Publishers Weekly
Roger Pryor was an influential Virginia newspaper editor and politician before the war and a Democratic congressman in Washington until he resigned as the Southern states began to secede. His "fair lady," as he first addressed her, was the former Sara Agnes Rice, whose family had been in Virginia since 1680. Waugh (The Class of 1846) bases this engaging account of their lives and times in part on Roger's correspondence and on two memoirs that Sara wrote after the war. Commanding the Third Virginia regiment during the Civil War, Roger competently led through the Seven Days, Second Manassas and Antietam, where he was elevated to division command and failed terribly. He was relegated to a secondary command and eventually resigned in disgust, reenlisting as a private in a Virginia cavalry regiment. Captured at Petersburg in 1864, he was imprisoned in a New York fort until released in early 1865. While he was away from home, Sara coped with six children, scraping by for food, clothing and shelter during her long stay in the Petersburg area, but keeping the family intact. In late 1865, Roger went to New York City, invited by friends he had known before the war. He became a lawyer, struggled for several years, then made enough money to bring his family to the city, forging a successful legal career (and making speeches noting that he was glad the South lost and the nation was now reunited) before retiring in 1899. Waugh describes vividly the society in which the Pryors moved and their struggles during the war, but the reconstructed dialogue and breathless descriptions ("Sara's heart pounded as she read the telegram from Roger in Norfolk in May," begins one chapter) may deter the more historically minded. (Sept.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Award-winning author Waugh (The Class of 1846; Reelecting Lincoln) takes us deep into the heart of Dixie in this life-and-times dual biography of the Pryors Virginia secessionists, ardent Confederates, and postwar Unionists. Roger Pryor made his name first as a fire-eating editor, then as a soldier, and finally as a lawyer, each of which positions allowed the Pryors to move in the highest social circles in antebellum Washington, DC, wartime Richmond, and postwar New York City. Waugh describes in great detail the travails of a family separated by war, the petticoat politics of the Confederate capital, the privations and despair of retreat and defeat, and the difficulties of leaving the South and finding a new life in the North. Waugh's accounts of battles and leaders do not redraw what we already know of the Virginia campaigns, but his vivid portrayals of private lives at war match anything in print. Waugh overdramatizes by including dialog and imputing motives to actions that the sources do not wholly sustain, and he sees the world uncritically from the Pryors' eyes. But in the Pryors he has found the couple he was seeking to retell the war. Not since Robert Manson Myers's Pulitzer Prize-winning Children of Pride has a white Southern family come so fully and fiercely to life. Recommended for public and college libraries. Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Booknews
For his fifth book about the US Civil War, Waugh examines how a Virginia couple who moved in the highest political and social circles in the North and South before the war, and in the South during it, dealt with the hardship and heartbreak of the conflict. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
