On October 20th, 1865, Champ Ferguson stood on the gallows in Nashville, Tennessee, with the noose already around his neck. Ten days earlier, a military court had found him guilty of fifty-three counts of murder, and that number, staggering as it was, only represented the cases the authorities could prove. Ferguson himself had claimed to have killed well over a hundred men. Now, facing the drop, he showed no remorse.

He declared that he had been a Southern man from the start and that he would die a rebel. The question that hung in the air, as it had for four years of war, was whether he was a patriot defending his homeland or a cold-blooded killer who used the conflict to indulge a murderous appetite. And even as the executioner prepared to do his work, rumors were already circulating that the man about to die was not the real Champ Ferguson at all. Samuel Champ Ferguson was born on November 29th, 1821, in Clinton County, Kentucky.

He was the eldest of ten children, raised in the Kentucky Highlands, a rugged hill country along the Tennessee border populated mostly by poor farmers. He had little formal schooling, about three months in total, and as he grew older he followed his father into farming and horse trading. He also built a reputation. Those who knew him described a rowdy, quarrelsome man, fond of gambling, drinking, and fighting.

That reputation was cemented in August 1858, when he stabbed a constable to death. According to Ferguson, the trouble started with a hog deal gone wrong. He had sold hogs on credit to brothers named Floyd and Alexander Evans. When they failed to pay him back, one of Champ’s brothers took Floyd’s mare as payment.

Shortly afterward, at a camp meeting, the Evans brothers and several others, including their cousin, Constable James Reed, decided to give Ferguson a beating. Ferguson claimed it was twenty against one, so he pulled out his Bowie knife and started stabbing. By the time it was over, Constable Reed was dead and Floyd Evans was seriously wounded. Even early on, Champ Ferguson did not shy away from violence.

When the Civil War broke out a few years later, the region was deeply divided, and the Ferguson family was a perfect example. Most of Champ’s siblings, and even his own mother, were staunch Union supporters. One of his brothers would die fighting for the Union. Champ chose the other side.

Legend later grew that he had turned Confederate after Yankee soldiers rode up to his porch and shot his young son dead, then forced his wife and teenage daughter to strip and march naked down the street. The story was horrifying, and if true, it would have explained a great deal. But none of it happened. Champ’s son had died of illness years before the war began, and Ferguson himself called the story about his wife and daughter absurd.

The real reason he joined the Confederates was far less romantic. He was still facing that murder charge from the stabbing in 1858. The case had dragged on for years, and local authorities offered him a clean slate if he enlisted with the Rebels. Ferguson later explained, “When the war broke out, I was induced to join the army on the promise that all prosecution in that case would be abandoned.

This is how I came to take up arms. ” He had a murder charge hanging over his head and figured that if the Confederates won, the charges would disappear. It was not ideology or Southern pride or vengeance. It was self-preservation.

In the fall of 1861, Ferguson signed on with a guerrilla outfit led by a man named Scott Bledsoe. It was not long before he was running a company of his own, and that was when the killings began in earnest. He might have been expected to bring the war to the Yankees, but for the most part, he used the war as an excuse to kill Black people and settle old scores. On November 1st, 1861, he murdered his old friend William Frog in Clinton County.

The two had known each other since childhood. At the time of his death, Frog was bedridden with the measles. His wife answered the door and offered Ferguson a seat. He declined, saying he needed to see William.

When she protested that her husband was too sick to receive visitors, Ferguson walked past her, past the couple’s five-month-old baby, and shot Frog dead where he lay. The motive, according to historian Troy Smith, was that Frog had been seen at Camp Robinson, a Union outpost. “Camp Robinson was a sore spot for Kentuckians who sided with the Confederacy,” Smith wrote. “They believed that men recruited there into the Home Guard went on to fight for the Union.

” Ferguson’s own account was that he killed Frog because Frog was planning to kill him first. A preemptive strike, as he saw it. About a month later, he killed another man named Reuben Wood for much the same reason. Wood’s children later testified that their father reminded Ferguson of their past friendship.

Ferguson replied, “You have always treated me like a gentleman, but you have been to Camp Robinson, and I intend to kill you. Don’t you beg, and don’t you dodge. ” No one recorded whether Wood begged, but he did not go quietly. Even after being shot, he managed to knock the gun out of Ferguson’s hand with a hatchet and escape into the forest.

He lingered for two days before dying. Ferguson again claimed self-defense, saying he killed Wood before Wood had a chance to kill him. It was a pattern that would repeat itself. In his own mind, Ferguson was always justified.

The killings were never his fault; they were always self-defense. He did not discriminate when it came to age. In early April 1862, he killed a sixteen-year-old boy in Fentress County. The boy had made the mistake of carrying a shotgun.

Ferguson claimed he had been given authority to kill anyone found carrying a weapon, and even though the boy surrendered the gun, Ferguson shot him down anyway. Then he took a knife to the corpse and went on to kill three more members of the boy’s family, including the grandfather. The killings continued. He shot another man in Clinton County even as the man’s daughter clung to him.

He killed a man named Wash Tabor in the same area. Both men were supposedly aligned with the local Yankee militia. The tactics were similar to those used by William Quantrill’s men in Missouri: rather than face the enemy on the battlefield, they went door to door and took their targets out one at a time. Ferguson did have a nemesis, a Union guerrilla leader named Dave Beatty, known as Tinker Dave.

Beatty had supposedly taken up arms in direct response to Ferguson. According to a Nashville newspaper, Beatty “fought Champ Ferguson from the beginning to the end of his career. They have shot each other innumerable times and each has received ugly wounds. They were deadly enemies and hunted each other down with savage ferocity.

” Yet oddly, there was mutual respect between them. After the war, when a reporter asked Ferguson what he thought of Dave, he was surprisingly generous. “Well, there are meaner men than Tinker Dave. He fought me bravely and gave me some heavy licks, but I always gave him as good as he sent.

I have nothing against Tinker Dave. We both tried to get each other during the war, but we always proved too cunning for each other. ” Ferguson also noted, almost with professional pride, that he was a skilled shooter and always hit his mark, except when that mark was Beatty. Ferguson occasionally rode with the regular Confederate forces.

He and his men scouted for General John Hunt Morgan and harassed Union troops when convenient. But for the most part, his war was personal. It was against whoever had wronged him in the past and whoever he thought might wrong him in the future. Union forces tried to catch him on multiple occasions, but they always came up empty.

Ferguson knew the hills and hollows better than they did and always managed to slip away. The best they could do was burn down one of his farms, and even then, he kept fighting. Later in the war, he linked up with Major General Joseph Wheeler, who sent him to report to General John C. Breckinridge in Southwest Virginia.

It was there, at a place called Saltville, that Ferguson committed his most infamous act. On October 2nd, 1864, Union soldiers attacked the Confederates defending Saltville. The battle ended in a resounding Confederate victory. As the Yankees fled, they left behind a number of wounded soldiers, many of them Black.

That was when Ferguson and his men went to work. Witnesses later testified that they saw Ferguson moving across the battlefield, coldly and systematically executing wounded prisoners, focusing mostly on the Black soldiers and their white officers. One survivor recalled Ferguson approaching a wounded white trooper who was crawling along the ground. Ferguson demanded to know why he had come down there to fight “with these damned n*****s.

” He then drew his pistol and asked the helpless man, “Where will you have it? In the back or the face? ” The soldier was too incoherent to answer, so Ferguson chose for him. The killing continued the next day.

The surviving prisoners, both Black and white, were taken to a Confederate hospital at the nearby town of Emory. That morning, Ferguson strolled inside and began going from bed to bed, killing a total of eight prisoners before he stopped. Ferguson was not the only one killing prisoners that day. Quite a few of the regular Confederate soldiers did the same, despite their own officers trying to stop them.

The full scale of the massacre remains unknown, but most estimates put the number of Black soldiers executed at around forty-six, not counting those killed during the battle itself. These forty-six men were killed after the fact, wounded and helpless, either on the field or later in the hospital. No one can be certain how many of them Ferguson personally killed. He was later formally charged with fifteen counts of murder at Saltville alone, on top of all the other killings he was involved in during the war.

The massacre was so outrageous that even the Confederates were outraged. They arrested Ferguson and threw him in a jail in Wytheville, Virginia. But he did not stay long. Two months later, around the same time General Robert E.

Lee surrendered, they let him go. The Confederate government was fleeing Richmond, and no one was much concerned with prosecuting past crimes. Despite the war being officially over, Ferguson went right back to bushwhacking. Details are scarce, but he reportedly continued his rampages in the Cumberland region in April and May of 1865, after most of the principal Confederate armies had already surrendered.

He also made another attempt on the life of his old nemesis Tinker Dave. It was not until May 26th, 1865, that he was finally taken back into custody, this time in Sparta, Tennessee. By that point, he and his family had already moved across the border to White County. They had burned too many bridges in Kentucky.

Whether Ferguson surrendered on his own or was captured is unclear, but he seemed completely unbothered. He figured he would be paroled just like everyone else who laid down their guns. What he had not counted on was being tried for murder. The authorities charged him with fifty-three counts of murder, including the fifteen prisoners killed at Saltville.

He was put on trial before a military court. The trial became a national sensation. Witnesses lined up to testify against him, including Tinker Dave. Ferguson had men like General Wheeler testifying to his character, but it was not enough.

He was found guilty and sentenced to hang. The execution took place on October 20th, 1865, at the Nashville prison, where Ferguson was ironically guarded by Black soldiers from the 15th U. S. Infantry.

Around three hundred people were given passes to witness the event. By all accounts, Ferguson remained mostly stoic. As the long sentence was read aloud, he stood there nodding and shaking his head at the various charges. When asked for a final statement, he declared, “I was a Southern man at the start.

I am yet and will die a rebel. I killed a good many men, of course, but I never killed a man who I did not know was seeking my life. I repeat that I die a rebel out and out, and my last request is that my body be removed to White County, Tennessee, and be buried in good rebel soil. ”

It was only when they placed the hood over his head that he cried out in a loud voice, “Oh Lord, have mercy on me.

” Moments later, he went swinging. His body was returned to White County as requested and buried in a comb grave just north of Sparta. A comb grave, a common sight in the rural South, particularly in the Appalachian regions of Tennessee and Kentucky, consists of a stone slab arranged in a tent-like or A-frame shape over the burial, with flat stones leaning against each other at an angle to form a ridge along the top, resembling the spine or comb of a rooster. The purpose was to prevent the weight of the soil from crushing the coffin.

Ferguson’s grave, located at the France Cemetery off Highway 84, is still visible today. And there the story might have ended, except for one lingering doubt. As is the case with many notorious figures of the era, there were those who believed that Ferguson faked his own death. Legend had it that his wife bribed the executioner, and once the funeral was over, she and her daughter headed west, never to be seen again.

Champ supposedly met up with them later, and they all lived happily ever after under assumed names. It is a compelling story, but unlikely. Champ’s wife and daughter can be found on the 1870 census, still living in White County, Tennessee. In 1880, they were living in Montgomery County, Kansas, where the daughter was already married.

They spent the rest of their lives there, without Daddy Ferguson. Champ Ferguson was just another murderous sociopath in a long line of sociopaths who used the war as an excuse to kill. The claim that the victors wrote the history books and turned true patriots like Ferguson into villains does not hold up. Historians write the history books, not soldiers, and they base their conclusions on a variety of sources: first-hand accounts, newspapers, census reports, military records.

Many of those historians have been kind to the Confederates. Men like Shelby Foote were celebrated. The United States government allowed former rebels to become full citizens, granted them pardons, and passed the Amnesty Act of 1872, which restored political rights to nearly all of them. Some former Confederates even went on to serve as congressmen and governors.

They were given pensions. The U. S. military named bases after Confederate generals, places like Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, and Fort Benning.

Over a thousand monuments were erected across the South honoring the Confederacy. The most widely read early histories of the Civil War were written by Southerners, and the Southern Historical Society papers shaped how Americans understood the war for generations. The United Daughters of the Confederacy controlled which textbooks were used in Southern schools. None of that was the work of vengeful Yankees trying to smear the South.

Ferguson gave himself a bad name through his own actions. His own family, his own mother and siblings, had sided with the Union. One of his brothers died fighting for it. Ferguson chose otherwise, and he chose to kill his own neighbors, wounded prisoners, and helpless men in hospital beds.

He was no patriot. He was a murderer who used the war as cover, and in the end, the war could not save him.