The road of W. J. Freeman

A note to the family

What you are about to read is the story of William James Freeman, a cooper and farmer from the Tuckahoe section of Lenoir County, who went to war in April 1861 and came home in the summer of 1865 a changed man.

The bones of this story are true. When and where he enlisted, the battles and marches of his regiment, the wound he took at Bristoe Station, his capture near Farmville, his months in prison at Newport News, his pension, his years at the Soldiers’ Home in Raleigh, and the place where he rests all come from his own pension and Soldiers’ Home applications, his Union prison record, and the documented history of the 27th North Carolina State Troops. The Historian’s Notes throughout the book point to those sources so you can see them for yourself.

What the records cannot tell us is what he saw, felt, said, or prayed. Those gaps are filled here in his voice. The journal entries, and some of the people who appear in them, are what I, as his great-great-great-grandson, believe most likely happened, based on the record and on the kind of man those papers describe: a man who stood back up after Bristoe and went back to his regiment, who told the truth about Newport News when it would have been easier not to, and whose comrades were still vouching for him forty years later.

Read it as his story, told as truly as we could tell it.

The line of fathers

1. William James Freeman (1829–1906), Private, Company D, 27th North Carolina
2. Charles Gaston Freeman (1876–1950), his son
3. Willie James Freeman (1900–1935), his grandson
4. Troy Leonard Freeman (1922–1999), his great-grandson
5. Ricky Freeman (b. 1957) his great-great-grandson
6. R. Lane Freeman Jr. (b. 1978) his great-great-great-grandson

Written by R. Lane Freeman Jr., his great-great-great-grandson