John Wallace Holden died at his home Chariton during February of 1899 in his 80th year --- a tailor by trade, staunch abolitionist and honored veteran of the 12th Regiment, Indiana Volunteer Infantry.
His principal caregivers had included a son, John Leonidas Holden, harness-maker and lifelong bachelor, who six years earlier had given up a life in the West to return to the Midwest to care for his aging father and stepmother.
When the former John Holden died, the latter John Holden wrote a tribute that stands out among those sometimes overwrought eulogies that were standard fare at the time. It was published in both The Chariton Herald and The Chariton Patriot of March 3.
The usual biographical material is here --- including an apparent misstep regarding year of birth --- but of special interest I thought was the account of the development of the senior Mr. Holden's convictions regarding slavery, abolition and civil war. Here's the text:
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John Wallace Holden was born at Georgetown, Kentucky, October 7, 1819, and died in Chariton, Iowa, February 23, 1899, aged 80 years, 4 months and 16 days.
At a very early age he was taken with the family to Indiana or Missouri, the writer does not know which state first, but at the age of twelve years he was living at Fayette, Missouri, at which time and place he entered his apprenticeship to the tailors trade.
While at this place, passing along the street one day and seeing a crowd near his line of march, he turned aside to investigate. It proved to be a sheriff's sale of a slave woman and she was just being forcibly separated from her child when he reached the scene. The sights and sounds accompanying the separation were so heartrending that he could not endure them, but ran away as fast as he could. From that moment he was an uncompromising hater of the "divine institution of slavery."
Soon after the expiration of his apprenticeship he went to Indiana. In those early days boys were apprenticed for seven years, and accordingly, he must have been not less than nineteen years of age.
Not long after reaching Indiana he was converted and joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, and for nearly sixty years, or until his death, he maintained a standing in the church consistent with his profession. He was active in all the various departments of church work, the Sunday School, the "Class Meeting" and the weekly prayer meeting.
About the time he became of age he was married to Miss Ann Early, daughter of James Early, who removed from Virginia to Indiana when it was still a territory. Seven children were born to them, of whom only three are living.
His wife died in Ripley County, Indiana, on July 4, 1854. Her death was an irreparable loss to the family, which was never again united under one roof. The writer's recollections of him and home begin at Frankfort, Clinton county, Indiana and co-extensive with them is the memory of the family altar and family worship.
When the firing on Fort Sumpter in 1861 called the nation to arms, he enlisted in the 12th Regt. Ind. Vol. Inf. and served until discharged for disability before the end of the term of enlistment. At the time of the Morgan raid into Ohio and Indiana he joined a Home Legion Regiment, and served as long as the occasion required. He was an ardent lover of the Union, a hater of "Slavery, the sum of all villanies," and of "Secession" and rebellion in its support. And he took especial satisfaction and pride in the fact that the whole fighting force of his family were in the Union army before the end of the first month of the war.
During all the years that the slavery question was the subject of such rancorous political debate, no one who knew him ever had to guess where he stood. He was an Abolitionist at a time and in a locality when and where to be known as such was to be classed as "scum" and the "scourgings" of the earth - a "black abolitionist."
Neither abuse, contemptuous epithets or threats of personal violence ever deterred him from the fullest and freest expression of his sentiments and principles. He was a Whig, of the Abolition section of the party, and when that party went out of existence he became a Republican and continued with that party until the last presidential campaign, when he declared himself a Democrat.
In October, 1861, he was married to Mary E. Jennett at Kokomo, Howard county, Indiana, but soon removed to Greentown, in the same county. Near the close of the rebellion he removed to Holt county, Missouri, where the writer visited him early in 1866 while on his way to Ottumwa, Iowa , to visit a brother and other relatives. He concluded to come also and make his home permanently in Iowa.
The trip was made "overland" in a "prairie schooner." We reached Ottumwa in March, 1866. In 1873 he concluded to go to Kansas to live with his youngest son, Charles, but after arriving there the grasshoppers destroyed all the crops around them and they returned to Iowa, settling in Chariton, where he remained until his death.
He has filled all the minor offices in the church and was fifty years a "Class Leader." As to his record here, it needs no words of eulogy. He was a righteous man. J.L.H.
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J. L. Holden's stepmother, Mary, a few years older than her husband, died three years later.
John L. continued to live in the family home on Linden Avenue and to work for Adam C. Riebel, owner and operator of Chariton's most widely known harness shop until both retired in 1920. He died two years later, on Jan. 20, 1922, also in his 80th year.
Adam and his wife, Margaret, had come to look upon John as a family member, so they saw to his care and arranged funeral services at their home.
Mr. Holden's life was marked by industry, honesty and conscientious devotion to duty as he understood it," The Herald Patriot of Jan. 22 reported. "He was a deep student of books and men, a great reader of the Bible. He loved his friends and was true to them. He was one of those persons whose real worth is known only to those most intimately associated with him, and by those who knew him best he will be held in sacred memory through the coming years."
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