Perhaps the feistiest Southerner
of all was Louis T. ‘Wigfall, a freshman senator from Texas. If Crittenden
represented the past, this new man from a new state might represent the future—though
there were many who devoutly hoped not. His very face was that of a man who,
whatever his other endowments might be, found it unbearable to hear more than
three or four words spoken consecutively by anyone else. His beetling eyebrows
clenched and unclenched when he talked (which was almost incessantly), and his
pugnacious black beard seemed to jut out perpendicular to his face. Even his
nose, an English journalist wrote, was somehow “argumentative.” But his eyes,
the writer continued, were most dangerously transfixing: “of wonderful depth
and light, such as I never saw before but in the head of a wild beast. If you
look some day when the sun is not too bright into the eye of a Bengal tiger, in
the Regent’s Park, as the keeper is coming round, you will form some notion of
the expression I mean.”32
By the age of twenty-five,
Wigfall had managed to squander his considerable inheritance, settle three
affairs of honor on the dueling ground, fight in a ruthless military campaign
against the Seminoles, consume a small lakeful of bourbon, win an enviable reputation
in whorehouses throughout the South, and get hauled before a judge on charges
of murder. Three years after that, he took the next logical step and went into
Texas politics. Of all the Southern fire-eaters in the Senate, Wigfall was the
most flamboyant—and inflexible. He scorned the very idea of compromise, openly
relished the prospect of spilling Yankee blood, and crowed the war would end
only after Southern troops had cut a swath of destruction across the North,
with the final capitulation signed in Faneuil Hall.33
Excerpted from 1861 – The
Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart, Knopf, New York, 2011
