The Last Fire-Eater: Roger A. Pryor and the Search for a Southern Identity by William A. Link (review)

Reviewed by: The Last Fire-Eater: Roger A. Pryor and the Search for a Southern Identity by William A. Link Keith S. Bohannon (bio) The Last Fire-Eater: Roger A. Pryor and the Search for a Southern Identity. William A. Link. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. ISBN: 978-0807178218, 123 pp., cloth, $30.00. William Link's The Last Fire-Eater analyzes the public career of Roger A. Pryor, an antebellum Southern newspaper editor and politician, Confederate general, and postwar New York lawyer and champion of sectional reconciliation. Link's intention in this book, based on his 2020 Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University, is to examine Pryor as "a central, perhaps representative figure during a critical period in southern history, between the 1850s and the close of the nineteenth century" (2). Drawing on recent scholarship, Link uses Pryor's transformation to illustrate the malleable nature of honor and definitions of manhood in the last half of the nineteenth century. A native of Petersburg, Virginia, Roger Pryor attended Hampden-Sydney College and the University of Virginia School of Law, graduating from the latter institution in 1848. By the early 1850s, Pryor was a newspaper editor in Richmond, making a name for himself as an eloquent defender of slavery and states' rights to secede. Pryor became, in Link's words, "a skilled practitioner in the politics of honor," engaging between 1854 and 1860 in at least eight attempted or realized duels (2). While Pryor's inflammatory and aggressive language bred conflict with Northern politicians, Link rightfully points out that the Virginian's words were more bark than bite and ultimately led to nothing. Actual duels were far less important to Pryor than the stage of honor, his words receiving widespread coverage in newspapers and elevating his status among Southern readers. When Virginia voters elected the hotheaded Pryor to the US House of Representatives in 1859, he joined the ranks of the fire-eaters, Southern politicians who loudly defended Southern chivalry against the threat of the Black Republican Party. [End Page 92] During the Civil War, Pryor amassed an unenviable record as an incompetent general unable to manage his troops on the battlefield. This lack of ability was particularly evident at the Battle of Antietam, when he assumed command of a division at a crucial point in the engagement. The division's piecemeal commitment to the fighting ultimately contributed to the Confederate abandonment of the Bloody Lane in the center of the Southern battle line. By the spring of 1863, Pryor no longer had a field command and found himself pleading with President Jefferson Davis and other Confederate officials for reinstatement to brigade command. In early August 1863, Pryor took the extraordinary step of resigning his commission as general and reenlisting as a private in a Virginia cavalry regiment. He supposedly acted as a scout, sometimes behind Union lines, until late November 1864, when Union troops captured him and held him prisoner until March 1865. By July 1865, the impoverished Pryor had relocated his family to New York City, where he started a legal practice. Link claims that combat in the Civil War undermined Pryor's antebellum assumptions about honor and manhood but offers little concrete evidence that this was the case. (The absence of any substantial collection of personal papers from Roger Pryor hampered Link in this regard, forcing him to rely heavily on newspapers and other sources.) Couldn't Pryor's transformation just as likely have been brought about by a pragmatic adoption of new values in order to succeed in the business and political world of New York City? As early as the late 1860s, Pryor publicly advocated a policy of sectional reconciliation very similar to that espoused later by Atlanta newspaper editor Henry Grady of "New South" fame. Pryor said God had decreed the end of slavery and the Confederacy's defeat in the Civil War. At the same time, Pryor said he had nothing to apologize for in defending his native land. The nation's future lay in racial peace, Pryor declared, claiming that uplifting African Americans would contribute to the prosperity of the whole country. Link's discussion of Pryor's reconciliationist views draws...