Cumberland Blood: Champ Ferguson's Civil War

3. “Don’t you beg and don’t you dodge”

34 3 ) “Don’t you beg and don’t you dodge” THE QUESTION OF WHY FERGUSON BEGAN KILLING during the war is still debated. A rumor at the time was that he was out to avenge an atrocity that the Home Guard had committed against his wife and daughter. Ferguson always denied it. In reality he started fighting after the Home Guard had captured and threatened him. He believed the men he killed were a personal threat to his safety, and he was determined to take them out before they had a chance to get him. The controversy about Ferguson’s motivation began during the war. Part of the dilemma was that most of the men Ferguson killed were not anonymous Union soldiers but acquaintances, old friends, and even relatives. Whether he committed the killings has never been in question. His motivation, however, remains open to speculation. Various stories surround Ferguson’s reasons for the killings. In one version, he was sentenced to hang for the murder of James Reed, but the sentence was commuted when he agreed to join the 35 “Don’t you beg and don’t you dodge” Confederate army. According to this story, Ferguson then vowed he would kill the entire jury, and by the end of the war he had dispatched nine of the twelve jurors. While the story has been garbled with time and retelling, there may be some truth to it. Ferguson was never tried for Reed’s murder, but that does not remove the possibility of retaliation against the members of the grand jury that indicted him.1 According to one mythic version, Ferguson had been a prewar resident of White County, Tennessee. One day Federal troops came by his home and were greeted by his three-year-old son, who came out on the porch waving a Confederate flag. Then “one of the men in blue leveled his gun at Champ and killed the child.” This infuriated Ferguson, and “his spirit welled up like the indomitable will of the primitive Norseman.” Ferguson then set out for the woods vowing to kill one hundred men, and ended up with a toll of 120 to avenge his murdered son. This writer went on to state that had Ferguson “lived in the days of the Scottish chiefs, the clans would no doubt have crowned his efforts.” While this account is entertaining , it is pure fiction. Ferguson’s son by his first wife had died well before the war. And he lived in Kentucky, not Tennessee, when the conflict began.2 The most enduring mountain folklore surrounds the alleged abuse of his wife and daughter. According to one of these yarns, when the war began Ferguson was unsure what course to take so he retired to a cave to make up his mind. When he returned home, he found that sixteen Union bushwhackers had come by his house. The band forced its way into the home and compelled Ferguson’s wife and daughter to disrobe and walk around the house three times. According to this version, Ferguson then vowed to kill all the participants. In this account, Ferguson’s other murders were explained away as revenge for the death of his three-year-old son who had been shot while waving a Confederate flag.3 While his son had been dead for years, the story of the abuse of Ferguson’s wife and daughter cannot simply be dismissed as a postwar mountain fable. The story originated during the conflict when Ferguson began his killing spree, and it spread with news of his murders. General Basil Duke recorded that Ferguson took up arms after a group of Home Guards came to his house while he was 36 “Don’t you beg and don’t you dodge” away and “brutally whipped the women.” The attack on his wife and daughter by the Union Home Guard made him “relentless in his hatred of all Union men; he killed all the parties concerned in the outrage upon his family, and, becoming then an outlaw, kept up that style of warfare.” Most of Ferguson’s enemies during the war were connected to the myth.4 Although many other colorful myths surround the story of how and why Ferguson took up arms, the most probable explanation is far less engaging. Ferguson began fighting in the fall of 1861 after members of the Home Guard had captured him...