Sure you can trust the Yankee government…just ask an Indian.  The list of broken promises and deceit are endless…

Champ Ferguson, a legendary Confederate partisan ranger and guerilla fighter who fought to control the Upper Cumberland Plateau region along the Tennessee and Kentucky borders. Nominally holding the rank of Captain in the Confederate Army, Ferguson led his own company of independent cavalry. 

Ferguson acted as a scout for Genl. John Hunt Morgan, and was for a time attached to the command of Genl. Joseph Wheeler. His company was under Wheeler's command when they took part in the Battle of Saltville (Virginia). 

At war's end, Ferguson and his men returned to their homes and on 23 May, 1865, they were INDUCED BY PROMISE of the same parole given to the officers and men of Lee's and Johnston's Confederate Armies to surrender themselves to federal military authorities. All except Ferguson were indeed released on Oath. Champ Ferguson himself was summarily arrested, and charged with over 50 counts of murder. Some of his purported victims remained nameless, and many of the other charges were wholly unsupported by either witnesses or documentation.

 In a trial at Nashville, lasting from 11 July through 26 September, 1865, a military tribunal called witness after unreliable witness against Ferguson, all the while denying his counsel every opportunity to present a competent case in his defense.

 On 10 October, General Orders affirming his conviction and sentencing him to death by hanging were issued. On Friday, 20 October, 1865, the Order of Execution was carried out while Ferguson's wife Martha and sixteen year old daughter Ann watched. Thus it came to be that Champ Ferguson joined Henry Wirz, Commandant of the Confederate prison at Camp Sumter (Andersonville) as the only two former Confederate's of any rank or position to be executed for SUPPOSED "war crimes."

~Robert~