Pryor, Sara Agnes Rice, 1830-1912

Sara Agnes Rice Pryor, born Sara Agnes Rice (February 19, 1830 – February 15, 1912), was an American writer and community activist in New York City. Born in Virginia, she moved north after the American Civil War with her husband and family to rebuild their life. He was a former politician and Confederate general; together they became influential in New York society, among numerous "Confederate carpetbaggers" after the war. She and her husband both later renounced the confederacy after settling in New York.<p>
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Mrs. Pryor was among founders of a home for women and children in Brooklyn, New York. She helped found heritage organizations including Preservation of the Virginia Antiquities, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Mary Washington Memorial Association, and the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. She was active in fundraising to support their goals. She was noted as a central figure in fundraising for a yellow-fever outbreak to benefit children in Jacksonville, Florida.
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Mrs. Pryor published two histories, two memoirs of the Civil War years, and novels by the Macmillan Company in the early 1900s. Her first memoir was recommended by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which encouraged southern women writers to defend the southern cause. Her memoirs have been sources for historians on the life of her society during and after the war years.
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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. The aunt and uncle were slaveholders. When she was about eight, they moved to Charlottesville seeking a better education for her, as documented in "Mary Blair Destiny". Sara and her husband were never slaveholders.
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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 prior to the Civil War, though he later publicly regretted his support for the Confederacy.
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Sara and Roger A. Pryor had seven children together, the last born after the war.
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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.
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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.
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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 <i>Reminiscences of Peace and War</i> (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.