Brian McKnight tells KCWRT about the life of Champ Ferguson

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Brian McKnight, Champ Ferguson, Civil War, Civil War in East Tennessee, Civil War partisams, Clinton County KY, Knoxville Civil War Rountable, partisan fighting

Historian Brian McKnight, professor at the University of Virginia-Wise, told the Knoxville Civil War Roundtable on Tuesday that partisan fighter and Confederate outlaw Champ Ferguson was a man who saw the world as “black or white.”

“You were either for him or against him,” McKnight said.

And if he thought you were against him, McKnight added, he would probably try to kill you.

Here’s a video (less than three minutes) of some of McKnight’s remarks:

 

Brian McKnight speaks to the KCWRT about Champ Ferguson from Jim Stovall on Vimeo.

 

McKnight made these additional points about Ferguson:

Brian McKnight, biography

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Brian McKnight, Civil War

Brian McKnight

Brian McKnight, the KCWRT speaker for June, 2016, is Professor of History and a Founding Director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at University of Virginia-Wise.

He is a specialist in contested and coerced loyalties and is the author of Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, which won the James I. Robertson Literary Award, and Confederate Outlaw: Champ Ferguson and the Civil War in Appalachia, which won the Tennessee Library Award for best book in Tennessee history.

His most recent book is titled We Fight For Peace: The Story of Twenty-Three American Soldiers, Prisoners of War, and Turncoats in the Korean War. His other writings have been featured in the New York Times and his work on Korean War prisoners of war was profiled in the New Yorker.

Outlaw Champ Ferguson subject of June KCWRT meeting

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Brian McKnight, Champ Ferguson, Civil War, Civil War outlaws, Civil War partisams, Henry Wirz

In the fall of 1865, as the nation was struggling to bind up its wounds and put the bloodiest war in its history behind it, the United States Army executed two ex-Confederates for war crimes.

One was Henry Wirz, the unfortunate former commandant of Andersonville Prison.

The other was the notorious Champ Ferguson.

In a talk based on his award-winning book, Confederate Outlaw: Champ Ferguson and the Civil War in Appalachia, Brian McKnight will discuss the actions of Confederate guerilla Champ Ferguson that led to his conviction for the “murder” of 53 citizens of Kentucky and Tennessee during the Civil War. Long remembered as the most unforgiving and inglorious warrior of the Confederacy, some historians dismiss Ferguson as simply a cold-blooded killer.

But McKnight maintains that Ferguson, with an Old Testament mentality, fought the war on his own terms.