The soldiers of the Texas Brigade—comprising the 1st, 4th, and 5th Texas Infantry regiments—were historically famous for their fierce independent streak, frontier stubbornness, and absolute lack of patience for pompous or incompetent officers. Upon arriving in Virginia, Brigadier General Louis T. Wigfall became the primary target for their relentless scorn. Lacking formal military training, high-strung by nature, and known as a hard drinker, Wigfall's command was defined by a chaotic series of drunken false alarms that thoroughly alienated both his junior officers and the enlisted men.
The late fall of 1861 and the winter of 1862 played havoc on Wigfall’s nerves, a condition exacerbated by his notorious weakness for "social liquor," hard cider, applejack, and whiskey. While the men quickly grew to dislike his habits as a field commander, they initially recognized his charismatic skills as a politician.
Wigfall's stated preference for applejack was not a trivial detail. Unlike ordinary hard cider, applejack in this period was frequently strengthened through a crude but effective process known as “jacking,” or freeze distillation. Because water freezes at a higher temperature than ethanol, a barrel of hard cider left outside during a Virginia winter camp could be repeatedly skimmed of its ice, leaving behind a smaller volume of liquid with a substantially higher alcohol content than the cider it started as. Farmers and soldiers alike had practiced this technique for generations, and the resulting spirit earned the regional nickname “Jersey Lightning” for its sharp, immediate kick.
Because freeze distillation was an imprecise, unregulated process performed in camp rather than in a licensed still, the resulting applejack varied wildly in strength from batch to batch, and often carried dangerously concentrated levels of fusel alcohols and other byproducts that a proper still would have removed. A man drinking what he believed to be a modest, cider-strength beverage could unknowingly be consuming something closer to brandy, with all of the disorientation, aggression, and impaired judgment that a rapid, unexpected dose of high-proof alcohol produces. This context does not excuse Wigfall's conduct in his winter quarters, but it does help explain why his paranoia and erratic false alarms proved to be so severe, so sudden, and so difficult for his own officers to predict.
Document A: The "A Little Drunk" Speech The complex duality of how the troops perceived their commander is captured perfectly in a letter home from William H. Lewis of Company D, 5th Texas Infantry. Describing the first time the regiment gathered to hear their new leader speak, Lewis observed that Wigfall appeared:
"...a little drunk, but he gave us a good one."
Wigfall used the speech to pay a high compliment to the Texans, telling them they carried a steep reputation to sustain as fighting men. While his fiery, pro-Texas rhetoric won temporary respect, his erratic behavior on duty quickly eroded any military authority he possessed.
Document B: The Observations of Thomas Jewett Goree Reflecting on the Confederate officer corps stationed around Richmond, Goree—an aide to General James Longstreet who had two brothers serving in the 5th Texas—confided his deep anxiety to his family:
"I like Genl Wigfall as a man, but on account of his habits I very much regret that [my brothers] Langston and Edwin are in his brigade. I hope, though, that when he assumes the responsibility of three or four regiments, he will see the necessity of reformation."
Wigfall never reformed.
Wigfall’s intense drinking directly triggered tactical blunders and late-night panic. Rather than enduring the harsh winter elements in tents alongside his enlisted men, Wigfall took up comfortable residence in a nearby local tavern. Driven by intense paranoia—which his men attributed directly to his heavy fondness for whiskey and hard cider—Wigfall became a nervous liability in close proximity to the Union lines.
Private Joseph B. "Joe" Polley—a veteran of the brigade who later became its primary historian and wordsmith—detailed how these false alarms became a compulsive habit for the general:
"General Wigfall's imagination was too often quickened by deep potations to be reliable. The colder the night and the more metallic the rustling of the pine tops above his quarters, the more plainly he could hear the rattling of oars in the oar-locks of boats transporting Federal troops across the Potomac."
Wigfall saw "a Yankee in every shadow" and heard an invading army approaching in every winter breeze. No sooner did the wind clink together the ice-incrusted boughs of the pine trees outside his headquarters than he would panic, ordering the "long roll" sounded by the personal drummer he keeps close at hand for emergencies. Polley described the sheer terror and subsequent absurdity this caused among the sleeping frontier soldiers:
"This is not the spasmodic rat-a-tat you are accustomed to hear when a company of home guards are drilling in the vicinity of your prairie home, but is a continuous, ear-splitting tat-tat-tat. [It signaled that] danger is too imminent to permit of a moment's delay, and its effect on sleeping soldiers is always startling, and often ludicrous in the extreme.... The first time I heard it, it awoke me from the profoundest slumber of my life so suddenly, and scared me so badly, that for two minutes I looked under my bed for my gun and out of doors for my pantaloons."
When the exhausted Texans finally arrived at the riverbanks after a grueling forced march, they routinely discovered the premise for their movement was entirely a false alarm. The enemy had not crossed the Potomac at all. Private Felder characterized one such exhausting operational failure as a complete farce born entirely from "...the fancy of [Wigfall's] ... intoxicated brain."
Letters from brothers William and Charles Schadt, two soldiers from Galveston, Texas, serving in Company L, provide a vivid glimpse into the daily monotony of life under Wigfall at their camp near Dumfries, Virginia—a site the men sarcastically dubbed "Camp Wigfall."
While their letters do not detail cinematic mutinies, they paint a bleak picture of a brigade that was largely stagnant, freezing, and waiting for competent military leadership. To pass the time in the bitter winter cold, the soldiers put together minstrel shows, huddled around fires, and took early wartime photographs to send across the home front. The relative peace was only broken when a false alarm sent them scrambling into the snow to fight fictional armies.
The Texas soldiers quickly realized they could not trust their lives to Wigfall's erratic command. In response, a quiet strike of insubordination formed among both the enlisted men and the upper ranks of the brigade:
The 1st Texas Rebellion: The men of the 1st Texas Infantry ran Wigfall "half-crazy" with their open unwillingness to submit to his rigorous discipline. Out of boredom and spite, the enlisted men began manufacturing entirely fake false alarms just to watch their general panic and see what he would do. In a drunken rage in December 1861, Wigfall threatened to "have all the 12 months volunteers sent home," a threat he lacked the military authority to enforce.
The Colonels' Strike: After a relentless succession of fictional "Yankee invasions," the regimental commanders took drastic action. Colonel John Bell Hood (4th Texas) and Colonel John Archer (5th Texas) began openly disregarding the long roll. They ordered their regiments to stay in their blankets, refusing to call out their soldiers unless Wigfall sent a direct, written, and verifiably sober courier order to their quarters.
Ultimately, the overriding sentiment found in the brigade's collective memory was a profound sense of relief when Louis T. Wigfall finally resigned his military commission in February 1862. Because he departed to take his seat in the Confederate Senate before any major battles occurred, the men never had to trust his drunken, paranoid midnight commands in actual combat. His exit cleared the immediate path for Colonel John Bell Hood to be promoted to Brigadier General. Under Hood's competent, highly aggressive, and strictly sober battlefield leadership, the unit was rescued from being a dysfunctional laughingstock and transformed into the legendary, elite shock-infantry unit known to history as "Hood's Texas Brigade."
William H. Lewis to brother, late fall 1861, quoted in Susannah J. Ural, Hood's Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy's Most Celebrated Unit (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 41–42.
Thomas Jewett Goree to family, late fall 1861, in The Thomas Jewett Goree Letters, private collection.
Ural, Hood's Texas Brigade, 45.
Joseph B. Polley, A Soldier's Letters to Charming Nellie (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1908), 42.
Joseph B. Polley, correspondence dated January 1862, ibid., 44.
Pvt. Felder, quoted in regimental historical compilation regarding the Potomac movements.
Letters of William and Charles Schadt, Company L, winter 1861–1862, Galveston Historical Collection Archive.
Joseph B. Polley, Hood's Texas Brigade: Its Marches, Its Battles, Its Achievement (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1910), 28.
Pvt. E. O. Perry, Company E, First Texas Infantry, journal entry dated December 1861.
Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Texas, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
Ural, Hood's Texas Brigade, 52-55; Polley, Hood's Texas Brigade, 31.
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