I, too, have found some interesting information.
I could not understand why Lt. Holt would be in Camden when Forrest and his men were moving north and west toward Marion and Gainsville after the Battle of Selma. I guessed that Holt was either wounded at Selma or he was detailed to Camden on some special task (such as gathering cattle or horses).
As it turns out, Lt. Holt had family in Camden. Lt. Holt's father (who lived in Shelbyville, Tennessee) had two siblings (a brother and a sister) move to Camden, Alabama prior to the Civil War. Did Lt. Holt go to Camden after the Battle of Selma because he knew he had refuge there or because he had connections who could help him gather cattle or other supplies?
A well-known Wilcox County historian and former newspaper editor, Ouida Starr Woodson, has written a series of six booklets, each titled "Within the Bend: Stories of Wilcox County". In volume 2, she pulls a story from the 1900 writings of an eyewitness to the Union invasion of Camden.
Judge Zoraster S. Cook (who served as Probate Judge for Wilcox County during the Civil War and was of the Enoch Hooper Cook family who lost four sons and two grandsons fighting for the Confederacy) wrote a series of rememberances around 1900. He states that he called together the Camden Home Guard in late April 1865 in order to prepare for the expected Union incursion. As part of that effort, he asked two men, Holt and Burris, to escort prisoners from the Camden jail to the Cahaba jail before they could be let loose on the community by the anticipated Union forces. No exact date is given. Judge Cook's recollection states that the two men left with the prisoners early one morning and barely made it five miles before they were confronted by a Union mounted unit. Without detail, Judge Cook tells how Holt was shot in the back and died in the arms of the Widow Frierson at the front gate to her home. Burris was likewise shot in the back after a horse race. Several women ignored the yankee warnings to leave the men were they lay. Instead, the women had the bodies taken into the Frierson home. Holt died in the road and Burris died several hours later.
A problem is that Judge Cook states that it was a Hiram Holt who was killed in the incident. Now, Lt. Joshua Holt's uncle had a son named Hiram, but Ouida Woodson believes he was too young to be the person killed. Judge Cook was writing about this thirty-five years after it happened, so he could have confused the names. Ouida is researching the ages of Camden's Holt family in 1865 to see if that sheds any light.
This incident written of by Judge Cook lends itself to the "killed after surrendering" possibility so clearly stated in Forrest's Escort Veterans Association minutes.
This same Union unit then burned a lumber mill outside of Camden after killing the confederate veteran who was the watchman. The watchman had refused to burn the mill for the Union soldiers. "If you want the mill burned then burn it yourself" is the watchman's last words according to Judge Cook. The Union officer's instructions were that the watchman's body was not to be moved from the middle of the road, but was to serve as a warning.
I believe we are getting closer to an answer to the mystery, but there are, obviously, several pieces that must fall in place to have an accurate picture.
Scott