Let's You And Me Fight!
Notable Scumbags Of The Civil War – The Fifth In A Series
Sen. Louis T. Wigfall 1816-1874
Fire Eater: A belligerent person, more specifically, in mid 19th-Century America, an extreme, pro-slavery, Southern agitator for secession.
For this, the fifth entry in my series about perfectly disgusting Civil War characters, my Confederate subject will be the King of the Fire Eaters himself. Yes, none other than Battling Louis Trevezant Wigfall, the biggest blowhard that ever bellowed about Southern liberty on behalf of destroying our country to keep human beings as chattel slaves. Wigfall was an even more flatulent windbag dedicated to disunion than other hotheads such as William Lowndes Yancey and Barnwell Rhett. Intemperate, violent, and alcoholic, this bull of a man operated with virtually no governor whatsoever on his surging, destructive emotions. From early manhood, he was an obdurate, radical advocate of secession. His eloquence and passion helped propel the South into secession and led directly to the disaster that was the Civil War, a cataclysm he welcomed.
Wigfall was born in Edgefield in the western end of South Carolina, a hotbed of virulent fire eaters. His family was wealthy and his mother descended from one of the state’s oldest families, an important distinction in caste conscious South Carolina. High born in an aristocratic society, equipped with a certain degree of brains and a fairly decent education by antebellum standards, endowed with a fair amount of wealth, Wigfall managed to squander these advantages due to drunkenness, a zero work ethic, and most of all, his overpowering tendency toward quarrels and violence. This is probably due in large part to the fact that both his parents died when he was quite young, leaving him to grow up wild with no one to instill discipline or restraint.
Wigfall’s education even included a year at my dear old alma mater, the University of Virginia. He left due to his rowdy nature, to include an argument sparked by a belle at a ball that led to a near duel and an honor court, a familiar term to Wahoos. Wigfall finished college in South Carolina, his academic tenure distinguished by sporadic attendance at best, frequent tavern brawls, and a three month sojourn during which he ran off to Florida to slaughter Seminoles. From there, Wigfall returned to Edgefield to take over his brother’s law practice. In those days, practically any man could practice law if he had a few books lying around to use as sources of authority, especially out in the sticks. Even so, to succeed as a lawyer, then as now, long hours were required, either drumming up clients or sweating out legal arguments. Wigfall simply lacked the patience and interest to do this. A go-getter, he wasn’t. Moreover, his crying need for the flowing bowl and the satisfaction of a good bloody fight drove him to debauch and dissolution while his profligate ways quickly ate through his sizable inheritance.
Aside from getting drunk and advocating secession, Wigfall liked nothing than a full on, daggers drawn, balls out feud with somebody. Wigfall was the sort of person who would start a fight with his toenails if no one else was handy. He picked a particularly nasty quarrel with Preston Brooks, another noted Edgefieldian fire eater. Despite their ideological harmony, they cordially hated each other’s guts. Matters escalated to a fistfight, followed by challenges. Friends intervened and the affair was drawn out, but like the true hothead he was, Wigfall refused to let the situation cool down. Brooks accused Wigfall of chickening out from a duel. Wigfall published a vitriolic response in a local newspaper. Brooks’s aged father decided to horn in on the act and wrote his own scurrilous, public rebuttal. Wigfall immediately challenged the father who responded, “I’m old and feeble.”
At this point, pursuant to the rigorous, detailed requirements of the code duello, Wigfall posted a public notice at the Edgefield county courthouse of his opinion of Brooks’s father as a no good, cowardly pissant. He stood guard over his placard with a drawn pistol. If this sounds like a ridiculous waste of time for an adult person, I most heartily agree. Two relatives of the Brooks family objected to the placard. Accounts vary as to what exactly happened, but the general upshot is that someone tried to tear down the placard and Wigfall shot Thomas Bird dead, possibly after Bird fired at him, possibly not. Wigfall dueled with the survivor after that with no result. A week later, however, he finally had his showdown with Preston Brooks.
Both men seriously wounded each other. Wigfall shattered Brooks’s hip. As a result, Brooks walked with a cane for the rest of his life. He used the cane when he decided to chastise Senator Charles Sumner for an assault on Southern honor. Brooks attacked without warning and nearly killed Sumner in the well of the Senate. He was hailed throughout the South as a champion. The fact that such disgusting, vicious savagery by one elected representative to another in the legislature of a supposedly democratic republic was not only condoned, but extolled is a neat illustration of how sick and dysfunctional Southern antebellum society was. So for that matter was the bloody, pointless quarrel between Wigfall and the Brooks clan.
Wigfall made efforts at reform. He married his second cousin, whom he’d already borrowed money from to pay off creditors as he had with every other acquaintance. Bad fortune continued, however, largely due to his own flaws. His debts dogged him until the family lost everything, the house and all the property they had. A young son died. Potential patrons were alienated by Wigfall’s drunken, violent nature and appalled by his untamable debts. Confronted by failure on all fronts, Wigfall did what many other 19th-Century Southerners did when they played their string out at home and needed a second chance, men like Crockett, Travis, Houston, and Bowie. Namely, he moved to Texas.
In the 19th Century and so today, reactionary lunacy flourishes in Texas under the hot, nurturing sun even more than in the lush, subtropical warmth of South Carolina. Here Wigfall came into his own and found the notoriety and fame his outsized ego so desperately craved. He went into politics. Texans responded positively to his forceful, unrepentant advocacy of extreme states’ right and secession. His masterstroke was to embark upon a campaign of harassment of Sam Houston when he ran for re-election to the U.S. Senate in 1857. Houston was the father of Texas independence and the man who successfully brought the state into the Union. As such, he was still revered throughout Texas, despite his Unionist sympathies. Wigfall paid him no respect. He instead hounded him throughout the state like a vicious, black mastiff. Everywhere Houston spoke, Wigfall appeared in another venue to denounce him as a traitor to Texas, state rights, and white men’s right to own slaves. He made a material contribution to Houston’s downfall and was rewarded by the Texas state legislature when they elected him to the Senate in 1859.
As can be expected, Wigfall’s tenure in Federal office was short and stormy. He regularly denounced his Northern colleagues in the most abusive terms. As the presidential election of 1860 drew near and sectional tensions grew white hot, Wigfall’s rhetoric grew even fevered and passionate, until he openly advocated secession from the well of the Senate, urged his former state to break away from the Union and form its own country. Someone once remarked of antebellum South Carolina that it “was too small to be a nation and too large for an insane asylum.” Wigfall seemed determined to prove the truth of that adage. When the crisis finally struck with Lincoln’s election and South Carolina seceded in December 1860, rather than leave the Senate like his other Southern colleagues, Wigfall remained behind to taunt Northerners and actively foment treason against the United States. He set up a recruiting station in Baltimore to send men and weapons to Dixie and used his Senate franking privileges to send letters to Confederate officials, reporting intelligence on the U.S. government’s dime. Cloaked with a Senator’s authority and none of the responsibility, Wigfall was free at last to be as rude and obnoxious as he pleased. He indulged himself to the hilt. Only the prospect of mayhem in Charleston drew him away.
Wigfall received a hero’s welcome in Charleston and was accredited to the skeletal staff of General P.G.T. Beauregard as an aide with the nominal rank of colonel. When the fateful moment arrived and the first, portentous shots were fired upon Fort Sumter, Wigfall rose to the occasion as only he could. He proved himself a true, flaming ass of the first mettle. Wigfall observed the cannonade from a nearby artillery installation on Morris Island, boozing while he did according to one report. A shot knocked down the fort’s flagpole and Old Glory hit the ground. Most likely hammered at this point, the ever impetuous Wigfall took that as a sign that Fort Sumter had fallen. Showing real dash and no sense at all, Wigfall commandeered the nearest boat and had two slaves row him out to the fort, even though shot and shell still rained down from all directions, a truly foolhardy move. He clambered into the fort with a white handkerchief tied to a sword and confidently asked the commander, Maj. Robert Anderson, to surrender. Persuaded by Wigfall’s impressive presence and air of authority, low on ammo and in a desperate fix, Anderson was ready to give way. When an actual official, Confederate delegation informed Maj. Anderson that Wigfall spoke completely without authorization, he flew into a rage and the tenuous surrender almost fell through. Needless to say, Beauregard wasn’t best pleased.
Wigfall left for Montgomery to represent Texas in the Confederate Provisional Congress and proceeded from there to Richmond where he served as a Senator in the legislature. Always easily distracted, with delusions of military glory based on his scant military service murdering Seminoles, Wigfall briefly took command of a Texas infantry battalion. He plagued the men when he regularly turned them out on full alert at midnight for an imagined Yankee attack, his suspicions undoubtedly fueled more by whiskey than actual, hard intelligence. Mercifully for them, Wigfall soon returned to the Senate. Initially an admirer and confidant of Jefferson Davis, with his usual perversity and extremeness, he turned on Davis and became one of his bitterest enemies in the legislature. That is saying a lot. Wigfall bitterly opposed every move Davis made to centralize authority and marshal resources as part of his desperate bid to keep the Confederacy alive. With bitter irony, like so many other fire eaters, Wigfall was such a devotee of states’ rights that he refused to give Davis what he needed to preserve the Confederacy, the very political entity he’d worked so hard to create.
When the inevitable fall came, Wigfall shaved off his beard and ran to Texas, leaving his family behind. Upon learning in Texas that Gen. Kirby Smith had surrendered, Wigfall fled to London where his family joined him in 1866. Other Confederates also fled abroad at the war’s end, some as far as Brazil where a town is still named Americana. Others went to Europe like Wigfall, most notably Judah Benjamin, Confederate Secretary of State and War, who made a most distinguished career for himself as a British barrister. As noted before, however, Wigfall lacked enterprise. His life’s dream of an independent Southern nation brought down in flames, Wigfall gave himself over to being a complete souse and dragged his family down with him into miserable, wretched Dickensian poverty. In 1872, seven years after the war and sure at last he wouldn’t be tried for treason, Wigfall moved back to the U.S. with his family. He invested money in a business venture that failed, of course, and died soon after that at 58, his death undoubtedly accelerated by decades of drinking and uncontrollable rage.
Duelist, drunkard, deadbeat, and a dick, Wigfall was all the “D”s in Dixie rolled up into one angry, fuming package. Some Neo-Confederate may still extoll this hump as a valiant defender of the Constitution and states’ rights, but any way I look at him, Wigfall was a miserable, bullying, drunken, angry reactionary steadfastly dedicated to upholding an incredibly objectionable, hopelessly obsolete social system based on chattel slavery. Above all else, he was a miserable failure, in his personal life and professional goals, his own worst enemy and an unwitting deadly enemy of the independent Confederacy he helped bring about. Wigfall truly deserves the name of scumbag.
Bibliographical note: Most of the information for this profile was drawn from The Fire-Eaters by Eric H. Walther. The link below is to the Amazon listing for the book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Fire-Eaters-Eric-H-Walther/dp/0807117757/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1409536252&sr=8-2&keywords=The+Fire-Eaters