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.