On Saturday, November 2, 1861, Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant directed Colonel Richard J. Oglesby of the 8th Illinois Infantry Regiment to move from Bird's Point, Missouri, to destroy Brigadier General Jeff Thompson's Confederate forces in Stoddard County, Missouri. On the following Tuesday, Oglesby started for Bloomfield, the county seat of Stoddard County, with 2,200 men from the 8th, 11th, 18th, and 29th Illinois Regiments. They crossed a seven-mile-wide swamp that one soldier described as covered with black moss four inches deep and so thick that it was like a carpet, on an awful gloomy road. Oglesby's force arrived in Bloomfield around 9:00 a.m. on Friday, November 8, and found that Thompson's forces had moved south. That evening, ten Union soldiers entered the abandoned Bloomfield Herald newspaper office and, according to Captain Daniel H. Brush of the 18th Illinois Regiment, printers in the regiment and others took possession of the printing office and planned to publish a paper that night. By the morning of November 9, 1861, The Stars and Stripes was printed and being distributed to Union soldiers in town. Only a few copies were printed. The ten men who acted to print this first issue were PVT. Benson T. Atherton, 1st Lt. John H. Barton, PVT. James T. Boseman, PVT. Charles M. Edwards, CPL. Theodore Edmonson, SGT. Major Otis P. Martin, PVT. Walter A. Rhue, SGT. John W. Schell, SGT. Robert F. Stewart, and PVT. Thomas Walsh. On November 9, 2011, the 150th anniversary of the first printing of The Stars and Stripes in Bloomfield, Missouri, words used by U.S. General of the Army George C. Marshall to describe the newspaper in its first World War II issue from London, England, were recalled: "It represents the free thought and free expression of a free people."