James H. Lane papers

James H. Lane was born to Colonel Walter Gardner and Mary Ann Henry Lane in Mathews Court House, Virginia on July 28, 1833. He came from a long line of veteran soldiers and he himself matriculated at the Virginia Military Institute in the early 1850s, graduating in 1854, second in his class. From there, he went on to the University of Virginia to earn a degree in science in 1857. Most of his career after graduation involved teaching at such institutions as the Virginia Military Institute, the State Seminary of Florida at Tallahassee, and the North Carolina Military Institute in Charlotte.

When hostilities broke out in 1861, Lane enlisted in the North Carolina Troops along with other officers from the NCMI. At first he became an adjutant and instructor of military tactics at a camp of instruction near Raleigh. When the First North Carolina Volunteers were organized in Raleigh, Lane was assigned to that regiment and was elected its major. The regiment was soon sent to Virginia and first encountered combat at Bethel, Virginia. It was there that the First NC Volunteers earned the moniker “the Bethel Regiment.”

Late in 1861, at the time of this regiment’s expiration (it had enlisted its troops for a six-month duration) the regiment was re-organized as the 11th North Carolina Troops. Over time, Major Lane was promoted until he became a brigadier general; and at the age of twenty-nine he was the youngest general in the Confederate Army. Lane saw action throughout the rest of the war, including such engagements as the battles of Chancellorsville, Sharpsburg, Gettysburg (where he lost half of his men), the Wilderness, and Cold Harbor. General Lane and the 11th NCT were present at Appomattox when General Lee surrendered in 1865.

After the war he returned to his parents’ plantation and eventually began teaching again in a number of different cities, including Richmond, VA, and Concord and Wilmington, NC. In 1869 he married Charlotte Randolph Mead of Richmond and they had four daughters. Throughout the rest of his life, Lane taught at other schools, colleges, institutes and universities. He eventually settled at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute (later known as Auburn University) where he had taught for twenty-five years, and was granted the title of professor emeritus. He died in Auburn in June of 1907. [Sources: Encyclopedia of North Carolina Biography. North Carolina Regiments, Vol. 1, (p 77)]

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