John Martin Holland
The 9th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry Regiment was an infantry regiment that served in the Union Army during the American Civil War.
November 20, 1861 to December 15, 1864
Battle of Shiloh
Seige of Corinth
Battle of Perryville
Battle of Stones River
Tullahoma Campaign
Battle of Chickamauga
Chattanooga Campaign
Battle of Missionary Ridge
Atlanta Campaign
Battle Resaca
Battle of Kennesaw Mountain
Battle of Peachtree Creek
Seige of Atlanta
Battle of Jonesboro
Battle of Lovejoy's Station
The regiment lost a total of 357 men during service; 8 officers and 96
enlisted men killed or mortally wounded, 3 officers and 250 enlisted men
died of disease.
There was much bitterness among the people of Tennessee as the Civil War came, and the Confederacy first began to call for volunteers and then to conscript, or draft, their young men. Many Macon Countians took their young sons just acrosss the Kentucky line to enlist in the Union Army because they were disturbed over leaving the Union.
Wiley and Scott Holland enlisted in the Union Army. Wiley became a first lieutenant in the Kentucky 5th Cavalry, and his younger brother, John, joined the infantry and later rode with bushwhackers. The Hollands, having survived Shiloh, were to prepare for two more major conflicts. On September 19 and 20, 1863, Union and Confederate forces clashed near Chickamauga Creek, in what proved to be another of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. The victorious Confederates drove their adversaries back into Chatanooga and seized the city. In November of 1863, Union forces reclaimed Lookout Mountain from the Confederates in what became known as the Battle Above the Clouds. The battle of Chatanooga ensued. This important Federal victory opened the door to the deep south and set the stage for General William Tecumseh Sherman's march from Atlanta, Georgia, to the sea. The North lost 5,915 men; the South lost 667. Again, both Hollands survived. The brothers were fighting under the command of General Sherman who marched an army across Georgia to the sea then after Savannah fell, he moved north through the Carolinas. The general commanded a brigade at the first Battle of Bull Run, and was in command and fought with Grant at Shiloh. His army took part in the capture of Vicksburg in 1863. He later helped relieve the Union Army at Chattanooga. It was March 3, 1865, in the Carolinas at a place known as Monroe's Crossroads where Lt. Wiley Holland was wounded, ending his army career. He was part of a cavalry division led by General Kilpatrick, which was a unit of Sherman's Army. An affidavit from the war department archives describes how he was wounded while leading a charge againse the Confederate cavalry, led by General Wade Hampton. Lt. Holland, with the Kentucky 5th Cavalry, had marched until nine o'clock the previous night. The unit stopped and set up camp at Monroe's Crossroads. The Southern cavalry, not wanting to fight a defensive battle and in an attempt to protect the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, decided the best defense was a good offense. They came out to meet the northern invaders of their homeland. Lt. Holland, having gotten his unit mounted, although clad in their underclothes, was leading a cavalry charge to drive the Rebels from their camp when he was knocked from his horse. He had taken a rifle ball in his left knee.
All Holland brothers survived the war and returned home to their young families in Macon County, Tennessee. They found a great division among their former friends and neighbors as to their different views, actions and parts played in the war. Families split, and neighbors quarreled and sometimes fought.
Harold G. Blankenship, a Macon County historian and distant cousin to the Hollands, writes: "After the War, neighbors split politically and even some religiously, over their feelings about the war--Confederate sympathizers, following the Democratic party, while most Union people became Republicans. Macon County, even today, is split politically anong those lines. The Hollands became Republicans. John Holland's son, Jim, later served Ripley County, Missouri for 28 years as a Republican county judge."
The Holland family, longing for a more peaceable place to live and raise their families where they could forget the slaughter and ravages of war, moved to Ripley County, Missouri. Minerva and William, their sons, Wiley, John, and a younger brother, Scott, and their daughter, Minerva, who was married to Beverly Donaho, settled 15 miles southwest of Doniphan in the community of Tucker. The journey to Missouri was recalled to family members by Mark and Clark Holland, twin sons of Lt. Holland, many years later. They were boarding a train for Missouri on April 14, 1865, at Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee, when word came down the line that President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated.
The legacy of bitterness left by the war in Ripley County was no different from that left behind them in Macon County. Horror stories emerged from such acts of violence as the slaughtering of women and children by Union troops at the Christmas Day Massacre at Pulliam Spring, a spring from which the Holland family was to get their drinking water for the next 60 years. This incident, and that of the burning of the town of Doniphan, were two of the worst examples of death and destruction thrust upon the civilian population of Ripley County by the military. The post-war era in Ripley County was a very painful period of adjustment for those woefully wronged during the war.
John Martin Holland returned from the Civil War a crippled man suffering from chronic rheumatic joint disease and blindness. He went in as a corporal and was promoted to sargent.
John Martin Holland *
(1835 - 1926)
is our 2nd great grandfather
son of John Martin Holland *
daughter of Martin Crenshaw Holland *
daughter of Ollie Florence Holland *
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