CHAPTER I.
WHEN the women of North Carolina, after years of unwearying effort to erect a State monument to the Confederate dead, saw their hopes realized in the beautiful monument now standing in Capitol Square, Raleigh, they caused to be chiseled on one of its faces this inscription:
FIRST AT BETHEL:
LAST AT APPOMATTOX.
This terse sentence epitomizes North Carolina s devotion to the Confederacy. From the hopeful 10th day of June, 1861, when her First regiment, under Col. D. H. Hill, defeated, in the first serious action of the Civil war, General Pierce’s attack at Bethel, to the despairing 9th day of April, 1865, when Gen. W. R. Cox’s North Carolina brigade of Gen. Bryan Grimes division fired into an overwhelming foe the last volley of the army of Northern Virginia, North Carolina s time, her resources, her energies, her young men, her old men, were cheer fully and proudly given to the cause that she so deliberately espoused.
How ungrudgingly the State gave of its resources may be illustrated by a few facts. Gen. J. E. Johnston is authority for the statement that for many months previous to its surrender, General Lee s army had been fed almost entirely from North Carolina, and that at the time of his own surrender he had collected provisions
