Bryan Grimes (November 2, 1828 – August 14, 1880) was a North Carolina planter and a general officer in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. He fought in nearly all of the major battles of the Eastern Theater of that war. Grimes was the last man in the Army of Northern Virginia to be appointed as a major general. He also led the last attack of that army not long before its surrender to Union forces at Appomattox Court House on the morning of April 9, 1865. Early life and career Bryan Grimes Jr. was born on the ancestral family plantation, called "Grimesland Plantation," in Pitt County, North Carolina. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. His father, Bryan Grimes Sr., was a prosperous planter. His mother, Nancy Grist, was the daughter of a prominent general from Georgia; she died when Grimes was only four months old, and his older sister for a time raised him. He attended school in Nash County and an academy in Washington, North Carolina, before attending a noted private school in Hillsborough. Grimes, at the age of fifteen, enrolled in the University of North Carolina, where he was a member of the Philanthropic Society. He graduated four years later in 1848. In 1849, his father gave him the Grimesland estate, along with control over its 100 slaves. On April 9, 1851, he married Elizabeth Hilliard Davis, but she would die only six years later. The couple had four children, one of whom, Bryan Grimes III, died in childhood. A grief-stricken Grimes later traveled to Europe. Civil War service Upon his return to the United States, he was elected as a delegate to North Carolina's secession convention. He resigned from the commission after the passage of the Ordinance of Secession and joined the Confederate Army as the major of the newly formed 4th North Carolina Infantry on May 16, 1861. He saw his first combat action at the First Battle of Manassas in Virginia on July 21. Grimes was promoted to lieutenant colonel on May 1, 1862, and fought at the Battle of Seven Pines, during which he was wounded when his injured horse fell on top of him on May 31. On June 19, 1862, Grimes was promoted to the rank of colonel and given command of the 4th North Carolina Infantry, now part of the Army of