Consider the circumstances of 35-year-old Colonel Isaac Erwin Avery of Burke County in the late afternoon of July 2, 1863. He and his fellow North Carolina soldiers found themselves pinned down in a wheat field under a flaming sun near the base of Cemetery Hill in a place called Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Avery was the grandson of Waightstill Avery, the fiery Revolutionary War hero who served as the first attorney general of North Carolina. As General Robert F. Hoke's senior colonel, Isaac Avery was thrust in command of Hoke's brigade at Gettysburg because Hoke had been badly injured and narrowly missed losing his left arm in the fight near Chancellorsville two months earlier.

As the afternoon of July 2 wore on at Gettysburg, Union artillery placements atop Cemetery Hill and nearby Culps Hill began to roar and belch deadly fire. Then came the command from Major General Jubal Early. The small brigades of Hoke and General Harry Hays of Louisiana were to attack the heavily fortified enemy positions on East Cemetery Hill-then considered the most strategic position for Union General George Meade. From the hill, the Union soldiers could observe in the twilight the Confederate assault columns as they formed. Avery's three regiments moved to the right of Hays' Louisiana Tigers, a hard-fighting bunch of French-speaking Creoles.

Without yielding or retreating, the two brigades moved forward in the face of terrible fire from the 22 heavy field guns raining down shot and shell from the two hills. Well-protected Union sharpshooters sniped at the men as they made their relentless advance. The Southern soldiers hurdled fences and rock walls, and it took nearly an hour to move across the 700 hundred yards of Pennsylvania landscape to reach the base of Cemetery Hill.

As the Confederates approached the hill, Colonel Avery was out in front, leading his men on General Hoke's big black warhorse, the only mounted soldier in the attack. At Archives and History, you can read a letter written by one of Hoke's officers to Colonel Avery's father written after the battle detailing the great debate that Colonel Avery had with himself as to whether he should go in mounted.

As the two brigades began their ascent of the hill, they quickly smashed through the first Federal line. With darkness rapidly approaching and with thick smoke from the heavy gunfire now enveloping the hill, most of the Confederates were unaware that Avery had fallen at the base of the hill when a gunshot had struck the colonel at the base of his neck on his right side.

The ball plowed its way through the blood vessels and nerves that supplied the upper extremities and resulted in immediate paralysis to his right side. Avery was knocked from his horse, and as he lay bleeding to death so far away from home, he gathered enough strength to take from his coat a lead pencil and a scrap of paper. With his writing hand paralyzed, he used his left to scrawl a note which was addressed to his business partner and aide, Major Samuel McDowell Tate. Colonel Isaac Erwin Avery's dying message read:

Major: Tell my Father I died with my face to the enemy. I. E. Avery

When the litter-bearers reached the dying officer, they found the blood-stained note near Avery's hand. His death came hours later at a field hospital.

Years later, Lord Bryce, the British Ambassador to the United States, noticed a dingy piece of brown Confederate note paper on display in our state's Archives. Deeply touched by Isaac Avery's dying message, Bryce remarked: "The message of that soldier to his father is the message of our race to the world."

---Excerpts from The Future of Our History written and presented by Representative Daniel W. Barefoot at the Leadership Conference on Access to Special Collections, High Point, North Carolina, March 2, 2000.