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Major Patrick Ferguson (1744 – 7 October 1780) was a Scottish officer in the British Army, an early advocate of light infantry and the designer of the Ferguson rifle. He is best known for his service in the 1780 military campaign of Charles Cornwallis during the American Revolutionary War in the Carolinas, in which he aggressively recruited Loyalists and harshly treated Patriot sympathisers. Some dispute this characterization of Ferguson as showing pro-Patriot bias, however, and other accounts praise him for his humanity and unwillingness to follow orders he considered barbaric. Ultimately, his activities led to a Patriot militia uprising against him, and he was killed in the Battle of Kings Mountain, at the border between the colonies of North and South Carolina. Leading a group of Loyalists whom he had recruited, he was the only regular army officer participating on either side of the conflict. The victorious Patriot forces desecrated his body in the aftermath of the battle. ==Early life== Patrick Ferguson was born at Pitfour in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, on 25 May (Old Style)/4 June (New Style) 1744, the second son and fourth child of advocate James Ferguson of Pitfour (who was raised to the judges' bench as a Senator of the College of Justice, so known as Lord Pitfour after 1764) and his wife Anne Murray, a sister of the literary patron Patrick Murray, 5th Lord Elibank. Through his parents, he knew a number of major figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, including philosopher and historian David Hume, on whose recommendation he read Samuel Richardson's novel ''Clarissa'' when he was fifteen, and the dramatist John Home. He had numerous first cousins through his mother's family: these included Sir William Pulteney, 5th Baronet, Commodore George Johnstone, and Sir James Murray (later Murray-Pulteney). In 1770 Ferguson purchased the Castara estate in Tobago.〔Gilchrist (2003): p. 10〕 After Ferguson's death the estate was inherited by his younger brother George who had managed it since the early 1770s and developed it into a successful enterprise. Exports of rum, sugar and molasses were made back to the UK from it.〔Buchan (2008): p. 33〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Patrick Ferguson」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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