May 10
On this day in 1864, 15-year-old John Wesley Holder (1848-1923), a boy private in the 46th North Carolina Infantry, was shot in the left arm at the Battle of Spotsylvania. Living in the impoverished household of his father, Branson Holder–a married laborer with a large family in Randolph County–Wesley (as he was known) enlisted as a substitute on March 1, 1863 when he was still only 14. Substitution held a strong financial appeal for poor men, who could earn cash payments of several hundred dollars from wealthier draftees who wished to avoid service. For Holder, perhaps the chance to earn quick money for himself and his family outweighed the risks of battle. However, many soldiers viewed substitutes skeptically as mercenaries who would desert at the earliest opportunity. Indeed, young Wesley may have tried to take the money and quietly slip away from the army, as the regiment’s April 30, 1863 muster roll lists him as “under arrest for running away on April 28.” But after having been immediately caught, he never attempted to desert again. On May 10, 1864, Holder was struck by a bullet “in the left arm between the elbow and the shoulder” when his unit attacked and helped drive Francis Barlow’s Union division back across the Po River on the far left of the Confederate line at Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia. He took several months to heal, and even after he recovered, his left arm remained 1 inch shorter than his right, because of the contraction of the damaged muscles. He was in and out of hospitals for the rest of the war dealing with complications from the wound. He was captured in Jackson hospital in Richmond on April 3, and released several weeks after Lee surrendered, upon taking the oath of allegiance. He married Susan Dixon in February 1873 and together they raised nine children on their rented farm. In 1901, he filed a Confederate pension claim with the state of North Carolina, and was awarded a payment of $30 a year for his war injury until his death in 1923; his widow continued receiving the payment until she passed away five years later.
Photo: Like this unidentified teenage Confederate soldier, Wesley Holder enlisted as a mere boy. Holder would have been no older than this youth when he was wounded at Spotsylvania. (Colorized image can be found here.)
Sources:
Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr., comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 11:203; John W. Holder, Compiled Military Service Record; John Wesley Holder, Confederate Pension Application; 1860 U.S. Census: Randolph County; Margaret Wood, “Civil War Conscription Laws,” 2012, Library of Congress Blog.
