Confederate Outlaw: Champ Ferguson and The Civil War in Appalachia

First and foremost, I am really excited that I got to read such a great book.  I had absolutely no knowledge of who Champ Ferguson was until now.  The Champ Ferguson legend contains so much mystery that it actually intrigued me, and now, I would just love to learn more about him.  Brian McKnight, not the singer, but the author, did a fantastic job at collecting evidence on Ferguson, and putting the pieces together as good as he could.  There are so many intricate details and stories concerning Ferguson that it is certainly hard to tell fact from fiction, but I feel that McKnight did a splendid job with all the evidence he complied.  There seemed to be many fallacies, and romanticized origins and legends of Ferguson that may or may not be completely true. Whatever the case, McKnight did a wonderful job.

My conclusion on Ferguson is that he was just a man of the times.  With so much instability within the borderland states and the Upper South, many people seemed to realize that they really did not know which route they wanted to take in terms of deciding whether of not they would go Union or Confederate.  Many of the families were split which caused friction.  Everything they ever knew was basically turned upside down.  He was caught between a rock and a hard place so to speak because it seemed as though he had actual motives behind his actions, but he went about the results all wrong.  Perhaps he just did not know how to deal with his paranoia of his enemies during the War. 

His legacy as a Confederate guerrilla is fascinating. It seemed as if Ferguson was paranoid about whether or not his fellow friends, family members, and acquaintances would turn their backs on him.  Everyone seemed as though they were out to get one another, in his eyes.  The paranoid thoughts seemed to be the motives behind the murders of these people.  Whether his actions were justified, meaning, whether or not they actually were going to kill him first, remains to be seen. The justification of his actions seem to be wrapped up in romanticized tales after his hanging.  

Furthermore, I also think that perhaps Ferguson felt as though he was "doing the Confederacy" a favor whenever he would go out and kill on of his arch-Union enemy's. Maybe he confused war time with his own agenda, and under the Confederate commission, he felt obligated to kill every last Yankee.  The world may never know.  But the mystery behind Ferguson and the Ferguson's sources are very intriguing.