One Hand Clapping

The only other Confederate executed for war crimes
The Andersonville POW camp's commandant was one, and well known. Here is the story of the only other Confederate soldier executed for war crimes by the US government. But was the execution real, or staged? A fascinating, true story.

In my post yesterday of an email from Fred Ray giving more information and insights of the sometime brutality in the Civil War of Southerner against Southerner , Fred mentioned a Confederate guerrilla fighter named Champ Ferguson, a Tennessean.

Champ Ferguson was a real piece of work, hanged by the Yankees in Nashville after the war. My grandfather, Thurman Sensing, wrote his biography back in 1942. The book was published by Vanderbilt University Press; the plates were donated during World War II to the war effort. Original editions now sell for hundreds of dollars. The book was reprinted in 1970 and again in 1994 with additional text by my dad. Ingram Reviews wrote the book is,

An amazing story of bloody guerrilla warfare along the Kentucky-Tennessee border. By the end of the Civil War, Champ Ferguson was accused of personally killing 53 people, including children, the elderly, and wounded soldiers in their hospital beds. In this classic study, first published in 1942, Sensing provides the only available book-length account of Champ Ferguson's brutal deeds, his capture, his trial, and his execution at the end of the war.

Champ was jailed by his county sheriff not long before the was as a potential defendant in the killing of a man named Jim Read; whom Champ did in fact kill. But the circumstances warranted a claim of self defense. While Champ was free on bail and the investigation ongoing, the war broke out. Champ agreed to an offer that all potential charges in the Read case would be dropped if he joined the Confederate army.

A legend developed about Champ during the war that, like the fictional Clint Eastwood character Josey Wales, Champ left behind his farming life for guerrilla fighting after Union soldiers savaged his family, shooting down his three-year-old son and raping his wife and daughter. Champ's vendetta began to kill the assailants. The story was untrue; Champ's first wife and their three-year-old child died 16 years before the war. He remarried and the only issue was a girl, who was 12 when the war began.

Another story with much greater credibility based on evidence, but still unconfirmed, is that 11 men of Champ's town, enraged at Champ's betrayal of the Union (Champ's home region was heavily pro-Union), fortified themselves with liquor and invaded Champ's home one night. They forced his wife and daughter to strip naked, compelled them to cook and serve, then marched them down the road naked. Upon learning of this outrage, Champ swore death to all 11 men. There is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence to support this story, but Champ himself never did. OTOH, a man of his day, time and place would have considered the violations of his wife and daughter so shameful that he would never speak of it, though the women be blameless.

In any event, he became enmeshed in irregular warfare against the Union army and was eventually given a captain's commission in the Confederate army. Eventually, even his postwar Southern apologists admitted that Champ was possessed with "maniacal desperation" to kill Yankees.

"Although Ferguson survived the Civil War unscathed and offered to surrender to Federal authorities, Ferguson's crimes had assumed so awful a stature that the Military Division of Tennessee brushed aside his offer, arrested him, tried him, and hung him on October 20, 1865. But the trial of Ferguson is important for Sensing in another way, for the trial becomes a lens through which we peer at the bitter, remorseless nature of guerilla warfare." -- Civil War Book Exchange

Ferguson was one of only two Confederates executed as war criminals; the other was Maj. Henry Wirz, commandant of the notorious Andersonville prisoner of war camp.

By the end of the war, Champ had become something of a legend even among the Federals. As my granddad explained in the book,

The prowess of Champ Ferguson was respected by his enemies. By the time of his trial, his captors had reason to know that to reckon lightly with him might be disastrous. He was kept in a prison cell built in solid stone, the only ventilation being a grating at the top of a door opening on to the corridor. He was carefully guarded throughout the trial by a detail of Federal soldiers, and his rescue or possible attempt at escape at one time being rumored, he was thereafter kept heavily ironed. (The handcuffs used on Ferguson at the time are still on display in the Tennessee State Historical Museum at Nashville.) Transported to and from prison to the courtroom by his guards each day, they were at one time on the way surrounded by a howling rabble, crying, "Lynch him. Kill him." The lion was tied and the jackals could howl! But the trial dragged on to its bitter end and the acts related by the witnesses affected the lives of many persons--persons whose descendants still live throughout the length and breadth of the Cumberlands.

Yet there are lingering questions about whether Champ really was executed. As my dad explained in the reprint:

I thought I'd found Champ back in 1941 when my father and I went looking for him in that old graveyard on the Calfkiller River. Maybe I was wrong. According to a story I read in the Cookeville Herald-Citizen, there was a conspiracy between Champ and the military. The theory is that the military felt that Champ should not be hanged because many others as guilty as he had been paroled. The story is that the military enclosed the undersection of the scaffold and that a ring of soldiers completely encircled it. When the hangman cut the rope and Champ dropped through the trap door, they quickly untied the loose knot and placed Champ in the casket alive. The casket was then placed on a waiting wagon which Champ's wife and daughter drove out of town. When they were out of Nashville, Champ climbed out of the casket and the three rode all the way to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, where they took new names and took up farming and ranching for a living.

It's an interesting story. But if it's true, who is buried in the grave I found marked "Capt. C. Furguson"? Are we to assume that his wife Martha didn't know how to spell his name? Or that someone else in on the conspiracy misspelled it and put up a stab of limestone at a fake grave so that everybody would think Champ had really been hanged? What did Colonel Shafter whisper to Champ [on the gallows] in a low undertone that made Champ's face light up noticeably? Did he tell him about the conspiracy and that he would be saved by the military?

All unanswered questions, but the ending of a true story of our history that is both fascinating and repugnant at the same time.

by Donald Sensing, 1/23/2004 11:25:32 AM. Permalink |

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