PRYOR, prriir, ROGER ATKINSON An American journalist and lawyer. He was born near Petersburg, in Dinwiddie County. Va., graduated at Hampden-Sidney College in 1845. and at the University of Virginia in 1848. and studied law. He became editor of the Southside Democrat at Petersbnrg, and in 1854 he was called to Washington to edit the Washington I Union, the principal organ of the Pierce Admin istration in the capital. In 1855 he was sent ' to Greece on a special diplomatic mission, an4 in 1856 he became editor of The. Riehmonil Enquirer, one of the most influential papers in the South. In 1357 he established at Richmond a paper called The South, in which his advocacy of extreme States-rights views brought him into national prominence. In 1858 he was elected to Congress, and was reelected in 1860. and brought upon himself considerable ridicule by challenging to a duel John I'. Potter, a Republican Congress man from Wisconsin, and then refusing to meet him when Potter proposed that the duel be fonght with bowie knives in a dark room. When Vir ginia seceded. he returned South, where he was elected to the Provisional Confederate Congress and the first regular Confederate Congress. Ap
pointed colonel of a Virginia regiment, he par ticipated in the campaigns about Richmond, dis tinguished himself in the battles of Williamsburg and Sharpsburg. and was brevetted brigadier general. but resigned his commission in 1863 as a result of a quarrel with President Davis. He some enlisted again as a private in Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry, and was captured and confined for some months in Fort Lafayette. Returning Smith on parole, he advised the South to submit. After the war he settled in New York, where he engaged in newspaper work, and studied law. Admitted to the bar. lie rose rapidly to a prominent place in his profession, and in 1890 he was appointed by Governor Hill a judge of the Court of Common Pleas. in 1891 was elected to the same office for a fourteen-year term, and under the provisions of the new Constitution of 1894 was transferred as a justice to the reor ganized Supreme Court. He retired from the bench on account of age in 1899.