Where he rests
William James Freeman, Private, Company D, 27th North Carolina State Troops, died in December 1906, at about seventy-seven years of age. He was laid to rest in Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, the city’s oldest cemetery, where nearly 1,500 Confederate soldiers lie. His marker reads simply:
Pvt William J. Freeman, Co D 27 NC Inf CSA
He enlisted at Tuckahoe on April 27, 1861. He ran at New Bern and stood at Sharpsburg. He held the stone wall at Fredericksburg, was shot through both shoulders at Bristoe Station, and went back to his regiment anyway. He was captured on the road to Appomattox, held at Newport News, and walked home to a family and a county that the war had changed forever. He lived forty-one more years with what the war left him.