By Bartee Haile
With his inheritance squandered and his reputation in ruins, Louis Trezevant Wigfall left his native South Carolina on Aug. 22, 1846 to start a new life in Texas.
The son of a well-to-do planter, Wigfall’s college days at South Carolina College, forerunner of the University of South Carolina, spawned a fanatical belief in state supremacy. His alma mater was a hotbed of secessionist sentiment, where as early as 1827 the college president called for the Palmetto State to sever all ties with the United States.
Even though several friends and his own brother had died in the pernicious pastime of dueling, Wigfall was eager to take his turn on the so-called “field of honor.” When the chance finally came, he went on a bloody rampage.
During five violent months, he engaged in a fistfight, three near-duels, two real things and a blazing gunbattle on the steps of the local courthouse. One youth was killed in the wild spree and two seriously wounded, including Wigfall himself.
Besides ruining his reputation and law practice, the mayhem also burdened his conscience, which tormented him for years with nightmare visions of the man he had slain. Snubbed by polite society, hounded by creditors and overwhelmed by guilt, he migrated to Texas the year after its belated annexation.
Getting in on the ground floor of the recently formed Democratic Party, Wigfall rocked the 1848 state convention with an inflammatory appeal to southern patriotism. When the meeting adjourned, the 32-year-old demagogue was firmly entrenched as the most rabid states’ rights advocate in Texas.
Wigfall’s ball really began rolling the next year with an appointment to a vacancy in the Austin assembly. Sensing a favorable shift in the political wind, he exploited the unpopularity of Sen. Sam Houston’s pro-Union pronouncements by attacking his “laxity in defending Texas’ interests.” From that day forward, the two were mortal enemies.
Slaveowners applauded the Dred Scott decision, which upheld their right to do as they pleased with their human property, but not the dogmatic Texan. To accept the Supreme Court decree, Wigfall lectured, was to acknowledge the power of the national judiciary over state sovereignty, a concession he would not make.
Three days after John Brown was hanged for treason in December 1859, Texas lawmakers picked a new United States Senator. In the angry aftermath of the Harper’s Ferry Raid, their nearly unanimous choice was the arch-secessionist from South Carolina.
As U.S. Senator, Wigfall delighted in taunting his Yankee colleagues and tongue-lashed them black and blue. Secession was a simple matter, he reasoned. “If this government does not suit us, we will leave it.” The South would not be cowed by northern threats. “If we do not get into Boston before you get into Texas,” he boasted, “you may shoot me.”
The election in November 1860 of a minority president, the preference of only two out of five voters, started a southern stampede. Meanwhile, Wigfall’s name cropped up in rumors of a bizarre plot to kidnap the lame duck in the White House.
With James Buchanan out of the way, Kentuckian John Breckenridge would advance to the presidency which he would then refuse to relinquish to Abraham Lincoln. But Breckenridge lost his nerve, and the conspiracy fizzled.
Told of Texas’ formal withdrawal from the Union, an exhilarated Wigfall gloated on the senate floor, “We have dissolved the Union! Mend it if you can! Cement it with blood!”
He stuck around the enemy capital for weeks gathering intelligence for the Rebels. He was present in April 1861 for the bombardment of Fort Sumter, where he personally suggested surrender to the outgunned federal commander.
The Lone Star legislature elected Louis T. Wigfall to the Confederate senate on Nov. 4, 1861. No one counted on the fire-eater raising as much hell in Richmond as he had in Washington.
As a Texas member of the Confederate Senate, Wigfall was at first a staunch supporter of President Jefferson Davis. But his wife hated Mrs. Davis, and her spiteful subversion on the home front poisoned the important relationship.
The bad situation took a turn for the worse, when Wigfall gave his debilitating imitation of the Yankee general Ulysses S. Grant. Wartime alcoholism impaired his judgment and ignited explosive rages. He blamed every southern setback on Jeff Davis and expressed a warped wish to see him hang.
After the curtain dropped at Appomattox, Wigfall hid for months in the backstreets of Galveston before slipping aboard a British ship and sailing away to sanctuary. The exile returned eight years later but was so sick from years of chronic drinking that he had to be carried to a boardinghouse.
Louis T. Wigfall never got out of bed alive, dying alone in a rented room on Feb. 18, 1874. Even death was a bitter disappointment for the hottest of the red-hot Rebs.
Visit barteehaile.com for Bartee’s books “Murder Most Texan” and “Texas Depression-Era Desperadoes” and bound collections of his Texas history columns from the past 32 years.
