Colonel Thomas Roe Freeman raised a mounted regiment for the Confederate cause in the south-central area of Missouri early in the war. He calculated that he could do the most damage to the northerners by striking at their tenuous road connection between their big base at Rolla, Phelps County, MO (and also a terminus then of a railroad from St. Louis) and their exposed base miles to the southwest at Springfield. Therefore, for most of the war Colonel Freeman and Colonel William O. Coleman (who commanded another regiment from this same area) conducted a guerrilla war against the Union troops and northern sympathizers along that stretch of road in west Phelps County and in Pulaski County, MO and the land south to the Arkansas border. The Union authorities were forced to keep at least a regiment of their own calvary in this area for most of the war for that reason, and there were many skirmishes in this hilly, wooded countyside.

A lady named Jean Tobey, a descendant of Freeman's, was kind enough to allow me to place a head and shoulders photograph of Thomas Freeman in my 1863 book on page 148. I mention Colonel Freeman and his men a great deal in that book (at least ten times according to the index entry for him), which in itself is sort of a war record. I am working on the final volume of the series about 1864 and 1865, which also will mention Freeman in several places.

Ray Bradbury, Jr. of Rolla wrote in his "Civil War in Phelps County" on page 14 that Freeman was an associate judge of the Phelps County Court before the war, and an 1863 tax list of Phelps County shows that Freeman had 240 acres at the southeast corner of Phelps County near the intersection of Crawford, Phelps, and Dent Counties. Bradbury also wrote that after the war Thomas Freeman returned to Phelps County, but later moved to Neosho, Newton County, in the southwest corner of Missouri. Neosho was a strong southern community during the war, and I suppose the colonel felt safer there. In fact, Thomas Freeman's memoirs are kept at Neosho, I suppose in some historical society there. Freeman served as a commander for the southern cause from 1861 through 1865.

Bruce Nichols