Topics Related to Civil War

On November 17, 1862, 19-year-old James Wells Champney drafted a collection of small images titled “First impressions of North Carolina, sketched in cars on the [way] to newbern.”

The son of a painter-illustrator, Champney apprenticed in Boston to become a master wood engraver, but the outbreak of war interrupted his artistic training. He volunteered for the 45th Massachusetts and deployed to North Carolina in November 1862 as part of reinforcements for the Union occupational forces then at New Bern.

On November 12, 1903, the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association appointed a committee to investigate and report on the various claims made about North Carolina’s involvement in the Civil War.

The following spring the group received the committee’s report, boasting that North Carolinians indeed had been “First at Bethel, Farthest at Gettysburg, Farthest at Chickamauga, and Last at Appomattox,” as a popular saying coined by editor and state Supreme Court Justice Walter Clark suggested.

Specifically, the saying refers to claims that:

On November 6, 1865, the CSS Shenandoah lowered the Confederate flag and James I. Waddell surrendered command of the vessel to British authorities in Liverpool. The surrender came a full six months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. In that time, Waddell, a native of Pittsboro, had led his men on the only circumnavigation of the world by a Confederate ship.

On June 18, 1867, the state-run artificial limbs factory in Raleigh closed due to a lack of business. The state had been operating the plant through Jewett’s Patent Leg Company for about 18 months in order to fulfill the needs of the state’s Confederate amputees.

North Carolina was the first of the former Confederate states to offer artificial limbs to its maimed citizens. The temporary factory was set up in Raleigh near a railroad terminus. A system was developed whereby the amputees bore no out-of-pocket expenses in visiting Raleigh for prosthetic fittings.

On June 17, 1864, Brigadier General Gabriel Rains was appointed chief of the newly created Torpedo Bureau of the Confederate army.

Born in New Bern in 1803, Rains graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1827. He began experimenting with mines, then called “torpedoes.” in 1839, during the Seminole War. At the outbreak of the Civil War he resigned his commission and offered his services to the Confederacy.

On June 10, 1861, Henry Lawson Wyatt lost his life at the Battle of Bethel in Virginia.