Murderous mayhem: Tinker Dave vs. Champ

On October 28, 1862 — the same day Union Col. William Clift was writing to his superiors that he had reorganized the 7th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry in Scott County and was mounting regular patrols in an effort to interrupt the raiding parties in the region — infamous guerrilla fighter Samuel “Champ” Ferguson visited the Albany, Kentucky home of an old nemesis, Thomas Washington Tabor, just as Tabor came riding up the road on his horse.

Ferguson, who had been attacked by one of Clift’s patrols from Scott County less than two weeks earlier and had lost four men in the skirmish, believed that the 55-year-old Tabor, known as “Wash” by friends and family, was responsible for killing some of his men. And he intended to get even.

As Ferguson approached him, Tabor — perhaps realizing it was too late to attempt an escape — dismounted his horse and pleaded for his life.

“Oh yes, you oughtn’t to die, you have nothing to die for,” Ferguson said, according to a witness, George Thrasher. But even as he said it, Ferguson was pulling his pistol from his belt.

“While the old man was beggin’ for his life he shot him through the heart and in the body,” Thrasher said. “He fell after the second shot.”

Tabor was likely mortally wounded. But one of Ferguson’s men said, “Damn him, shoot him in the head.” At that, Ferguson put his gun to Tabor’s head and fired again.

As Tabor’s wife and daughter ran from the house, screaming, Ferguson looked at Thrasher and said, “I have killed old Wash Tabor, a damned good Christian, and I don’t reckon he minds dying.”

Following the conclusion of the Civil War, Ferguson was convicted of murdering 53 men. By his own account, the number of his victims was more than double that — more than 120, though he claimed the killings were all justified. The men who died at Ferguson’s hand included Union soldiers and sympathizers alike — and sometimes included old men who were bedridden and unable to fight back even if they had been given a chance.

There is no evidence to prove that Ferguson, the most famous of the Confederate guerrillas, ever set foot inside Scott County. But his brand of exploitation across the Upper Cumberland region during the war came to define the lawlessness that plagued the entire area, including Scott County. It was a region that became gripped in terror as the war progressed.

Guerrilla warfare had played a role in the region since the beginning of the war. But it especially increased following the death of Confederate Gen. Felix Zollicoffer at Mill Springs in January 1862. The Confederate force that occupied the northern Cumberland Plateau was left in disarray after that battle, and the region was left to lawlessness. That gave rise to guerrilla bands like those led by Ferguson and his famous pro-Union counterpart, Tinker Dave Beaty.

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Born in 1821 in Clinton County, Kentucky, just north of the TN-KY border and present-day Pickett County, Champ Ferguson was given his nickname as a baby, when his grandfather called him “Champion.” No one knows exactly what triggered Ferguson’s violence during the war. There were rumors that he was seeking vengeance after Union men forced his wife and young daughter to strip off their clothes and walk along a public road, but he denied that at his trial. Another story says he was angry that his brother, Jim Ferguson, fought with the Union during the war. 

Whatever his reason, Ferguson hated the Union and anyone who stood with it, and he unleashed years of terror on the Upper Cumberland region as the war was being waged. 

Ferguson was known for his violence even before the war began. In 1858, he killed a Fentress County constable named James Reed — according to legend, by tying him to a tree and hacking him with a sword. 

After the war, Ferguson’s brutality increased sharply. 

On November 1, 1861, Ferguson rode to the home of William Frogg, who lived just north of Albany, Kentucky. Frogg’s wife, Esther Ann Frogg, would later testify at Ferguson’s trial in Nashville.

“I asked him to have a chair,” Frogg said. “He said he didn’t have time. I asked him to have some apples. He said he had been eating apples. He then asked for Mr. Frogg. I told him he was in bed, very sick.”

Frogg, in fact, was suffering from the measles, and had had a relapse. Walking into the sick man’s room, where he lay in bed, Ferguson said, “I reckon you caught the measles at Camp Dick Robinson.” Frogg vehemently denied he had ever been to Camp Dick Robinson. But Ferguson shot him twice with his pistol, executing the sick man as his five-month-old child lay in a cradle by his bed.

A month later, Ferguson rode onto the farm of Reuben Wood, a man he had known all his life. When Wood begged for his life, saying that he had helped care for Ferguson as a child, Ferguson said, “No, Reuben, you have always treated me like a gentleman, but you have been to Camp Robinson, and I intend to kill you.” And he did.

On June 1, 1862, Elisha Koger was killed near Albany as his 11-year-old daughter clung to him and begged Ferguson not to shoot her father. He died in her arms. Koger’s crime was that he was a pro-Union representative at a meeting of men from Clinton County, Kentucky, and Overton and Fentress counties in Tennessee — with allegiances to the North and the South alike — who had brokered a deal in the tiny village of Monroe, Tennessee to stop the constant guerrilla raiding in those communities. Ferguson and his men killed a total of four of the Unionists who took part in the meeting.

At various points during the war, Ferguson fought alongside famous Confederate officers John Hunt Morgan and Joseph Wheeler, two men who were feared in their own right for their exploits during the conflict. Stories emerged of Ferguson’s sadism. He was accused of decapitating men with the large Bowie knife he carried, rolling their heads down hillsides. On one occasion, he and his men entered a military hospital in Virginia, after the Battle of Saltville, and murdered several members of the all-black 5th United States Colored Cavalry and their white officers as they lay wounded in bed. 

At one point, Ferguson and his men were accused of posing as Union soldiers in Morgan County to win the confidence of pro-Union men there. Daniel Simeon “Sim” Lavender II was said to have given them information about a Union detachment, and Ferguson attacked the next day. As they withdrew from Montgomery, Ferguson decapitated Lavender as Lavender’s daughter watched.

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On the opposite side of the fight was David Beaty, who was born just a few miles south of Ferguson’s home town, in Fentress County, and changed his legal name to “Tinker Dave” before the war began. It was shortly after Zollicoffer’s death at Mill Springs that Confederate soldiers visited Beaty’s home. Beaty was in the field that day, but the soldiers told his wife that Beaty “must take sides of leave the country.”

Beaty was a Unionist — Lincolnites, the Confederates called them — but he had stayed out of the fight until that point. That was about to change; the visit from the Rebels spurred him into action.

“I told my boys that before I would leave home or run away I would fight them to Doomsday and if they killed me, let them kill me,” he said. “So I took my sons and raised a company of men to fight them. Sometimes I had as many as 60 men, sometimes as low as five.”

While history has generally regarded Ferguson a murderer and Beaty a hero, historian Michael O’Neal wrote that there might not have been a significant difference between the two.

“If not driven by the near-psychopathic violence which characterized Ferguson, Beaty was no less ruthless as a fighter,” O’Neal wrote. “He claimed matter-of-factly that he only took one prisoner during the war; if there are to be found more tales of grim acts committed by Ferguson than by Beaty, it is probably only because Ferguson’s side lost.”

On one occasion, Beaty was accused of telling a woman to look out her window, so she could see him kill her husband. On another, he was said to have slashed an old man’s throat and mutilated his body before riding to the home of a 92-year-old blind man who had three sons serving in the Confederate army and shooting him to death, along with his dog. The dead dog was draped over his old owner’s lifeless body.

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For its part, the Confederacy embraced guerrilla warfare for much of the war, justifying the actions of the non-regulars by saying that they were “citizens of the Confederacy who had taken up arms to defend their homes and families.” On the other hand, the United States did not recognize guerrilla fighters for the most part, but Beaty’s outfit was an exception. Congress would eventually recognize Beaty’s men as “Beaty’s Independent Scouts,” a part of the Union fighting force.

Both Ferguson and Beaty claimed their killings were justified. Given their similar tactics, it isn’t surprising that the two men tangled during the war.

In fact, Ferguson and Beaty knew one another before the war began. At Ferguson’s trial in 1865, Beaty said, “I have known Champ Ferguson for 18 or 20 years and I saw him a number of times during the war, sometimes accompanied by only a few men, sometimes with quite a large company.”

The first time they met after the war began was in the late winter of 1862, shortly after the Battle of Mill Springs. It was only days after Confederate soldiers had visited to tell Beaty he must choose sides in the fight. This time, Ferguson was accompanied by 20 men, some of who wore the uniform of the Union army. They also carried a Union flag. When Beaty asked them what they wanted, Ferguson yelled that they wanted “Captain Beaty to help us drive off the damned Rebels, who are now coming in on us.” It was the same wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing tactic that Ferguson would later use in Morgan County when he killed Sim Lavender. 

Recognizing Ferguson, even though Ferguson apparently didn’t recognize him, Beaty told the men that Capt. Beaty was away at a “log rolling,” but that he would go for him. He did, and didn’t return to his farm until the guerrilla band had left.

The last time the two men encountered one another was in Jamestown, three weeks after Richmond fell late in the war. Ferguson and five of his men entered a home where Beaty was located and ordered him to surrender his weapons. 

Beaty would later testify that he knew Ferguson intended to shoot him. With three men riding on either side of him, he said, “It occurred to me that if I could turn my horse suddenly and slip out, they would not dare shoot for fear of shooting each other, and before they could turn around I could get a good start.”

Knowing it was life or death, and that he had only one chance to escape, Beaty resolved to try it. He said the men fired 20 shots at him as he dashed down the road. Three of the bullets struck him. But he made his getaway. He never fully recovered from his wounds, and died in 1876.

Before his own death, Ferguson spoke of Beaty during an interview with a Nashville Dispatch reporter. He said, “Well, there are meaner men than Tinker Dave. He fought me bravely and gave me some heavy licks, but I always gave him as good as he sent. I have nothing against Tinker Dave. He spoke to me very kindly at the court room when he was giving his testimony to me. We both tried to get each other during the war, but we always proved too smart for each other. There are meaner men than Dave.”

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Ferguson was hanged in Nashville on October 20, 1865. He had believed that he would be pardoned; President Abraham Lincoln had urged tolerance towards the men who had taken up arms against the federal government and pleaded with his fellow countrymen that they be welcomed back into the Union. There were reports that Ferguson was lured into giving himself up with a promise of being pardoned.

But a pardon was not in the works. He was put on trial for murder, and sentenced to be executed. Before his death he said, “I was a Southern man at the start. I am yet and will die a Rebel. I believe I was right in all I did. I don’t think I have done anything wrong at any time. I killed a good many men, of course; I don’t deny that. But I never killed a man whom I did not know was seeking my life.”

Ferguson’s final request was that his body be taken to White County, at the base of the Cumberland Plateau, and “buried in good Rebel soldier.” That request was honored, and he was buried near the Calfkiller River.

Ferguson was one of just two Confederate officers who were executed for war crimes after the Civil War ended.

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The extent to which the reputations of Champ Ferguson and Tinker Dave Beaty preceded them is revealed in numerous historical reports of a guerrilla raid on the Big South Fork River in 1863. It has been widely written that it was Ferguson’s men who raided the river settlement, and Beaty’s men who attacked the guerrilla band. It has even been written that Ferguson was killed and buried on the Big South Fork River during that fight. None of those things are true.

Historian Lillard Terry wrote in the Independent Herald in the 1980s that Ferguson had ties to Station Camp in Scott County.

“Ferguson had some connections in the Station Camp vicinity in Scott County,” Terry wrote. “There are reports of at least one skirmish there between members of his band and Tinker Dave Beaty’s Scouts, along with members of Scott County’s Home Guard. The several Confederates who were killed in this foray were buried in one grave.”

That report by Terry is likely a reference to the Duck Shoals Skirmish that would take place in 1863. Ferguson was not at that fight.

Terry also wrote, “Reports indicate that Ferguson was hiding out in the Station Camp vicinity of Scott County when Federal authorities contacted him and persuaded him to surrender, promising him amnesty as a soldier in the war.” However, Ferguson was arrested in May 1865 at his home in Sparta, Tennessee.