Holiday Assignment #1

Earlier this month, before the holiday vacation, my dad went down to North Carolina. I asked him if he could find anything on North Carolina’s role in the Civil War, and he managed to find me a book in a local library called Remembering North Carolina’s Confederates. Flipping through this book, the chapters are divided into one covering each of the four geographical areas of North Carolina, one on Jefferson Davis, and one on the soldiers’ involvements in battles outside of the state. For this first assignment I brushed over the part on coastal plains and am going to give a brief description of what was in it. The coast of North Carolina saw the majority of real battles that took place on the state’s soil. The Northern cities such as New Bern and the Outer Banks were captured relatively soon by the Union army, but southern ports such as the one in Wilmington and the Fort Fisher complex, fell in early 1865. These served as some of the last ties to the outside world for the confederates and provided vital supplies. This area contains the most civil war memorials in the state, as well as the largest civil war graveyards. A number of Civil War generals, one even which died in Gettysburg are scattered across the state, buried with different memorials and statues. The book even discusses the legacy of some of these generals. One of them, Charles M. Stedman who was born in Wilmington North Carolina, was a U.S. representative until 1930, and was the last Civil War veteran to do so.