Military Commission · Nashville, Tennessee · 1865
Good Rebel Soil
The Last Confession of Champ Ferguson
A Novel of the Civil War, Appalachia, and America's First War Crimes Trial · by J.B. Fox
"They're going to hang me for being late."
October 1865. Nashville. Champ Ferguson is in a brick cell waiting to become the only Confederate guerrilla ever hanged for war crimes. While carpenters build his gallows outside the window, he walks his life backward, post by post, as the widows, daughters, soldiers and neighbors of the men he killed take the stand to tell it their own way.
The Record of the Case
Champ Ferguson was a Confederate guerrilla on the Kentucky and Tennessee border, the Cumberland country where neighbors chose opposite sides of the Civil War.
After the war he was tried by a Union military commission in Nashville in 1865, one of the first war crimes trials in American history.
Witnesses at the trial included the families and neighbors of the men he was charged with killing, the voices this novel gives the stand.
He was hanged in Nashville in October 1865, the only Confederate guerrilla executed for war crimes.
Exhibits
Places the novel moves through include Camp Dick Robinson in Kentucky and the mountain borderland where Thomas' Legion and the cavalry of General Joseph Wheeler rode.