Are you like me? Is your mood immeasurably improved when Bad Things Happen to Bad People? Well, PREPARE TO CHEER UP, cuz I'm gonna tell you how the fire-breathing secessionist Roger Pryor almost became the 1st casualty of the war thanks to his own breathtaking stupidity.
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Pyor, who is inevitably described as a “fiery orator” even though he looks like an extra in Encino Man, was asked to take the first shot on Fort Sumter but turned it down, saying: “I could not fire the first gun of the war.”
#OhReeeally
#HowConvenient
#BarkIsWorseThanYourBite

The next day, while visiting Sumter to negotiate the Federal surrender, Pryor saw a bottle on the table and, being full of swagger, took a swig. A Union surgeon approached him and said: “Sir, what you have drunk is poison. It was iodide of potassium and you are a dead man.” #Oops

Pryor commenced to collapse on the spot, as one does after unwittingly drinking a bunch of POISON, and for a loooong few seconds, the Union guys stood around and put their hands in their pockets and whistled nonchalantly and were like: “So … how do you like the Sox this year?”

But, finally, a Union surgeon grabbed a stomach pump. And, presumably, some activated charcoal and saline, plus all the cigs and orange slices Pryor could handle -- not that I’VE ever been admitted to a Chillout Tent at a Dead show. But seriously ... stay hydrated, kids!

“Some of us,” Abner Doubleday wrote later, “questioned the doctor’s right to interpose himself in a matter of this kind.” After all, “if any Rebel leader chose to come over to Fort Sumter and poison himself, the Medical Department had no business to interfere.” #AbnerHitsAHomerun

With the Union doctor’s aid, the Rebel fire-breather recovered to become a notably inept general in the Confederate army. Then Pryor got captured as a spy and thrown in jail, before being released by Lincoln and playing no further part in the war he’d wanted OH SO VERY BADLY.

After the war, Pryor pulled a reverse Carpetbagger and moved to NYC, becoming a prominent Lost Causer. Guess what he blamed the war on? Those dastardly fire-breathing secessionist politicians!

Here’s Pryor in old age, trying to figure out what a decent human being looks like.

Oh, well. At least we learned our lesson and hold politicians to account now. But just think: the first Rebel death of the war could have been a case of “frankly absurd self-poisoning in a moment of illusory, fevered glory.”

Not that it would have been a metaphor or anything.