April 13 

 

          On this date in 1863, 39-year old Joseph Basinger, a yeoman farmer in Rowan County, finally enlisted into military service against his will as a conscript. Joseph had avoided it for the entire year that the Conscription Act had been in place, but could no longer talk military officials into deferring his service. He did manage at least to choose the unit to which he would serve, and on April 13, he and 32 other men were escorted into Salisbury and assigned to Captain Nathan N. Fleming’s Company B, 46th North Carolina Infantry. Basinger chose the regiment because two younger brothers and a nephew served in it; he enlisted with a cousin on April 13. On his small farm outside Salisbury, Joseph left his wife, Chrissie, and his son, William, who had turned 4 years old just two weeks earlier. The detachment of conscripts joined the regiment in Wilmington and served in eastern North Carolina through the rest of the spring. They acted as a defensive force near Richmond that summer, thereby missing the battle of Gettysburg. After a taste of combat at Bristoe Station in October 1863, Basinger experienced his first and only major battle on May 5, 1864, at the battle of the Wilderness. His regiment entered into in a vicious fight on the Orange Plank Road about 4:00 p.m. The regiment’s Quartermaster sergeant described the fighting as “butchery pure and simple… It was a mere slugging match in a dense thicket of small growth, where men but a few yards apart fired through the brushwood for hours.” During the close quarters combat, Joseph was standing in the battle line next to his nephew, 18-year old Joseph M. Basinger, who was wounded in the left hip. The nephew recovered, but Uncle Joseph Basinger was wounded much more severely. Removed by ambulance to a hospital in Staunton, he died of his wounds on May 20, 1864.

 

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A wounded soldier being carried off the Wilderness battlefield (perhaps the way Basinger was)​

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Sources

Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr., comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 11:129-133, 149; 1860 U.S. Census: Rowan County; Joseph Basinger, Compiled Military Service Record..