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Nathan Neely Fleming (February 13, 1826 – May 5, 1864) was a North Carolina politician, Speaker of the House and Confederate soldier.

Early life

Fleming was born at Mount Vernon, NC, February 13, 1826. By 1850, Nathan Neely Fleming was working as a lawyer in Davie County; and by the late 1850s he was practicing law in Salisbury with the well-known lawyer and former US House Member Frances Burton Craige.

Political Career

In 1858, Fleming ran as a Democrat for the North Carolina House of Commons, pitted against the Whig Daniel Burton Wood (Dr. Wood, a physician), he won the race, serving his two-year term and then getting re-elected two years later, in 1860. On January 16, 1861, Nathan Neely Fleming, representative of Rowan County, moved in the North Carolina House of Commons that the state secede from the Union. Secession was not approved that winter. But later in 1861, North Carolina did secede from the Union, at a May convention in which Fleming’s law partner from Salisbury, Burton Craige, introduced the Ordinance of Secession. In the fall, Fleming was elected speaker of the NC House of Commons. He began service in the Confederate Army in 1862, and the entire time he served, according to John Kerr Fleming, he never missed a single session of the North Carolina Legislature. He was re-elected to that body for a third time in 1862 and nominated by his party to run yet again in 1864.

'''Military Service and Death

In April, 1862, Nathan Neely Fleming enlisted as a lieutenant in Company B of the 46th NC Regiment of the Confederate army. He was soon seeing military action and suffered a wound at Sharpsburg (Antietam) on August 17, 1862. Perhaps for leadership displayed there, Fleming was promoted to captain of Company B on September 30, 1862. During this time he is listed as being in a hospital in Richmond because of his wounds and was transferred to Charleston, SC, taking advantage of his legal training, where he served on court martial cases in 1863 under General P.G.T. Beauregard. Later he was appointed Judge Advocate in A.P. Hill’s army on the Rapidan River, in Virginia, from fall 1863 to spring 1864.

May 18, 1863, Captain Fleming sent a letter to General S. Coopin, Adjutant General, CSA, requesting to be relieved from Court Martial duty and return to duty with his regiment. In the spring of 1864, at the start of General Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign (what would become the “Forty Days”), Captain Fleming’s 46th NC was one of four NC regiments in Brigadier General John R. Cooke’s Brigade, which was one of five brigades in Major General Henry Heth’s division, one of three divisions (plus artillery) in Lieutenant General A.P. Hill’s Third Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, all of it under the command of General Robert E. Lee.

On the first day of the Battle of the Wilderness, May 5, 1864, Captain Fleming was killed in action, most likely along the infamous Orange Plank Road, east of widow Tapp’s house (Gen. Lee’s headquarters), while engaging Union forces under Major General Winfield S. Hancock.

Captain Nathan Neely Fleming of Rowan County, North Carolina, former Speaker of the House and member of the North Carolina House of Commons is more than likely buried in a mass grave with his fellow North Carolinians he fought with near Chancellorsville, Virginia.