On October 20, 1865, Champ Ferguson was marched to the gallows in Nashville, Tennessee. Ten days earlier, a military court had found him guilty of fifty-three counts of murder, and even that staggering number did not cover the full scope of his wartime killing. Ferguson himself claimed to have killed more than one hundred men. As the noose was placed around his neck, he remained defiant to the end, declaring that he had been a Southern man from the start and would die a rebel.
Samuel Champ Ferguson was born in Clinton County, Kentucky, on November 29, 1821. The eldest of ten children, he grew up in the hill country along the Tennessee border, a region of poor farmers. He received barely three months of formal schooling and followed his father into farming and horse trading. He also built a reputation as a rowdy, quarrelsome man who enjoyed gambling, drinking, and fighting.
That reputation caught up with him in August 1858, when he stabbed a constable to death. According to Ferguson, the trouble began over a hog deal. He had sold hogs on credit to brothers Floyd and Alexander Evans, and when payment stalled, one of Ferguson’s brothers took Floyd’s mare in lieu of the debt. At a camp meeting shortly afterward, the Evans brothers, along with several others including their cousin, Constable James Reed, confronted Ferguson.
Ferguson claimed he was attacked by twenty men, so he pulled out his Bowie knife and started stabbing. By the time the fight ended, Constable Reed was dead and Floyd Evans seriously wounded. When the Civil War broke out, the region became deeply divided, and the Ferguson family itself split. Most of Champ’s siblings and even his mother supported the Union, and one of his brothers would die fighting for it.
Champ chose the Confederacy. A popular legend claimed his young son had been shot dead by Yankee soldiers and that his wife and daughter had been stripped and marched through the streets, but none of that happened. His son had died of illness years before the war, and Ferguson himself called the story about his family absurd. His real reason for joining was simpler.
He still had a murder charge hanging over his head, and the case had dragged on without coming to trial. As Ferguson later explained, he was induced to join the army on the promise that all prosecution would be abandoned. That is how he came to take up arms. Not ideology, not Southern pride, but self-preservation.
In the fall of 1861, he signed on with a guerrilla outfit led by Scott Bledsoe, and it was not long before Ferguson commanded a company of his own. The killings began in earnest, and they were rarely directed at Union soldiers on the battlefield. Instead, Ferguson used the war as an excuse to settle old scores and kill people he considered threats. On November 1, 1861, he murdered his old friend William Frog in Clinton County.
The two had known each other since childhood. Frog was bedridden with the measles when Ferguson arrived at his home. Frog’s wife opened the door and offered him a seat, but Ferguson said he needed to see William. When she protested that her husband was too sick for visitors, Ferguson walked past her and shot Frog dead where he lay.
The reason, supposedly, was that Frog had been seen at Camp Robinson, a nearby Union outpost where men were recruited into the Home Guard. Ferguson claimed he killed Frog because Frog was planning to kill him first. About a month later, he killed another man, Reuben Wood, for nearly the same reason. According to Wood’s children, their father reminded Ferguson of their past friendship, and Ferguson replied that Wood had always treated him like a gentleman, but since he had been to Camp Robinson, Ferguson intended to kill him.
Wood tried to fight back, knocking Ferguson’s gun away with a hatchet even after being shot, and escaped into the forest. He died two days later. The pattern continued. In April 1862, Ferguson killed a sixteen-year-old boy who had been carrying a shotgun.
Ferguson claimed he had authority to kill anyone found with a weapon, and even after the boy surrendered the gun, Ferguson shot him anyway, then took his knife to the corpse before killing three more members of the family, including the grandfather. He shot another man to death in Clinton County while the man’s daughter clung to him. He killed yet another man named Wash Tabor. These killings were not battlefield actions but door-to-door executions of men aligned with the local Yankee militia.
Ferguson did have an enemy worthy of him. Dave Beatty, known as Tinker Dave, was a Union guerrilla leader who had taken up arms in direct response to Ferguson. The two men hunted each other relentlessly. According to a Nashville newspaper, they shot each other innumerable times and each received ugly wounds.
They were deadly enemies. Yet there was also a strange mutual respect. After the war, Ferguson said of Tinker Dave that there were meaner men, and that Dave fought bravely and gave him heavy licks, but Ferguson always gave as good as he sent. He added that they both tried to kill each other but were always too cunning.
Occasionally Ferguson rode with regular Confederate forces. He scouted for General John Hunt Morgan and later linked up with Major General Joseph Wheeler, who sent him to report to General Breckinridge in southwest Virginia. It was there, at Saltville, that Ferguson committed his most infamous act. On October 2, 1864, Union soldiers attacked the Confederates defending Saltville and were beaten back in a resounding rebel victory.
As the Yankees fled, they left behind many wounded, a large number of them black soldiers. Ferguson and his men went through the battlefield executing the wounded prisoners, focusing mainly on black soldiers and their white officers. One survivor recalled Ferguson approaching a wounded white trooper crawling on the ground, demanding to know why he had come down to fight alongside those damned negroes. He drew his pistol and asked the helpless man where he would have it, in the back or the face.
When the soldier could not answer, Ferguson chose for him. The killing continued the next day. Surviving prisoners, black and white, were taken to a Confederate hospital in the nearby town of Emory. Ferguson walked inside, went from bed to bed, and killed eight prisoners before stopping.
He was not the only one murdering prisoners that day; regular Confederate soldiers did the same despite officers trying to stop them. The full scale of the massacre remains unknown, but most estimates put the number of black soldiers executed after the battle at around forty-six. Ferguson himself was later charged with fifteen counts of murder at Saltville alone. The massacre was so outrageous that even the Confederates arrested Ferguson and held him in Wytheville, Virginia.
But two months later, around the time Lee surrendered, they let him go. The government was fleeing Richmond, and no one seemed concerned with prosecuting past crimes. Despite the war being officially over, Ferguson went back to bushwhacking. Sources report that he continued his rampages in the Cumberland region in April and May of 1865, after most of the principal Confederate armies had already surrendered.
He was finally taken into custody on May 26, 1865, in Sparta, Tennessee. By then his family had moved to White County. Ferguson seemed unbothered, figuring he would be paroled like everyone else who laid down their guns. What he did not count on was being tried for murder.
Investigators went back before Saltville and charged him with fifty-three counts total. His trial before a military court became a national sensation. Witnesses lined up to testify against him, including Tinker Dave. Ferguson had men like General Wheeler testify to his character, but it was not enough.
He was found guilty and sentenced to hang. The execution took place at the Nashville prison, where Ferguson was guarded by black soldiers from the 15th US Infantry. Around three hundred people were given passes to witness the event. Ferguson remained mostly stoic as the long sentence was read, nodding and shaking his head at the various charges.
When asked for a final statement, he declared that he was a Southern man at the start, was yet, and would die a rebel. He admitted killing a good many men but said he never killed a man who was not seeking his life. His last request was that his body be removed to White County, Tennessee, and buried in good rebel soil. Not until the hood was placed over his head did he cry out, Oh Lord, have mercy on me.
Moments later he was swinging. His body was returned to White County and buried in a comb grave north of Sparta, a style of burial common in the Appalachian regions of Tennessee and Kentucky, where flat stones are arranged in an A-frame over the coffin to protect it from the weight of the soil. His grave is still visible at the France Cemetery. There were rumors that Ferguson faked his death, that his wife bribed the executioner and the family fled west to live under assumed names.
But his wife and daughter appear on the 1870 census still living in White County, Tennessee, and again in 1880 in Montgomery County, Kansas, where the daughter was already married. The family lived out their lives without him. The only person responsible for giving Champ Ferguson a bad name was Champ Ferguson.