once or twice more, before it finally
went off.
Ferguson then went on to look up other wounded White
Union officers whom he intended to murder.
He was kept from doing so by the Confederate hospital
staff.
The precise numbers will never be known, but the best
numbers are that about 46 men were murdered.
The Confederate causalities of the battle, and the
Union patients in the hospital who died there were buried in
the Emory and Henry Cemetery.
Years later the Grand Army of the Republic had the
white Union bodies dug up and reburied in the North.
One White Union soldier remains buried in a marked
grave there. The
Union Black dead were buried in unmarked graves around and
about the cemetery.
The locations are not marked to this day.
There is a large oblisque memorializing the
Confederate dead buried there.
The corpses of the Union dead were disposed of near
the battlefield.
Some were buried in shallow graves near Cedar Branch, and
were later dug up and eaten by hogs.
Some were taken to a nearby sinkhole which has a cave
descending from the bottom of it, and the bodies were thrown
down this hole.
Those who died near the river were cast afloat into it.
The Union commander sent a message to General Breckenridge,
who had Ferguson arrested.
However, in the general break down of social
structure at the end of the war, Ferguson was not tried.
After the war, he was arrested by the Union army, who
hanged him for his acts.
Only the commander of Andersonville Prison, Henry
Wertz, was also hanged after the war 
Champ Ferguson's Hanging
In December 1864 Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia were
holed up in Petersburg.
They were being sustained largely by the Virginia and
Tennessee Railroad that ran from East Tennessee through
Glade Spring, Wytheville, and on to Petersburg.
The railroad’s main hub, Knoxville,
Tennessee was in Union hands,
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