Surviving the Confederacy: Rebellion, Ruin, and Recovery--Roger and Sara Pryor during the Civil War (review)

Credit John C. Waugh with understanding what many academic historians often seem unwilling to explore or unable to confront: the Civil War was an emotional experience, an intensely human drama. Credit him, too, with a lithe pen. His Surviving the Confederacy is an easy read. The book will not interest scholars, and it is not intended to. As a tale of Roger and Sara Pryor and their experiences in the maelstrom, the book is an escape from academic prose, impersonal and immovable historical forces, and theories and theses—social, cultural, or otherwise.

But even general readers ought to be very cautious. Surviving the Confederacy is a fine fare for the eyes but deeply suspect history.

As Waugh explains, he went looking for a "Confederate couple who could carry the story" (3). The Pryors were seemingly in the midst of every major drama of the war years and there at the end to experience disaster. The tale of rebellion, ruin, and recovery, as told through man and wife, is what most interests him—an exciting idea and well worth pursuing. Pryor, a fire-breathing Virginia editor, Congressman, mediocre Confederate general, and finally private soldier and postwar lawyer, certainly has the presence for it. So does Sara Pryor, who faced the deprivations of war with resolve and later wrote charming memoirs of her trials as a lady at war.

But it does not work. Part of the problem is Waugh's inability or refusal to restrain himself. All the women are beautiful and vivacious, the men (many of whom seem to walk with "long Indian strides") mainly chivalrous, the fields and springs of the Southland green and warm. Slaves are servants or, even more formally, "manservants." (There soon follows and incredibly naïve explanation. The Pryors "never owned slaves. They had servants, but these were rented from slaveholders and were paid for their services" [179].)

Indeed, Waugh's relationship with his sources is incestuous; Surviving the Confederacy often reads as if it could have been copyrighted during the halcyon days of the Confederate reminisce. The book is built primarily upon memoirs, published diaries, edited collections, and other accessible material. Those sources are certainly not to be dismissed; much of the backdrop of the story is developed through the voices of such important diarists as Mary Chesnut and Cornelia McDonald. But they should not be consumed whole, either for their details or their nostalgia. Waugh evinces no discretion either way, a failure of judgment so complete that examples are too many to catalogue: made-up, mawkish conversations, cliched war scenes, the glories of the white South gone with the wind. We are told that Sara Pryor denied herself and her children food in the waning days of the war and instead spent her last gold to buy a "servant" whose owner was going to send him down the river to Louisiana. She of course offered to free him. "Papers nothing!" he scoffs at her offer. "I belong to you—that's where I belong" (244). Such simplistic generalizations like "the wealthiest women in the South were working as hard as the poorest" serve as the author's courtly bows to the pride and devotion of elite white Southern ladyhood (115). But they are fatally erroneous, the intended audience for the book notwithstanding.

Some measure of redemption might have been possible had Waugh been able to present an intimate look at the Pryors and their family under the stress of war. Despite the book's press-kit promise to tell the tale of "a couple united in a nation divided," the reader feels and sees these relationships only indirectly. They are reflected through a humid mist of memoir and an insidious mirror of moonlight and magnolia.