1. Louis Trezevant Wigfall was an American politician who served as a Confederate States Senator from Texas from 1862 to 1865.
34 Facts About Louis Wigfall
1. 2.
Louis Wigfall was among a group of leading secessionists known as Fire-Eaters, advocating the preservation and expansion of an aristocratic agricultural society based on slave labor.
3.
Louis Wigfall briefly served as a Confederate Brigadier General of the Texas Brigade at the outset of the American Civil War before taking his seat in the Confederate Senate.
4.
Louis Wigfall was born on a plantation near Edgefield, South Carolina, to Levi Durant and Eliza Thomson Louis Wigfall.
5.
Louis Wigfall's father, who died in 1818, was a successful Charleston merchant before moving to Edgefield.
6.
Louis Wigfall's mother was of the French Huguenot Trezavant family.
7.
Louis Wigfall developed an interest in the law, participated in the Euphradian Society, and wrote epistles on student rights.
8.
Louis Wigfall abandoned academics altogether for three months to fight in the Second Seminole War in Florida, achieving the rank of Lieutenant of volunteers.
9.
In 1839 Louis Wigfall returned to Edgefield and took over his brother's law practice.
10.
Louis Wigfall borrowed from friends to maintain a freewheeling lifestyle, including from his future bride.
11.
In 1841 Louis Wigfall married his second cousin, Charlotte Maria Cross, daughter of the prominent Charlestown lawyer and former South Carolina State Controller, Col.
12.
Louis Wigfall received an aide-de-camp and Lieutenant Colonelcy on Governor Richardson's staff, but never was completely satisfied with the outcome of the Brooks affair.
13.
Louis Wigfall was elected delegate to the South Carolina Democratic convention in 1844, but his violent temperament and behind-the-scenes meddling had already doomed his youthful political ambitions.
14.
Louis Wigfall piled up medical bills because of a sickly infant son who eventually died.
15.
Louis Wigfall became a staunch political opponent of Sam Houston.
16.
When Houston ran for governor in 1857, Louis Wigfall followed him on the campaign trail, attacking his congressional record at each of Houston's stops, and accused Houston of being a traitor to the South.
17.
Louis Wigfall claimed that Houston had ambitions for a presidential nomination and courted the support of Northern abolitionists.
18.
Louis Wigfall organized state Democrats to resist the Know Nothing party, but with their defeat his radical views descended in the estimation of Democratic moderates.
19.
Matthias Ward was appointed to the Senate following Henderson's death and served from September 27,1858, until Louis Wigfall was elected and sworn in on December 5,1859.
20.
Louis Wigfall was expelled from the Senate on July 11,1861, for support of the rebellion.
21.
Louis Wigfall served as a member of the Texas delegation to the Provisional Confederate Congress, which formed the provisional government of the Confederacy, and which selected Jefferson Davis as its president.
22.
Louis Wigfall had continued to hold his seat after Texas had seceded on February 1,1861, and was admitted to the Provisional Confederate Congress on March 2,1861, exhorting the rightness of the Southern cause and berating his Northern colleagues whether on the floor of the Senate or in Capitol Hill saloons.
23.
In January 1865, Louis Wigfall stated his reasons for having supported the Confederacy, namely, opposition to African American equality:.
24.
Louis Wigfall arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, as the siege of Fort Sumter commenced.
25.
The incident was widely reported in the newspapers furthering his celebrity, but the story redacted the important detail that Louis Wigfall had not spoken to Beauregard in two days.
26.
Louis Wigfall's nervousness was blamed on his fondness for whiskey and hard cider.
27.
Louis Wigfall appeared visibly drunk, on and off-duty, in the presence of his men on more than one occasion.
28.
Louis Wigfall resigned his commission in February 1862 to take a seat in the Confederate Senate, and was replaced by John Bell Hood.
29.
At the beginning of the war Louis Wigfall was a close friend of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
30.
Louis Wigfall challenged Davis, a West Point graduate and former United States Secretary of War, on many of his military-related policies, citing his own military experience in the Seminole Wars.
31.
Louis Wigfall was an early proponent of making Robert E Lee commander of all Confederate armies.
32.
Louis Wigfall bought a mine in Clear Creek, Colorado, returning to the United States in 1870.
33.
Louis Wigfall lived for a while in Baltimore, Maryland, and was in Galveston, Texas, in January, 1874.
34.
Louis Wigfall died a month later of "apoplexy" and is buried there in the Episcopal cemetery.