<P> After secession, some North Carolinians refused to support the Confederacy . Some of the yeoman farmers in the state's mountains and western Piedmont region remained neutral during the Civil War, while some covertly supported the Union cause during the conflict . Approximately 2,000 North Carolinians from western North Carolina enlisted in the Union Army and fought for the North in the war . Two additional Union Army regiments were raised in the coastal areas of the state, which were occupied by Union forces in 1862 and 1863 . Numerous slaves escaped to Union lines, where they became essentially free . </P> <P> Confederate troops from all parts of North Carolina served in virtually all the major battles of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy's most famous army . The largest battle fought in North Carolina was at Bentonville, which was a futile attempt by Confederate General Joseph Johnston to slow Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's advance through the Carolinas in the spring of 1865 . In April 1865, after losing the Battle of Morrisville, Johnston surrendered to Sherman at Bennett Place, in what is today Durham . North Carolina's port city of Wilmington was the last Confederate port to fall to the Union, in February 1865, after the Union won the nearby Second Battle of Fort Fisher, its major defense downriver . </P> <P> The first Confederate soldier to be killed in the Civil War was Private Henry Wyatt from North Carolina, in the Battle of Big Bethel in June 1861 . At the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the 26th North Carolina Regiment participated in Pickett / Pettigrew's Charge and advanced the farthest into the Northern lines of any Confederate regiment . During the Battle of Chickamauga, the 58th North Carolina Regiment advanced farther than any other regiment on Snodgrass Hill to push back the remaining Union forces from the battlefield . At Appomattox Court House in Virginia in April 1865, the 75th North Carolina Regiment, a cavalry unit, fired the last shots of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War . For many years, North Carolinians proudly boasted that they had been "First at Bethel, Farthest at Gettysburg and Chickamauga, and Last at Appomattox ." </P> <P> North Carolina is bordered by South Carolina on the south, Georgia on the southwest, Tennessee on the west, Virginia on the north, and the Atlantic Ocean on the east . The United States Census Bureau places North Carolina in the South Atlantic division of the southern region . </P>

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