The Selective Telling of the Saltville Massacre

Most People Have Never Heard of It

By Aplomado — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1081020

I’d never heard of the Saltville Massacre until Rahab Mitchell mentioned it in response to another story. It took place in Saltville, VA, in an Appalachian Mountain valley. Two major Civil War battles were fought there, referred to as the First and Second Battles of Saltville. The Confederate Army won the first battle, with Union soldiers taking the second.

During the first battle, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Stephen G. Burbridge, then commander of U.S. forces in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, led the U.S. Army troops, including two Black cavalry units of the United States Colored Troops. Horses were a valuable commodity during the war, and it especially enraged Confederate soldiers to see Black men mounted. The Southerners were upset to see white men fighting alongside colored soldiers. Gen. Burbridge was there to destroy the saltworks that provided salt to much of the Confederate army. Saltville was the largest salt mine under Confederate control; sales in 1864 exceeded $100 million.

With the battle in full swing and the Black cavalry on the front lines. Gen. Burbridge received word from Gen. Sherman his troops were urgently needed elsewhere. He hastily retreated, leaving his wounded soldiers on the battlefield. When the rebel army retook the field, they killed the wounded soldiers, most of them Black, and also went to the field hospital at Wiley Hall on the campus of Emory & Henry College, where they killed eight more wounded men, seven of them Black.

For approximately forty years, Saltville has held reenactments of the two Battles of Saltville. They were usually full weekends, including a “Kids-only battle” on Saturdays. I watched videos describing the two battles with no mention of the massacre. The telling is definitely Confederate-friendly, and people are encouraged to bring their own flag.

Another video centered on the role of Emory & Henry College (the Henry is named after either Patrick Henry or his sister) and does prominently mention the eight victims killed on campus. No mention, however, of the wounded men killed a few miles away on the battlefield.

You might wonder how many wounded soldiers were killed after the Union troops withdrew. The first estimates were as few as five, though most estimates center around fifty men. Confederate Brig. Gen. Felix Huston Robertson had bragged to another officer that “he had killed nearly all the Negroes.” In his book An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government (2001), William C. Davis says that Robertson personally “joined in the act of villainy,” although he escaped prosecution. General Robert E. Lee learned of Robertson’s conduct and communicated to General John C. Breckinridge, Commander of the Department of East Tennessee and West Virginia, his dismay “that a general officer should have been guilty of the crime you mention” and instructed Breckinridge to “prefer charges against him and bring him to trial.”

Champ Ferguson was the only man held to account for the Saltville Massacre, though many, including Gen. Robertson, were known to have participated. Ferguson led a group of renegades, though often serving alongside regular Confederate soldiers. He turned himself in after the end of the Civil War, expecting a pardon like most ex-soldiers. Instead, he was hanged after being convicted of 22 murders, many of them personal vendettas.

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The last reenactment of the Saltville Battles was held in approximately 2018. One was scheduled in 2021, but it was canceled due to COVID-19. Some of the reenactors bragged about “getting the history right” while totally excluding the massacre. Some sources treat Champ Ferguson as a terrorist, and others see him as a hero. Markers exist at the place of his birth and his burial, neither of which mentions the Saltville Massacre. So much for getting the history right.