May 6
On this day in 1864, John A. Carpenter (1840-1864) fell while carrying the regimental flag of the 16th North Carolina Infantry at the Battle of the Wilderness. Before the war, the 21-year old Carpenter lived a life of ease on his father’s prosperous farm along Stanley Creek in northeastern Gaston County, worked by 15 enslaved people. On May 1, 1861, he answered the call to arms, enlisting at a muster in Dallas. Surviving a two-week fight with typhoid fever that December, his courage on the battlefield earned him a promotion to Color Sergeant on January 18, 1863–a role of honor and immense danger. Carpenter learned the peril of the flag at Chancellorsville. On May 3, 1863, while carrying the colors during Pender’s brigade’s morning assault, Carpenter was shot in the head, a Minié ball fracturing his left orbital bone, causing him to lose sight in that eye. His gallantry earned him a nomination for the Badge of Distinction (the Confederate counterpart to the Medal of Honor). He returned to duty on September 1, blind in one eye. In April 1864, Carpenter accepted a commission as Ensign, a newly created officer rank assigned to carry the regimental flag. He knew the risks–and embraced them. On May 5, during the savage fighting of the Wilderness near the Orange Plank Road, he bore the colors amid the chaos, miraculously emerging unharmed. But at dawn the next day, his fate found him. As General Winfield Scott Hancock’s Union corps smashed into A.P. Hill’s exhausted lines, the 16th North Carolina was thrown into retreat. A lieutenant in the regiment recalled in his memoir 37 years later that “several of the 16th were hit, and color bearer Carpenter was killed, and many others wounded.” John, the second of two Carpenter boys to die in the war, never returned to Gaston County. He was buried in the Confederate Cemetery at Fredericksburg.
Fighting in the Wilderness near the Orange Plank Road, where Carpenter fell
Sources:
Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr., comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 5:12, 109; 1860 U.S. Census: Gaston County; George H. Mills, History of the Sixteenth North Carolina Regiment in the Civil War (1901), 47.
