following April, when the Confederates bombarded Fort Sumter and forced its surrender. This column will cover a fourth who, like the others, has a name familiar to most of us. Less familiar to me, and others I am sure, are the details of this man’s life and his role in the Civil War.
While the bombardment was still underway, the subject of this column commandeered a boat and ordered two slaves to row him to Fort Sumter, where he negotiated the terms of surrender with Maj. Robert Anderson. The fact that he had no authority to do any such thing did not pose an obstacle
n the two previous issues, I wrote about three men who played various roles in the tense standoff in Charleston Harbor between Lincoln’s election in 1860 and the
By Gould Hagler
to Louis Trezevant Wigfall. He forged ahead the only way he knew—at full speed.
Wigfall’s family, on both his father’s and mother’s side, was part of South Carolina’s Low Country elite. In 1814, two years before Louis was born, the family moved inland to the Edgefield District, where Louis was born and raised. The future Fire-eater was orphaned, losing his father when he was two and his mother 11 years later. Using Louis’s inheritance of $13,000, his guardian made sure the young man received a well-rounded education at an academy near home, at the University of Virginia, and finally at the University of South Carolina. He graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1837; in 1839, he was admitted to the bar.
Wigfall had a way of creating trouble for himself and for others. He had a hot temper, a heightened sense of honor, a quickness to take offense, and a habit of overindulging in alcohol. During his year at Virginia, Wigfall nearly fought a duel over what was, or should have been, a trivial matter. Later, in South Carolina, after leaving the university and entering politics, he “was involved in a fistfight, three near-duels, two duels, and one shooting – all of which left one dead and two, including Wigfall, wounded.”1 His own wound was the outcome of a political feud with the powerful Brooks family. In a duel with Preston Brooks in 1840, Wigfall was shot in the thigh and Brooks through the hip.2
Wigfall was also a wastrel. From a young age until his death, he was plagued by debt and hounded by creditors.
Wigfall was 16 during the Nullification Crisis of 1832. The events of those tense days made “a deep and abiding impression”3 on the bright and politically aware youth. Throughout his pre-Civil War career, he fought passionately for state sovereignty, for the institution of slavery (including slavery in the territories), and for a southern route for the planned transcontinental railroad. With the same intensity, he waged political war against protective tariffs, the Homestead Act, and a strong central government. He argued that the Constitution was a compact agreed to by individual states, sovereign polities that never yielded their sovereignty. A state could withdraw from this federation for any reason it saw fit, and was answerable to no other entity, only to its own people.
