Thomas Livingston

In my last post, I mentioned Tom Livingston's killing of Union troops near Sherwood, Missouri, during the Civil War and the subsequent destroying of the town by Federal soldiers in retaliation.
Livingston was an interesting character who refutes the common perception of Confederate guerrillas in Missouri. Today they are thought of by many as little more than outlaws who merely used the Civil War to indulge an already-established proclivity toward lawless behavior, but, in reality, such a stereotype fits a relatively small number of them. Livingston, for instance, was a well-respected merchant and smelter in Jasper County prior to the war, and many of his followers were landowners and established citizens of the county. Livingston lived at a place called French Point, located on Center Creek just a mile or two west of present-day Oronogo, which was known as Minersville during the Civil War, and most of his men, as I pointed out last time, came from the western half of Jasper County in and around Sherwood.
Livingston was killed in July 1863 while leading a charge on the courthouse at Stockton in Cedar County. Acording to one story, he was brought back to Sherwood and buried in the cemetery there, but a second, more likley story, says he was buried in an unmarked grave at Stockton.