WIGGING OUT
It’s quite possible that Louis Wigfall was the most obnoxious politician in American history.
Candidates abound, of course, but few were as arrogant, racist, quarrelsome, vituperative, and violent as Wigfall. He schemed for a decade to create a Southern Confederacy based on slavery. Then he turned his talents for truculence and treachery on his allies, inadvertently helping to divide and defeat the South.
Whether with fists, pistols, or his big, acerbic mouth, “Wigfall liked a good fight,” wrote biographer Alvy L. King. He seemed, King wrote, “always to need an object for his hostility.”
Born in 1816, Wigfall was a scion of two rich, powerful South Carolina clans. His father died
