First to Bob and Kirby, I am indebted to both of you and others for your books and other information that have been of immense value to me in ferreting out just a part of the complicated guerrilla war in southeast Missouri. This is particularly true in determining more of the truth in Ripley County events clouded by others and with the field executions of prisoners on both sides on several occasions. I appreciate your work and the great research you have done.

Leonard, there were three regular Confederate cavalry regiments formed in southeast and south-central Missouri that for most of the war actually fought on home ground, more as irregulars than regulars. These were (with references to James E. McGhee's 2008 "Guide to Missouri Confederate Units, 1861-1865,"):

-- Colonel Timothy Reeves' 15th Missouri Cavalry Regiment from mostly Ripley, Butler, and Wayne Counties as well as north Arkansas (McGhee, pages 106-108);
-- Colonel William O. Coleman's Missouri Cavalry Regiment from several south-central MO counties, generally from Phelps and Pulaski Counties and south of there and north Arkansas (McGhee, pages 168, 221);
--Colonel Thomas Roe Freeman's Missouri Cavalry Regiment generally from the same area as Coleman's above (McGhee, pages 111-113).

Since these units operated on home ground and far from any Confederate supply source, their uniforms (if you can call them that), were not always proper to regulation, and they had to take what subsistence, horses, firearms, ammunition and other logistics wherever they could find or take them--generally offered by southern sympathizers, taken by force from northern sympathizers, or acquired by battlefield acquisition from Union soldiers. By the necessity of feeding the men and foraging their horses in poor country, these men generally operated in small sub-units. These small numbers of Confederate cavalry quickly found their best method of keeping pressure on the Union occupation of their home regions was to operate and fight using guerrillas tactics, even though these were full-fledged regular soldiers--at least to the Confederacy. The "no quarter" rule imposed by General Henry W. Halleck in Missouri during early 1862 against southern combatants armed but dressed not in recognizable Confederate uniforms eventually applied to the men of these three regiments, although Confederate officials argued they were regular combatants. The intensity of the conflict they fought against the Union cavalry of all types in this part of Missouri soon deteriorated into personal animosities, such as that referrred to with Union Captain William Leeper of the 3rd Cavalry Missouri State Militia. As a result, depending upon which Union units they faced, men of these three regiments upon capture may have faced:
--drumhead court martial and field execution;
--being sent back to military prisons in St. Louis for tribunal and execution if convicted of being guerrillas; or,
--being determined to be captured Confederate soldiers and sent to military prison in St. Louis and treatment as POWs.

Just to complicate this troubled state of affairs, some men of these units occasionally killed managers of rural stores they robbed for their needs, or killed neighbors who informed on them to Union authorities, or other acts that Union authorities determined to be that of guerrillas, and Union soldiers applied such acts to their regiments as a whole. Also, when the Confederacy ordered these units into northern Arkansas in spring and summer of 1864 to prepare for an all-out attack on the Union occupation of Missouri leading up to MG Sterling Price's great raid in September, Colonel Coleman resisted having his regiment placed under brigade structure as he preferred to continue independent operation. When Major General Thomas C. Hindman then dismissed Coleman from the service, many of Coleman's subordinate leaders broke away and conducted the rest of their war as independent guerrillas in small groups in their own home neighborhoods (McGhee, page 168). So, in effect some men of these regiments became guerrillas or bushwhackers indeed.

For more reading on this topic, you may try Nichols, "Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri, 1862" Chapters 3, 9, 14, and 17; or by the same author "Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri, vol. II, 1863" Chapters 3, 7, 11, and 16. The author is currently writing the manuscript for the 1864/1865 volume.

Bruce Nichols