Gus Smith (1835-1871) was a Captain of the US Army who was lynched in 1871 by the Ku Klux Klan.
Biography[]
Gus Smith was a freedman who served in the Union Army during the American Civil War, and he became a Captain in the US Army during Reconstruction, taking part in the occupation of the South in the following years. In 1871, he attempted to get a white woman named Flora Cameron to marry him, and he chased her into the woods when she tried to run from him. She jumped off a precipice when he refused to back off, and her furious brother Benjamin Cameron (leader of the local Ku Klux Klan) headed to get revenge. Smith was hunted down and lynched by the Klansmen, and his body was given to Lieutenant-Governor Silas Lynch by the KKK as a message.