Decimus et Ultimus Barziza

His father, Phillip Ignatius Barziza (originally Filippo Ignazio Barziza), was a viscount who had emigrated from Venice in 1820 and been forced to renounce his title of nobility and become an American citizen in order to legally qualify for a bequest;[3] he subsequently married a French-Canadian woman, with whom he had ten children.

[6] In 1861 the American Civil War began and Barziza enlisted in the Confederate States Army, serving in the 4th Texas Infantry Regiment under Louis Wigfall and John Bell Hood.

[6] After spending a year in hospital as a prisoner of war, he escaped by leaping out the window of a moving prisoner-transport train in the middle of the night, and walking to Upper Canada, where Confederate sympathizers relayed him to Nova Scotia, and then Bermuda; there, a blockade runner returned him to North Carolina.

[2] During the fourteenth legislature, he played a key role in the controversial transition of the Governorship from Edmund J. Davis to Richard Coke.

[6] At the end of the session, Barziza became embroiled in a procedural dispute regarding the Texas and Pacific Railway: in an effort to prevent a vote, he and 33 other representatives did not return from recess on July 31, 1876, so that there would not be a quorum.