82 ILLUSTRATION BY CECILIA CARLSTEDTCulture & CriticsBOOKSAbraham Lincoln’s
Radical Moderation
What the president understood that the zealous
Republican reformers in Congress didn’t
By Andrew FergusonIn the opening days of the Civil War, long before
Saturday Night Live appropriated the idea, Louis
Trezevant Wigfall earned the distinction in Washing-
ton, D.C., of being the Thing That Wouldn’t Leave.
Elected to the United States Senate from Texas to fill
a vacancy in 1859, Wigfall wasted no time in making
himself obnoxious to his colleagues and the public
alike. He was lavish in his disdain for the legislative
body in which he had sought a seat. On the Senate
floor, he said of the flag and, especially, the Union for
which it stood, “It should be torn down and trampled
upon.” As the southern states broke away, Wigfall
gleefully announced, “The federal government is dead.
The only question is whether we will give it a decent,
peaceable, Protestant burial.”
By then Wigfall had been appointed to the Con-
federate congress, and the only question that occurred
to many of his colleagues was why he was still blovi-
ating from the floor of the U.S. Senate. Wigfall was
worse than a mere gasbag. As Fergus M. Borde wich
points out in his provocative new book, Congress at
Wa r, he “passed on military information to his southern
friends, bought arms for the Confederacy, and swag-
gered around encouraging men to enlist in the seces-
sionist forces.” At last, in March 1861, Wigfall quit the
U.S. capital and showed up a few weeks later in South
Carolina. Commandeering a skiff after Confederate
batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter, in Charleston
Harbor, he rowed out to present terms for the fort’s
surrender. He had no authorization to do such a thing;
he was simply following his passion to make trouble
and get attention. He went down in history as a triple
threat: a traitor, a blowhard, and a shameless buttinsky.
Wigfall, one of the many strange and colorful
characters tossed up by the politics of the Civil War,
typifies the time in important respects. The years lead-
ing to the Civil War, and the war itself, were politi-
cal intensifiers; radicalism was rewarded and could
be made to pay. This was as true of the Republican
reformers who are the heroes of Borde wich’s book as
it is of secessionists like Wigfall.
Bordewich’s ungainly subtitle—How Republican
Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended
Slavery, and Remade America—telegraphs the grand
claims he sets out to make for a group of congressmen
who mostly styled themselves as Radical Republicans.
In his account, it is they who pressed for aggressive
military campaigns when the will for war flagged
among Abraham Lincoln’s generals; who invented
the financial mechanisms that funded the war; who
pushed for punitive measures against the southern
slaveholders; and who deserve credit (or blame!) for
the birth of big government—achievements more
commonly attributed to their far less radical presi-
dent. A popular historian and journalist blessedly free