The noose was placed around his neck, and still, Samuel “Champ” Ferguson refused to bend. He stood on the gallows in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 20th, 1865, a man convicted of 53 counts of murder, yet he declared to the gathered crowd that he was a Southern man from the start and would die a rebel.
Just ten days prior, a military tribunal had found the Confederate guerrilla guilty of a litany of killings that spanned the entirety of the Civil War, a bloody trail that began long before the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter. The official verdict covered only a fraction of his alleged deeds, as Ferguson himself would later confess to having killed well over 100 men, a boast that cemented his legacy as one of the most prolific killers the war produced.
The condemned man’s final words were followed by a cry of “Oh Lord, have mercy on me,” before the trap door swung open. Yet, as the body swayed, a persistent legend took root, one that suggested the man who escaped the hangman’s justice was not the man who died that day, a rumor fed by reports of a wife bribing the executioner and a family disappearing west.
The story of Champ Ferguson begins not with the Civil War, but with a dead constable. He was born on November 29th, 1821, the eldest of ten children, in Clinton County, Kentucky, a rugged region of the Kentucky Highlands along the Tennessee border that was home to poor, independent farmers.
Ferguson’s life was marked by violence from an early age, a short fuse that was documented long before the war tore the nation apart. Official reports from the period record him as a rowdy, quarrelsome type disturbed by liquor, gambling, and brawling, fitting a pattern that would define his crimes.
In August 1858, that violent reputation reached a deadly crescendo when Ferguson stabbed a constable to death during a melee over a hog deal gone bad. The altercation began when Ferguson sold hogs on credit to brothers Floyd and Alexander Evans, and they failed to pay him back in a timely manner.
When Ferguson’s brother retaliated by taking the Evans’ mare, the debtor brothers, along with Constable Reed, decided to teach Ferguson a lesson. Ferguson later claimed he faced 20 attackers and pulled out a Bowie knife in self-defense. By the end, Constable James Reed was dead and Floyd Evans was seriously wounded, a stabbing that would lead to a murder charge.
By the time the Civil War broke out, the Kentucky and Tennessee borderland was a maelstrom of divided loyalties. Ferguson’s family was scattered across the political spectrum, his own mother and brothers were Union supporters, and one of his brothers served and fell for the Union, while Champ aligned with the Confederacy.
While legend claims that he joined the Cause after Union soldiers murdered his son and abused his family, the historical record provides a far less romantic motivation: pure self-preservation. Ferguson himself stated he was induced to join the army on the promise that the prosecution for the constable’s murder would be abandoned.
It was in the fall of 1861 that he signed on with a guerrilla outfit under Scott Bledsoe, and it was not long before Ferguson was leading his own company of mounted killers, operating in the hills and hollers of the border region. His war, however, was not against the Yankee army but rather a campaign to settle old scores and target those he deemed a threat, including Black people and perceived Unionists.
His first confirmed war crime was the murder of his childhood friend, William Frog, on November 1st, 1861. Frog, bedridden with measles and a wife and infant son, was shot dead in his bed because he had been seen at a Union outpost known as Camp Robinson. Ferguson walked past the protests, shot his friend where he lay, and then returned to his riders.
He stated that he killed Frog as a preemptive strike, claiming he was planning to do the same to him. A month later, he repeated the pattern with Reuben Wood. Ferguson approached Wood, reminded him of their old friendship, but told him, “You have been to Camp Robinson, and I intend to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 you.
Don’t you beg, and don’t you dodge.” Even after being shot, Wood managed to knock Ferguson’s gun away with a hatchet before fleeing, only to die two days later.
As the war escalated, so did Ferguson’s methods. He had no qualms about killing the defenseless. In April 1862, he gunned down a 16-year-old boy he had been ordered to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 for simply being armed.
The boy surrendered his shotgun, but Ferguson pulled the trigger anyway, then used a knife on the body before killing the boy’s grandfather and several other family members.
His reign of terror was facilitated by a deep understanding of the terrain, which allowed him to evade capture from Union troops who tried repeatedly to hunt him down. Despite having his farms burned by Federal forces, he continued his rampages.
He also developed a sworn enemy in Union guerrilla leader Tinker Dave Beatty, a man who probably mirrored Ferguson’s tactics but fought for the Union forever scarred by the war. They hunted each other for years, exchanging gunfire and inflicting wounds, but neither was ever able to finish the other off.
Ferguson did occasionally ride with the regular Confederate army, notably as a scout for General John Hunt Morgan. But it was his actions at the Battle of Saltville in October 1864 that would forever cement his name in the annals of war crimes, and where his reputation for butchery reached its peak.
He was dispatched to Southwest Virginia to report to General Breckinridge, and his contingent arrived there to counter a Union attack on salt mines vital to the Confederate cause. When the federals were repelled, they left behind a number wounded soldiers, many of whom were black. Ferguson and his men moved through the battlefield, cold-bloodedly executing the wounded, focusing on prisoners and their white officers.
Witnesses described Ferguson cold-bloodedly approaching a wounded, crawling white soldier and demanding to know why his officers were with these “damned n—–. He then asked the helpless man, “Where will you have it? In the back or the face?”
before shooting him dead.
The next day, the surviving prisoners, both black and white, were taken to the Confederate hospital in Emory. Ferguson walked into the hospital and went from bed to bed, executing eight patients with his pistol before leaving, an act that was so outrageous that even some Confederates had him arrested.
The massacre had an estimated 46 Black soldiers killed, not including those who died during the battle. Ferguson was later formally charged with 17 counts of murder for the Saltville massacre alone, a number that was a mere fraction of his total crimes. Despite this, he was released by the Confederates two months later, around the same time of General Lee’s surrender.
With the war officially over, Ferguson gave up his command but continued his bushwhacking, paroling not accepted. He was finally captured in Sparta, Tennessee in May 1865 and brought to Nashville to face justice. However, the legal system didn’t just target him for the Saltville killings.
The U. S. government had federal court try him for a staggering count of 53 murders, and the trial became a national spectacle.
Witnesses lined up to testify against him, including his old nemesis Tinker Dave, while his character witnesses, including generals, tried to speak for him. It was ultimately in vain. On October 20th, 1865, he was marched to the gallows, having been found guilty of the 53 charges.
Even at the end, he claimed his war was a matter of honor, though the evidence presented contradicted his own testimonies. He claimed that he never killed a man he did not know was seeking his life, failing to reconcile his own methodical murders of the sick, the wounded, and even a toddler. In his final declaration, he remained a rebel to the core, asking to be buried in the soil of Tennessee.
The story of Ferguson’s criminality cannot be separated from the mythology of the Lost Cause. After the war, a pervasive narrative emerged that sought to romanticize the Confederacy, downplay the role of slavery, and recast brutal killers as Southern patriots. This mythology was not just written by lost soldiers, but by an entire historical movement.
The United States government not only pardoned Confederate soldiers, but even went on to name military bases after them, including Fort Bragg and Fort Hood. Thousands of Confederate monuments were erected, and films like The Birth of a Nation and books like The Lost Cause: A New Southern History shaped popular perception for decades.
The early histories were written by Southerners, and the Southern Historical Society papers, alongside the United Daughters of the Confederacy and its control over school textbooks, helped to enshrine the “Lost Cause” as accepted history. This narrative reframed the war as a noble struggle for rights and states’ rights, not as a battle to preserve the institution of slavery, and it whitewashed the malevolence of men like Ferguson.
Despite this retrospective pardoning, the hard evidence—eyewitness testimony, military records, and newspaper accounts—paints Champ Ferguson as a warmongering sociopath who used the backdrop of the Civil War to unleash a reborn reign of murder and personal vengeance.
He was granted neither by the history books nor by any rebel ethos was he a hero. He was a man who went door-to-door killing friends and neighbors for imagined slights, and he was a man who executed defenseless prisoners in a hospital, actions that were not considered honorable even by the Confederacy.
Even in their aftermath, the legend of the execution hoax was a similarity to many other outlaw myths of the era. His wife, however, was allegedly seen still living in Tennessee on the 1870s and 1880s censuses, and no credible evidence was found to suggest the murderer ever escaped the gallows. The State of Tennessee had succeeded in its business.
Only a slab of stones, a so-called “comb grave” in White County, remains to mark his final monstrous life. It is a grave without a defeated soul, perhaps there’s finally a spot where that murderer could not commit his crime.
The truth of Champ Ferguson serves as a critical reminder that history is not a blank slate, and that the men who are celebrated are often the victors who wrote history. But in this case, the only person responsible for giving Champ Ferguson a problematic name is Champ Ferguson himself, a man who murdered and lied to the very end.
