitimacy. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) encouraged southern women to write of their experiences, enlarging their cultural power. In her Reminiscences of Peace and War (1904), Mrs. Pryor wrote about antebellum society but also defended the Confederacy, as did fellow writers Virginia Clay-Clopton and Louise Wigfall Wright; the UDC recommended the works of these three for serious study by other women.

Like her husband in his speeches Mrs. Pryor promoted the idea that the war had nothing to do with slavery. She suggested that the average Southern soldier fought to resist the invasion of the North. After noting that most soldiers were not slaveholders, she wrote, "His quarrel was a sectional one and he fought for his section."

In addition, Mrs. Pryor wrote two histories and several novels, all published by The Macmillan Company in the early 1900s. Perhaps because of her status in New York, she had continued success in getting her books published, at a time when southern women writers were having difficulty. Her memoirs have been important sources for historians. The writer John C. Waugh drew extensively from her works in his joint biography of the Pryors: Surviving the Confederacy: Rebellion, Ruin, and Recovery: Roger and Sara Pryor during the Civil War (2002), which was also a social history of their circle.

After her death, Sara Agnes Rice Pryor was buried at Princeton Cemetery, near her sons Theodorick and William. Her husband was also buried there after his death.

Works

All published in New York by Macmillan: