By the end of the Civil War, Champ Ferguson was accused of personally killing fifty-three people, including children, the elderly, and wounded soldiers in their hospital beds. Up in the Cumberland Mountain districts of Tennessee and Kentucky families had chosen sides at the start of the war and then pursued a private war with each other. Champ Ferguson was the most infamous of their number, whose guerilla exploits were interspersed with periods of service as a scout for Morgan’s Men and as a member of Joe Wheeler’s cavalry.

He was one of two Confederates ever executed by the Union Army, if, indeed, he was actually executed.