Welcome! I'm currently working on a non-fiction biography of my great, great grand-father Daniel Trigg of Abingdon, Virginia. The basis of it is my master's thesis.

My intention is to solicit feedback while it's a work in progress, so please feel free to read the current drafts and comment honestly, thanks! You must be a registered user to comment, but that only takes a couple of minutes!

About Daniel Trigg

Trigg entered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis at the age of fifteen, and two-and-a-half years later he made the difficult decision to go with his beloved native state of Virginia when the Civil War broke out. His roommate and friend, Silas Terry of Kentucky, however, opted for the Federal navy. Trigg saw action early on at the Battle of Hampton Roads that included the historic duel between the world’s first ironclads, the Merrimac and the Monitor. He was sent along with other young officers to France to man new warships which the South counted on but never received. Toward the end of the war, he went on at least one secret mission to mine rivers in Virginia to secure the supposed kidnapping route of Pres. Abraham Lincoln. Trigg ended up with Comm. John Randolph Tucker’s bedraggled sailors during the retreat from Richmond and fought and surrendered in his first land battle at Sayler’s Creek. After his release from prison, Trigg, only twenty-two years of age, decided to fight as a soldier in South America. He was hired for his torpedo experience and nearly died twice before making it back to Virginia. He managed, though, to keep a journal of his adventures in the southern hemisphere that sheds valuable light on his character.

Through all of this, the Civil War and the South American detour, Trigg’s attitude was one of being the “romantic adventurer” — a typical profile in the nineteenth-century South, but one not generally carried out. After this period of instability and uncertainty in his young life (his “romantic adventurer” period) Trigg shifted to a more conservative stance after he returned home from South America — it was a search for stability. He came of age. This change in character echoed the shift taking place all across the New South and the rest of the country. What other profession than law promised stability and whose very nature was the essence of precedent and established codes of conduct and language? Trigg therefore became a lawyer and was involved in the heated post-Reconstruction politics in Virginia.