General Lenoir served as Major General of the militia about eighteen years.  In a civil capacity he also discharged many high and responsible duties.

He filled, at different times, the offices of Register, Surveyor, Commissioner of Affidavits, Chairman of the County Court, and Clerk of the Superior Court for Wilkes county.  He was one of the original Trustees of the State University, and the first President of the Board.  He was also a member of both the State Conventions which met for the purpose of considering the Constitution of the United States.  He served for many years in both branches of the State Legislature.  During the last seven years of his services in the Senate, he was unanimously chosen Speaker of that body, and performed the duties of that important station with great satisfaction, firmness and impartiality.

In private life General Lenoir was no less distinguished for his moral worth and generous hospitality than in public life for his unbending integrity and enlarged patriotism.  His mansion was open at all times, not only to a large circle of friends and relatives, but to the stranger and the traveller.  To the poor he was kind and charitable, and in his will made liberal provision for those of his own neighborhood.

During his last illness he suffered much pain which he bore with Christian resignation.  He often said “he did not fear to die—­death had no terrors for him.”  He died, with calm composure, at his residence at Fort Defiance, on the 6th of May, 1839, aged eighty-eight years.

His remains were interred in the family burying ground which occupies the spot where Fort Defiance was erected during the Revolutionary war.

CHAPTER X.

MISCELLANEOUS.

LORD CORNWALLIS.

The readers of American history, and more particularly those of the Southern States, will doubtless be gratified to know something of the end—­the closing career, and “shuffling off of this mortal coil” of Lord Cornwallis and Colonel Tarleton, the two British officers, who remained the longest time among them; sometimes conquering all before them, and again retrograding, until their capture and surrender at Yorktown, in Virginia, on the 19th of October, 1781.

Charles Cornwallis, son of the first Earl of Cornwallis, was born in Suffolk on the 31st of December, 1738.  He was educated at Westminster and St. John’s College, Cambridge.  He entered the army in 1759, and succeeded to the title and estates of his father in 1761.  He was the most competent and energetic of all the British generals sent to America during the Revolution, but the cruelties exercised by his orders on a few occasions, have left an indelible stain upon his character.  It was in pursuance of one of his orders, issued soon after the battle of Camden, that the unfortunate Colonel Isaac Hayne was executed by that tyrannical British officer, Lord Rawdon.