1

TOMMY

In December 1912, Woodrow Wilson’s name, picture, and story were all over the newspapers and magazines. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to meet the man who had been elected president of the United States the month before. Office seekers and advice givers figuratively, sometimes literally, banged on his door. Each mail delivery brought invitations to attend ceremonies in his honor around the country. The president-elect evaded the callers for a while by sailing away with his family for an island vacation. He declined invitations to events—except one. He could not resist making a sentimental journey to Staunton, Virginia, the town of his birth, for a celebration of his fifty-sixth birthday.

The trip lived up to all expectations for warmth and festivity. The whole town turned out for a parade, and the guest of honor spoke at two events. For him, the highlight of the occasion came when he spent the night of his birthday sleeping in the same bed, in the same room, in the same house where he had been born. Also during the visit, he went to see the only member of his family who still lived in the town, an elderly aunt on his mother’s side of the family who was slightly deaf. She remembered him from his childhood, but she had not followed his life and career since then, and she did not even call him by the name he had been using since his early twenties. “Well, Tommy, what are you doing now?” she asked. “I’ve been elected President, Aunt Janie,” he shouted into her ear trumpet. “Well, well,” she answered. “President of what?”¹

When Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born, on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, his birth was big news in this town of just under 4,000 people.² He was the third child and first son of the Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson, minister of Staunton’s leading church, the First Presbyterian Church. He was born in the house that the church provided for the minister, which Presbyterians call a manse, and this manse stood among the newest and finest houses in the town. Staunton is in the Shenandoah Valley, then a diversified agricultural area with a focus on wheat growing and comparatively few plantations and slaves. It drew its population largely from the Scotch-Irish who had migrated southward from Pennsylvania and Maryland. They had made the valley strongly Presbyterian.

The boy’s father, thirty-four-year-old Joseph Wilson, was himself the son of Scotch-Irish immigrants, and he had been born and raised in Ohio. In his youth, he had worked as a printer on the newspaper edited by his father, who had also served as a representative in the Ohio legislature and as a state judge. He had sent Joseph, his youngest son, to Jefferson (now Washington and Jefferson) College in Pennsylvania, where he graduated as valedictorian of his class in 1844. Joseph Wilson had taught school for a year before going to seminary, first in Ohio and then in New Jersey, at Princeton. He had taken his first pulpit in Pennsylvania while teaching rhetoric part-time at Jefferson College. Teaching had drawn him to Virginia in 1851, when he became professor of chemistry and natural sciences at Hampden-Sydney College. Preaching, however, was his heart’s desire, and he served as a temporary, or supply, minister while at Hampden-Sydney. In December 1854, two years before his son’s birth, Joseph Wilson had received the call to Staunton, and the following June he had moved there with his family to fill the pulpit of its large, prosperous Presbyterian church.³

The new minister did not fit the prevalent stereotype of the stern pastor. He was outgoing and witty, much given to puns. He smoked cigars and a pipe heavily, played billiards incessantly, dressed well, and took an occasional drink of Scotch whisky. He was tall and handsome, with warm brown eyes, and he endeared himself particularly to his female parishioners. According to one relative, Joseph Wilson’s first son believed “that if he just had his father’s face and figure, it wouldn’t make any difference what he said.” Yet Joseph Wilson did care about what he said and how he said it. Having taught rhetoric, he was well versed in secular as well as religious speaking, and he followed the contemporary oratorical stars of American politics, especially Daniel Webster. Perhaps not surprisingly, Joseph Wilson remained fascinated with worldly success and would try to push his first son toward that goal.⁴

In those days, a truly successful Presbyterian minister needed intellect and an intellectual pedigree. With their intricate Calvinist theology, the Presbyterians laid great stress on learning and analysis, but Joseph Wilson had little taste or patience for the intricacies of that theology. Likewise, as the son of a self-made man and Scotch-Irish immigrant, he enjoyed no particular standing in Presbyterian circles. But he did have one advantage: he had married well.

Joseph Wilson’s wife was Janet Woodrow, the English-born daughter of a Scottish-born and -educated Presbyterian minister. Janet, or Jessie, as her family called her, was eight years younger than her husband, whom she had married in 1849 at the age of nineteen. Her father, Thomas Woodrow, had graduated from the University of Glasgow and its seminary and counted among his ancestors eminent seventeenth-century Scottish divines. When Jessie was five, her family immigrated to the United States from England, enduring a rough ocean crossing, which her mother did not long survive. They eventually settled in Ohio as well, where Jessie and her four older siblings were raised by their mother’s sister; their father had remarried when Jessie was thirteen and had gradually distanced himself from his first family. Those experiences had left Jessie Woodrow a shy, timid, sometimes self-pitying young woman. She also lacked her future husband’s good looks. The few surviving photographs of her suggest that it was from her that her son got his long jaw and angular features. He also inherited her blue-gray eyes, which reportedly changed color according to his mood, as had hers.⁵

In Presbyterian circles, everyone regarded the Woodrows as enjoying a higher status than the Wilsons. This sense of superiority was not just a matter of background. Jessie’s older brother, James, or Jimmy, Woodrow was a rising star in their little Presbyterian firmament. A friend of Joseph Wilson’s at Jefferson College, Jimmy Woodrow had studied first at Harvard, with the leading American scientist Louis Agassiz, and then in Germany, at Heidelberg. In 1861, at the age of thirty-three, he would become a professor at the South’s leading Presbyterian seminary, the Columbia Theological Seminary, then located in South Carolina. The Woodrow connection was something that Joseph Wilson cherished.

The young couple had two daughters before their son was born: Marion Williamson Wilson, born in Pennsylvania in 1851, and Anne, or Annie, Josephine Wilson, born at Hampden-Sydney in 1853. As happy as the Wilsons were with the births of their daughters, they made a great deal more of the birth of their first son. In the first surviving description of him, when he was four months old, Jessie Wilson told her father that he was “a fine healthy fellow … and just as fat as he can be. Every one tells us, he is abeautiful boy. What is best of all, he is just as good as he can be—as little trouble as it is possible for a baby to be. You may be sure Joseph is very proud of his fine little son. … Our boy is named ‘Thomas Woodrow.’ ”⁶

• • •

The Woodrow connection played an indispensable part in Joseph Wilson’s rise in his denominational world. In August 1857, he preached at James Woodrow’s wedding, at the First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia. His sermon evidently went over well, because the church issued a call to him the following December. Joseph Wilson was moving up in his world. With more than 12,000 residents, Augusta counted for much in its region’s economy, particularly the lucrative cotton trade. The church there had more members and bigger buildings than Staunton’s First Presbyterian, and its manse was larger and grander and provided more slaves to serve the minister and his wife and children.⁷ Joseph Wilson also parlayed his professional advancement still further with a shrewd political move. In May 1858, he invited the president of Oglethorpe University, where James Woodrow was then teaching, to take part in his installation service. A few months later, possibly with some prompting from James Woodrow, the president repaid the compliment by conferring an honorary doctorate of divinity on Joseph Wilson. No title sounded sweeter or more august to Presbyterian ears than Reverend Doctor, and for the rest of his life he would go by the title Dr. Wilson.

The family’s move to Georgia made their son truly a child of the South. Located across the Savannah River from South Carolina, Augusta was the unofficial capital of the region known as the black belt, at first because of the color of its soil. The richness of the soil had made this part of South Carolina and Georgia, together with the lands stretching westward to the Mississippi River, a singularly attractive place for producing the most profitable commodity in the world at that time, cotton, which had fueled a half-century-long economic boom. But this form of economic development exacted a high price from the labor force, which planters paid by using large numbers of slaves to work the plantations, thereby giving an ironic racial twist to the name of the region. At the time of the Wilson family’s move to Augusta, slaves made up just under a third of the city’s residents, but in the surrounding county they constituted half the population.⁸

The Wilson family soon felt a huge consequence of their move to Augusta. According to his own account, their son’s first lasting memory from childhood went back to November 1860, just before his fourth birthday, “hearing some one pass and say that Mr. Lincoln was elected and there was to be war. Catching the intense tones of his excited voice, I remember running in to ask my father what it meant.” Lincoln’s victory at the polls set off a chain of cataclysmic events. Six weeks later, South Carolina moved to secede from the Union, and the rest of the black belt, or Deep South, states quickly followed suit, including Georgia, on January 19, 1861. Though not a politician, Joseph Wilson was in the thick of the events that led to secession and the ensuing four years of civil war.⁹

The southern wings of all the major Protestant denominations except the Episcopalians likewise seceded from their national organizations. Despite his Ohio birth and upbringing, Joseph Wilson fervently embraced the cause of the South. When the southern presbyteries withdrew from the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America during the summer of 1861, he offered his church as the meeting place for the newly formed General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, which convened there the following December. That body elected him to its third-ranking office, permanent clerk, and in 1865 he moved up to the second-ranking spot, stated clerk, managing the organization’s finances and serving as its parliamentarian and record keeper. At the war’s end, the southern Presbyterians dropped the reference to the Confederacy from their denominational name but did not rejoin their northern brethren. Joseph Wilson would remain stated clerk of this denomination for thirty-three years. He also saw active service in the Confederate cause. He joined a group of influential citizens of Augusta in a home defense unit and made at least one trip to the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia, to inspect hospitals and confer with high-ranking officials, and he also served briefly as an army chaplain.¹⁰

The war and the denominational split caused a family rift as well. The break was worse with the Wilsons than with the Woodrows. Joseph Wilson’s father had earlier taken anti-slavery stands, and two of his brothers became Union generals. Joseph Wilson did not resume relations with his extended family after the war, and his son would not get to know his Wilson relatives until he was a grown man. On the Woodrow side, things were different. James Woodrow’s move to the Columbia Seminary in 1861 had placed him in the citadel of secession. During the war he put his scientific training to use as chief chemist of the Confederacy, which meant that he oversaw munitions manufacturing for the Confederate armies. His and Jessie’s father, Thomas Woodrow, remained in Ohio and sided with the northern Presbyterians, but after the war Joseph Wilson invited his father-in-law to preach in Augusta, and his son grew up knowing his Woodrow relatives from the North.¹¹

The war came home to the Wilson family in Augusta when wounded Confederate soldiers began to arrive. In 1863, the government took over the church to use as a military hospital and its grounds to use as a temporary detention camp for captured Union soldiers on their way to the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville. Fortunately for Augusta, the enemy bypassed the city the next year when William Tecumseh Sherman’s army made its March to the Sea, but Union forces did occupy Augusta at the end of the war.

The early 1860s were an often exciting, sometimes frightening, time to be a young boy there, but what effect this Civil War childhood had on the Wilsons’ son is hard to judge. He almost certainly saw and heard wounded and dying soldiers in the town and in his father’s church and prisoners of war in the churchyard. At the end of the war, he watched a conquering army occupy his hometown, and he saw the captured former Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, being transported to prison. Yet those sights and sounds do not seem to have affected him deeply. “To me the Civil War and its terrible scenes are but a memory of a short day,” he wrote in a note to himself when he was in his early twenties. Nor did his boyhood experiences fill him with repugnance toward fighting or war. He may or may not have gotten into fights as a boy, but he certainly liked the idea of fighting, and like many other boys he would dream about adventure in arms. Later, when he was about to become president, he remarked that he “thought there was no more glorious way to die than in battle.” If the Civil War left a psychological imprint on the boy or the man, it was buried so deep as to be imponderable.¹²

Except for the war, he seems to have had a happy, healthy childhood. His mother later confessed to him, “I always wanted to call you Woodrow from the first.” But they called him Tommy, and that was the name he would use until his early twenties. His older sisters reportedly adored their little brother, and his mother unquestionably played the biggest role in his early life, while his father was often away. Her son wrote to his wife, “I remember how I clung to her (a laughed-at ‘mamma’s boy’) till I was a great big fellow; but love of the best womanhood came to me and entered my heart through those apron-strings.” As an urban minister’s son, he had a more sheltered upbringing than did the mischief-filled, rough-and-tumble southern white boys depicted in Mark Twain’s stories. One of his friends in Augusta later recalled him as “a dignified boy” who on horseback was “a conservative rider … very careful and very orderly.” He and his friends organized a baseball club after the war, and the same friend remembered him as “not active or especially strong, although his figure was well knit and he was what you would call a ‘stocky’ boy.” Yet like Tom Sawyer, Tommy Wilson had a rich, elaborate fantasy life and enjoyed a certain amount of mischief; he once recalled that he had liked cockfighting, evidently using the family rooster.¹³

Tommy’s closeness to his mother did not spring from any need for shelter from boyhood’s knocks and scrapes. Rather, what was most important was that his “love of the best womanhood” had come from her. The next sentence in his letter to his wife read: “If I had not lived with such a mother I could not have won and seemed to deserve—in part, perhaps, deserved, through transmitted virtues—such a wife—the strength, the support, the human source of my life.” Throughout his life, Wilson would spend more time with women and enjoy female companionship more than most men of his era. He would value women not only as wives and lovers but also as friends and confidants with whom he could share his deepest thoughts and emotions.¹⁴

In those early years, his mother did help to shelter him from one significant childhood travail. Tommy Wilson did not appear at first to be very bright. He was slow in learning to read. His presidential physician, Cary T. Grayson, later claimed that Wilson told him that he had not learned his letters until he was nine, and one of his daughters said that he did not read comfortably until he was twelve. It is not clear just what Tommy’s problem was. He told Dr. Grayson that his mother and his sisters would read to him by the hour, “and he would listen as long as anyone chose to read.” The story smacks of rationalization, although it hints at how protective Jessie Wilson was of Tommy. He was her favorite of all her children, and he enjoyed his primacy even after the birth of a second son, in 1867. Born when Tommy was ten, Joseph (Josie) Ruggles Wilson, Jr., was the last of the family’s children. People later described Josie Wilson as a smaller, brown-eyed, less sparkling version of his older brother. Josie would never enjoy the attention and solicitude that Tommy received from both his parents.¹⁵

Tommy’s difficulty with reading most likely stemmed from some physical cause. His vision may have contributed to the problem. As an adult, Wilson would wear glasses to correct astigmatism and farsightedness, but he did not begin to wear them until after college. A better explanation may be that he suffered from some kind of developmental disorder. At the age of thirty-nine, when he suffered from semiparalysis in his right hand, Wilson easily shifted to writing with his left hand, producing the same neat script with almost no practice. Such ambidexterity, which can manifest itself in childhood as a lack of preference for either hand, often accompanies slowness in speaking and reading.¹⁶

Young Tommy Wilson may also have suffered from a form of dyslexia, a condition that would not begin to be identified for another thirty years. Several known facts support this explanation. He never became a rapid or voracious reader, and he developed ways to compensate for that shortcoming. As a freshman in college, he wrote in his diary, “I sometimes wish that I could read a little faster but I do not know that it would be an advantage.” His brother-in-law Stockton Axson later remembered Wilson saying in his thirties, “I wonder if I am the slowest reader in the world.” As an adolescent, Tommy eased the burden of writing by teaching himself shorthand. When he was sixteen, he began a two-year correspondence course in the Graham method. As a writer, Wilson would later confess that he composed entire paragraphs and even longer passages in his mind before putting them down on paper. As a speaker, he would deliver long, well-organized addresses from the sketchiest of notes—usually just a few shorthand jottings—or no notes at all. Other known facts, however, work against the notion that he suffered from dyslexia. He soon did learn to read, and he never made the grammar and spelling mistakes that often plague dyslexics. Foreign languages also pose problems for dyslexics, but in college he earned good grades in Latin and Greek and French, and he used German in his scholarly work, although he never became fluent in any foreign language.¹⁷

In any case, this experience left the boy with no discernible psychological scars, much of the credit for which belonged to his parents. His mother took the lead at first, giving her son more than comfort and protection. The letters she wrote to him after he went away to college show how fervently she believed in his gifts. In one, she told him, “I hope you will lay aside all timidity—and make the most of all your powers, my darling.” One of the few people who appreciated the deep imprint Jessie Wilson left on her son was David Bryant, one of the family’s African American servants in Wilmington, North Carolina, who would tell one of Wilson’s biographers, “Outside Mr. Tommy was his father’s boy. But inside he was his mother all over.”¹⁸

Almost everyone recognized his father’s influence. After the Civil War ended, Joseph Wilson began to play a bigger role in his son’s life. From the time Tommy was eight or nine until he went off to college, he spent a lot of time in his father’s company. “He was good fun,” Wilson recalled in his fifties; “he was a good comrade; … and by constant association with him, I saw the world and the tasks of the world through his eyes.” Even after Tommy started school, he spent Mondays, which was a minister’s day off, with his father, who took him to see sights he thought “might interest or educate a boy.” Afterward, his father would have Tommy write an essay about what he had seen. After his son had read the essay aloud, Dr. Wilson would say, “Now put down your paper and tell me in your own words what you saw.” Tommy would then give a shorter, more direct account, and his father would respond, “Now write it down that way.”¹⁹

After he mastered his letters, Tommy helped Dr. Wilson with his duties as stated clerk of the southern Presbyterians. He would attend the meetings and help keep the minutes and review parliamentary procedure. Those experiences may have given Tommy a taste for debate and organization, but the type of politics that he witnessed in those denominational gatherings was more like what he would later find in college faculties—usually self-righteous and self-important, frequently petty, often grudge-ridden. As for his interest in “real-world” politics, it seems to have grown out of his father’s having him study speeches by celebrated orators with an eye to improving them and out of the surrounding environment. Later, Tommy remarked to a college friend, “As usual politics is the all-engrossing topic of conversation. Southerners seem born with an interest in public affairs though it is too often of late a very ignorant interest.”²⁰

As those Monday jaunts and the essay writing suggest, Joseph Wilson gave Tommy more than companionship. His son later called him the “best teacher I ever had,” and his father did spend much of their time together teaching the boy, particularly about the use of words. The core of his teaching consisted, in his son’s recollection, of an analogy to firearms: “When you frame a sentence don’t do it as if you were loading a shotgun, but as if you were loading a rifle. … [S]hoot with a single bullet and hit that one thing alone.” The son remembered his parental instruction as nothing but joyful and loving. The elder Wilson began his letters with “My darling son” or “My darling boy” when Tommy was in college and even afterward, the letters themselves reading like elaborations of Polonius’s advice to Laertes in Hamlet. In one, he admonished, “Let the esteem you have won be only as a stimulant to fresh exertion.” In other letters, he exhorted, “Study manner, dearest Tommy, as much as matter. Both are essential.” His father also bucked Tommy up when he encountered setbacks. “You are manly. You are true. You are most lovable in every way and deserving of confidence.” Plainly, Joseph and Tommy Wilson regarded each other with warmth and happiness and love. One of his nieces supposedly declared, “Uncle Joseph never loved anyone except Cousin Woodrow.”²¹

From Tommy’s late teens on, Joseph Wilson’s circumstances conspired to make his older son the main object of his hopes and dreams. In 1870, the ambitious clergyman took another step upward in his southern Presbyterian world. The family left Augusta for Columbia, South Carolina, where Dr. Wilson became a professor at the Columbia Theological Seminary. With just over 9,000 residents, Columbia was smaller than Augusta, but it was the capital of the state and the home of the state university, as well as the seat of the Presbyterians’ most prestigious seminary in the South, where James Woodrow was on the faculty. This was a plum assignment for Joseph Wilson. The idyll lasted less than four years. Joseph Wilson was a popular teacher, but he entangled himself in the kind of political snare that often afflicts churches and faculties. Students balked when he tried to require them to attend his chapel services rather than the services at other churches in town.²² Wilson consequently resigned from the seminary faculty and moved to a well-paid pulpit in Wilmington, North Carolina. He would spend the rest of his working life on a gradual downhill slide in professional esteem.

Not surprisingly, Joseph Wilson would yearn for Tommy to redeem his own thwarted ambitions. Indeed, the boy was beginning to show promise as a vehicle for his father’s hopes. Columbia had broadened Tommy’s horizons. From the time he was thirteen until he first left for college three years later, Tommy lived in an environment that was as much academic as it was clerical. Moreover, thanks mainly to having on its faculty James Woodrow and George Howe, a New England–born and–educated theologian whose son married Tommy’s sister Annie, this environment was sophisticated in intellectual matters and liberal in religious thinking.

The schools Tommy attended did not challenge his mind, but his imaginative life continued to flourish, with his fantasies now turning to armed exploits at sea. He fantasized about organizing his friends into such units as the “Royal Lance Guards,” assigning them ranks, and giving them knighthoods, and he fancied himself “Lord Thomas W. Wilson, duke of Eagleton, Admiral of the blue.”²³ He continued to play baseball, and music offered another diversion. He also became an accomplished singer, a tenor, and music, both sacred and secular, would remain his main artistic interest outside literature for the rest of his life.

Tommy Wilson also grew fascinated with the subject that would become his life’s work. A cousin recounted that he showed her a picture in his room of the British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone and “remarked that when he was a man he intended to be a statesman such as this hero of his.” A friend in Columbia chided him, “Never mind Tom you just wait till you and me get to be members of the US Senate.” It might seem surprising that as the son, grandson, and nephew of Presbyterian ministers, he did not want to become one too. Some evidence suggests that his father wanted him to follow in his footsteps, perhaps to assuage his own disappointments over his career setbacks. But it is more likely that Joseph Wilson never pushed Tommy toward the ministry and viewed his son’s nascent interest in politics with relish, not regret.²⁴

Not choosing the ministry as his vocation implied no want of religious commitment on Tommy’s part. He took the serious step of joining the church when he was fifteen, which evidently required a personal decision to accept Christ as his savior, as young Presbyterians were expected to do. Tommy resembled his father more than he did James Woodrow and others on the seminary faculty in having little taste for Calvinist theology or metaphysical speculation. Religious books would rarely figure in his reading. When he was twenty-four, he confessed to a friend that his reading had been “very unusual in kind. I’ve been looking into some Biblical discussion, thus coming at least to the outskirts of theology.” He added, “As an antidote to Biblical criticism I’ve been reading aloud to my sister and cousin a novel by Thomas Hardy.” Eight years later, on his thirty-third birthday, he would record in a private journal, “I used to wonder vaguely that I did not have the same deep-reaching spiritual difficulties that I read of other young men having. Isaw the intellectual difficulties, but I was not troubled by them: they seemed to have no connection with my faith in the essentials of the religion I had been taught.”²⁵

Still, Tommy Wilson’s upbringing in one of the most liberal and sophisticated religious and intellectual environments in America at that time gave him familiarity with the basic concepts of Protestant thought, Lutheran as well as Calvinist. He believed that Christians were instruments of God’s will and must fulfill their predestined part, but his upbringing among learned Presbyterians stood in stark opposition to evangelicals who stressed emotional commitment and personal salvation. Attitudes and approaches borrowed from evangelical Protestantism had spawned the pre–Civil War moral reform movements, such as the temperance and anti-slavery crusades. Those attitudes would flourish again in such varied incarnations as the Protestant Social Gospel, anti-liquor and anti-vice crusades, and an overall evangelical style of political reform. Yet despite a deep religious faith and a look and manner that would later strike some observers as preacherish, the man Tommy Wilson grew up to be would not adopt those approaches. It was not this preacher’s-son-turned-president but rather his greatest rival, himself a religious skeptic, who would call their office a “bully pulpit.” Wilson did not call the presidency by that name, nor did he think about it and politics that way, largely because his religious upbringing had inoculated him against such notions.

Tommy Wilson’s upbringing also inoculated him to a degree against the influence of the larger environment around him—the South. With an Ohio-born father, an English-born mother, and foreign-born grandparents, he did not have deep roots in the South or any place in the United States, and he raised the question of his southern identity whenever he opened his mouth. By the time he went north to college, at the age of eighteen, he lacked the distinguishing characteristic of his native region—a southern accent. The close-knit nature of the Wilson family may have insulated him somewhat from his surroundings, but Tommy had plenty of exposure to southern-accented playmates and schoolmates, together with the family’s African American servants and the general populace of Augusta and Columbia. In adolescence, he seems to have consciously rid himself of a southern accent, training himself to speak with a broad a, which he considered more pleasing and more refined. He would also try, without success, to get his Georgia-born and -raised fiancée, Ellen Axson, to rid herself of her southern accent.²⁶

Yet Tommy Wilson was still a southerner. A friend during his freshman year in college remembered him as “very full of the South and quite secessionist. One night we sat up until dawn talking about [the Civil War], he taking the southern side and getting quite bitter about it.” As an adult, he would avow that “a boy never gets over his boyhood, and never can change those subtle influences which have become a part of him, … [so] that the only place in the country, the only place in the world, where nothing has to be explained to me is the South.”²⁷ Being a southerner made him identify with a defeated, impoverished, disadvantaged region. As the son of a well-regarded and well-paid minister, he never knew poverty or social inferiority firsthand, but his local advantages paled in comparison with the wealth and status that he encountered when he went north to college. His southern allegiance also fixed his choice of party identification. Wilson would remain a Democrat throughout many years of residence in the North, but unlike many northern Democrats, he would never carry disaffection with the party’s later turn toward agrarian reform and evangelical-style politics to the point of switching parties or turning into a disgruntled conservative. Identification with his underdog native region would help to keep him on the side of reform.

Tommy Wilson could not have been a young white southerner without encountering race. He grew up surrounded by African Americans. His family had not owned slaves because the common practice was for Presbyterian churches to lease slaves, usually from parishioners, for their ministers’ use. Tommy and those slaves and, later, servants had known each other well. In moving to Columbia, the Wilson family moved to a city and a state where a majority of the population was African American, and while they lived there, African Americans served in Congress, held statewide offices, and made up a majority in the state legislature, as they would for nearly all the years of Reconstruction. Yet African Americans remained invisible to Wilson. References to people of color almost never appear in any of the documents or recollections of Tommy’s early years. Later, he told a friend of how some blacks had seemed awestruck when he practiced oratory in the pulpit of his father’s church in Wilmington. “I’m Southern,” he commented, “but I have very little ease with coloured people or they with me. Why is it? For I care enormously about them.” Wilson’s later dealings with matters of race suggest otherwise.²⁸

Tommy Wilson’s youth in the South ended after his first foray into college education. In the fall of 1873, at the age of sixteen, he entered Davidson College in North Carolina. Small and struggling, like other southern colleges, Davidson was a spartan place, with each student having to draw his own water, cut his own wood, and light the fire in his room. The student body numbered only between 100 and 150. Tommy got good grades, except in mathematics, and did a lot of reading on his own. He made friends, took a leading part in the literary and debating society, and played on the baseball team. He spent just one year at Davidson. Why he left is not clear, but contrary to some later reports, ill health does not seem to have been the reason for his withdrawal. He spent the next year at his family’s new home in Wilmington, where he read, helped around the house, practiced oratory, and improved his shorthand skills. He wrote to his shorthand school, “I am studying for entering Princeton College, where I expect to be next session.” The “diffident youth” evidently planned to expand his horizons beyond the bounds of his native South.²⁹

The official name of the institution that eighteen-year-old Tommy Wilson wanted to enter was the College of New Jersey, but from early on it had gone by the name of the town in west-central New Jersey where it was located, Princeton, which by the 1870s boasted a population of about 3,500 people. It was one of nine American colleges founded before the American Revolution, and its main building, Nassau Hall, dating from 1756, was the second-oldest college building in the United States. During the Revolution, Nassau Hall came under fire before and after the battle of Princeton, and it later served briefly as the meeting place of the Continental Congress.³⁰

Princeton’s history was as illustrious as it was long. The college’s early presidents included the theologian Jonathan Edwards and the Scottish-born and -educated divine John Witherspoon, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Its early alumni included three other signers of the Declaration; nine delegates to the Constitutional Convention; the nation’s notorious third vice president, Aaron Burr; and most notable of all, the co-author of The Federalist Papers, co-framer of the Bill of Rights, and fourth president, James Madison. Equally important to the members of a Presbyterian minister’s family, Princeton was the first college in America founded by their denomination. Its founders had named Nassau Hall for William, prince of Orange and count of Nassau, the king who secured Protestant succession to the English throne, and the students had adopted orange and black as their college colors.

When Tommy Wilson entered Princeton, in 1875, the college was staging a comeback. Until recently, a succession of lackluster presidents had not upheld the standard set by the early leaders, and more recent alumni had not been as stellar as those from the early years. Princeton had also suffered from the Civil War. Before the war, the college had drawn students from the South, but sectional tensions and the war had constricted and then cut off this source of students. Circumstances had begun to improve only in 1868, with the appointment of an able new president, James McCosh, who had immediately begun to upgrade intellectual standards and recruit students. The class Tommy Wilson entered was the largest in the college’s history, and the place was a good fit for him. With an unbroken succession of minister presidents, Princeton had not strayed far from its denominational roots and embodied the learned, sophisticated, liberal brand of Presbyterianism in which he had grown up. Happily for him, the college allowed plenty of time for reading and solitude. For all of McCosh’s learning and intellectual rigor, he had not made Princeton academically demanding for its students.³¹

Tommy Wilson quickly made friends and fitted in socially, but his classes did not challenge him. Princeton’s curriculum during the first two years consisted entirely, as in most colleges, of prescribed subjects, mainly the classics, and the classroom experience featured incessant daily drill. Yet the academic situation seemed to suit Tommy Wilson. “He was not a hard student and had no ambition to stand high,” recalled his classmate Robert McCarter. Instead, he “read a great deal—good books.” Another classmate, Robert (Bob) Bridges, who became his closest friend at Princeton, remembered that “what he called ‘the play of the mind’ was as exhilarating to him as the play of the body to an athlete. It was as natural for him as an undergraduate to talk about [Edmund] Burke … as it was for the rest of us to allude to [James Fenimore] Cooper or [the popular boys’ novelist] Mayne Reid.”³²

He paid scant regard to what went on in class. He confessed in his shorthand diary that he cut class to read Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England: “It has all the fascination for me of a novel.” Yet he experienced an intellectual awakening. Soon after he arrived at Princeton, he wrote home excitedly, “Father, I have made a discovery; I have found that I have a mind.” His diary entries crackled with excitement at his discoveries and reflections, and his growing sense of his intellectual powers filled him with doubt as well as confidence. “I have come to the conclusion,” he wrote, “… that my mind is a very ordinary one indeed. I am nothing as far as intellect goes. But I can plod and work.” Despite his unconcern for classes, he got good grades. In a class that averaged 180 students during his four years at Princeton, he always ranked in the highest quarter, though never among the “honor men,” who were limited to the top twenty-one students.³³

His academic performance also came in spite of his preoccupation with sports, which were beginning to emerge on the college scene. Princeton played its first schedule of football games against other colleges during Tommy’s sophomore year. Although he was big enough to make the team in those days, having grown to his full height of five feet eleven inches, with a medium build, he did not try to play, but he did become an avid fan of the game. Baseball remained his favorite sport, and at the end of his freshman year he noted, “This is the first day this week that I have not played baseball.” He also joined an eating club, called the Alligators. In a photograph of the Alligators taken during Wilson’s senior year, he is the most recognizable figure because he is the only one to make the jaunty gesture of doffing his hat.³⁴

Of the three celebrated temptations of college men—tobacco, alcohol, and sex—Tommy Wilson made no mention in his diaries. One of his daughters told his first biographer that she remembered “hearing her father say that he had never smoked because the old Doctor [Joseph Wilson] had done enough of it for the two.” His ambitions and training as a speaker may also have led him to consider smoking a hazard to his voice, as did some aspiring orators of his generation. Later, Wilson did become a moderate drinker—like his father, of Scotch whisky—but alcohol did not flow as freely at Princeton in the 1870s as it subsequently would. Nor did sex—at least in the form of the romantic associations permissible among proper young men and women of that time—loom large. He later tried to explain away a post-college romance to his fiancée this way: “I was just fresh from Princeton where for four years I had been leading what was, to all intents and purposes, a monastic life.”³⁵

Tommy Wilson found outlets for “the play of the mind” in speaking and writing. Of Princeton’s two venerable debating societies, he joined Whig, where the debate topics featured his favorite subject—politics. In his freshman year he began to reflect on what he saw as the shortcomings of the system of government in the United States as compared with Britain’s parliamentary institutions, noting, “How much happier [?] she [the United States] would be now if she had England’s form of government instead of the miserable delusion of a republic. A republic too founded upon the notion of abstract liberty!”³⁶ That preference for British institutions and practices most likely stemmed from pride in his mother’s English birth and his family’s Scottish heritage, combined with his southerner’s resentment toward the triumphant North. Rejection of universal suffrage for men was becoming a widely held article of faith among “better” people throughout the country, and it was one of his father’s strongest convictions.

Wilson would soon change some of those views, especially the bias against republics and universal suffrage. But that early statement contained two significant elements of his later political thought. One was the penchant for comparing the British and American systems of government, and the other was his scorn for “the notion of abstract liberty,” which showed how early and how thoroughly he had absorbed Edmund Burke’s fundamental approach to politics—the rejection of notions of applying general principles and sweeping theories to public life and the belief that institutions and parties must emerge organically from human experience.

His political views were already changing by the end of his freshman year. Twelve years later, he told a fellow scholar, “Ever since I have had independent judgments of my own I have been a Federalist (!)” By “a Federalist,” he meant the rejection of prevailing southern state-rights and limited-government views and the espousal of a strong, centralized national government, along the lines expounded by Alexander Hamilton, who would become his favorite among the founders of the Republic. Wilson also claimed that the “mixture of elements in me—full identification with the South, non-Southern blood, and Federalist principles”—instilled “a detachment of my affectionate, reminiscent sympathies from my historical judgments.”³⁷

In his sophomore year, Wilson began writing for publication at Princeton. In 1876, the faculty approved student petitions to start a campus newspaper, which took the name The Princetonian. This student paper became young Wilson’s major activity in addition to his participation in Whig. His first contribution was a long letter signed “W,” which deplored “the fact that very little attention is paid to oratory in Princeton College.” He came into his own during his last two years. He had already moved into the most desirable housing on campus, the newly opened Witherspoon Hall, where he joined a coterie of student leaders known as the Witherspoon Gang. Overlapping with his eating club, the Alligators, the Witherspoon Gang included such close friends as Bob Bridges, who would later distinguish himself as a poet and editor of Scribner’s Magazine; Charles (Charlie) Talcott, a future lawyer who shared Wilson’s interest in politics and would later serve in Congress; and Hiram “the Cow” Woods, who would become a physician and professor of medicine in Baltimore.³⁸ Another future lawyer who roomed in Witherspoon, wrote for the Princetonian, and belonged to the Alligators, Mahlon (May) Pitney was not such a close friend of Wilson’s. Pitney would also serve in Congress and would become a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, appointed by Wilson’s Republican predecessor.

During those final years at Princeton, Tommy still read on his own, although he devoted more time during his junior year to writing for The Princetonian. His harping on Princeton’s deficiencies in oratorical training took on a sharper edge, while he ridiculed charges that football was dangerous and brutal. In his senior year, he ascended to the top position, managing editor. Another editor in 1879 was his successor in the next class, a tall, gifted mathematician named Henry (Harry) Burchard Fine, who would later become a dean and Wilson’s right-hand man during his presidency of Princeton.

“He ran a good paper,” Tommy’s classmate Robert McCarter recalled long afterward. “I can remember him now running around with a memo pad, taking shorthand notes; he worked hard.” Wilson left his stamp on The Princetonian. In contrast to his predecessor as managing editor, he included almost no references to religion and instead covered and commented on student activities and athletics. His editorials reflected his major interests, particularly speaking. In one, he pleaded for more opportunities for debate, because “debate is the chief field of oratory outside of the pulpit. … Oratory is persuasion, not the declaiming of essays.”³⁹ Those editorials may also have been part of a self-serving and none-too-subtle campaign on Wilson’s part for a prominent speaking role at his graduation: he was describing the kind of orator that he was striving to be.

One essay from this time, which was not published, gives the first evidence of this young man’s newfound detachment and independent judgment. Titled “Some Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs,” this work deplores “the entire and almost fatal separation of power and responsibility.” What sets this essay apart from Tommy’s earlier musings is an about-face on universal suffrage, which he now called “the blessing that it is capable of becoming.” Acknowledging the view that universal suffrage had lowered the tone of American politics, he argued, “This is one side of universal suffrage: look at the other. While it is indisputably true that people can comprehend great truths, is it not as true that people can comprehend these truths and that they must be educated into an acceptance of them?”⁴⁰ Young Wilson was becoming a convinced democrat, and he was beginning to grasp what would become the central tenet of his concept of leadership—education of the public.

By contrast, Joseph Wilson told his son, “Either a limitation of suffrage or anarchy in twenty-five years or sooner. I do not refer to the Negroes any more than to the ignorant Northern voters.” Conflict between the young man’s growing independence of thought and filial loyalty caused him to pass up a chance at the highest oratorical honor at Princeton. He refused to take part in the Lynde debate because he would have had to argue publicly in favor of universal suffrage; he lamely claimed to his father that the subject did not interest him. Wilson was not elected to be a class officer, either. That may have been because other classmates resented the Alligators and the Witherspoon Gang as a privileged clique that dominated college affairs. If so, that was ironic, because the Princeton class of 1879 included young men from New York and Chicago such as Cleveland Dodge and Cyrus McCormick, whose families were far richer and more socially prominent than the families of Wilson and his friends. The college was small enough for all the students to know each other, but Wilson was not particularly friendly with his upper-crust classmates. Nor was he chosen to be valedictorian. The faculty selected William F. Magie, who later recalled, “Wilson ought to have had it.” The faculty evidently resented Wilson’s outspoken criticisms of them and the curriculum in The Princetonian, together with his thinly veiled campaign for the valedictorian’s spot.⁴¹

Editing the college paper and speaking at Whig cut down on Wilson’s outside reading, but not completely. In fact, he began a more purposeful program of self-education, which led him to discover a major intellectual influence. Five years later, he noted, “My reading in constitutional law and history had begun to widen about a year before I left Princeton,” when he had come upon the writings of the recently deceased English political commentator Walter Bagehot. Of those writings, he wrote that his “appetite for the investigation was whetted by my admiration … and finally demanded a comparative examination of our own constitution as it exists outside of the books and stripped of ‘the refinements of the literary theory.’” Those writings appealed to Wilson because his previous steeping in Burke’s anti-theoretical approach to politics had made him receptive to Bagehot’s approach to politics and government. Like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about the emperor’s new clothes, this Englishman had been an unrelenting empiricist who insisted upon seeing things as they were, not as they were supposed to be. He had set aside formal institutions and insisted on probing how politics really worked, wanting to know where power resided, who exercised it, and to what ends. Likewise, Bagehot’s direct, pungent writing style caught Wilson’s fancy.⁴²

This new intellectual influence also helped bring about some immediate results for Wilson’s study of politics. At the middle of his senior year, he composed an essay titled “Cabinet Government in the United States,” and in April 1879 a Boston magazine, theInternational Review—whose editor was a young instructor in history at Harvard named Henry Cabot Lodge—accepted it for publication. Appearing in the magazine’s August 1879 issue, “Cabinet Government” was more polished, mature, and thoughtful than anything Wilson had written before. He opened by noting a “marked and alarming decline in statesmanship,” but he argued that its “real cause” lay not in universal suffrage but “in the absorption of all power by a legislature which is practically irresponsible for its acts.” This irresponsibility sprang, in turn, from Congress’s suppression of “thorough, exhaustive, and open discussions” in favor of “dangerous and unwholesome” domination by committees that operated in secret. To remedy this evil, he proposed to give seats in Congress to cabinet members, thereby introducing “responsible Cabinet government in the United States” and opening the way for freer, more open discussion in Congress. Wilson’s solution would deprive “factious government, … [p]arty trickery, legislative chicanery … of the very air that they breathe—the air of secrecy, of concealment,” and would restore the fundamental principle “that debate is the essential function of a popular representative body” and absolutely indispensable to its role in educating the public.⁴³

Wilson also maintained that having cabinet members sit and debate in Congress would forge a link between the executive and legislative branches and thus promote efficiency and lessen corruption. Although he conceded that a cabinet system might bring its own defects and dangers, knitting together executive and legislative powers still struck him as a positive good because it would overcome the “complete separation of the executive and the legislative.” He scoffed at those who would sound “the alarm-bell ofcentralization,” inasmuch as congressional committees already exercised “despotic authority.” The present defects in American government were not, he claimed, “self-adjusting”: without action by “the people from whom springs all authority, … our dangers may overwhelm us, our political maladies may prove incurable.”⁴⁴

“Cabinet Government” would have done credit to an older writer, much less a twenty-two-year-old college senior. The essay is not perfect. The analysis does have a hasty, all-embracing quality, and the tone often suggests an alarmist speech rather than a dispassionate dissection. Such ideas as seating cabinet members in Congress and comparing American and British practices were not original with Wilson, and his writing sometimes lapses into floweriness and convolution. Yet despite those shortcomings, he had come by his thoughts on his own and poured his own thoughts and writings since adolescence into the essay. “Cabinet Government” was also his declaration of intellectual independence. He was embracing both democracy and Hamiltonian federalism, and he was rejecting the limited, noninterventionist government views that were purveyed in high-toned journals and college classrooms, including Princeton’s. “Cabinet Government” was a plea to make politics and government matter more, so that those arenas could become challenging, worthy fields of endeavor for him and others like him.⁴⁵

Publishing his essay in a well-regarded journal complicated Wilson’s plans for what he would do after graduation. Four years later, he wrote to his fiancée, Ellen Axson, “The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was the law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other.” In fact, his choice was not so straightforward. His political ambition evidently remained unchanged. As Robert Bridges later recalled, Wilson regularly joked, “When I meet you in the Senate, I’ll argue that out with you.” Law was the part of his choice that had grown problematic. For years both Wilson and his father had assumed that he would become a lawyer after college. Yet he yearned to follow the path that allowed young men from wealthy, socially prominent families to gain office at an early age. His new editor, Lodge, was already active in Massachusetts politics and would go to Congress within a decade and would become a senator at the age of forty-two. Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt, an upper-class New Yorker, would enter the New York State legislature only a year out of Harvard and become president at the same age at which Lodge entered the Senate. Without such wealth and connections, Wilson could foresee for himself only a long grind at the law to earn a living, which he thought would unfit him for meaningful, broad-gauged public service.⁴⁶

That was only part of the problem. Publishing essays in student publications and now the International Review whetted his desire to write. As he also later told Ellen Axson, “[M]y predilections, ever since I had any that were definite, have always turned very strongly towards a literary life, notwithstanding my decided taste for oratory. … I want to contribute to our literature what no American has ever contributed, studies in the philosophy of our institutions, not the abstract and occult, but the practical and suggestive, philosophy which is at the core of our governmental methods; their use, their meanings, ‘the spirit that makes them workable.’ ”⁴⁷ The quotation came from Bagehot, and Wilson wanted to be an American Bagehot. Over the next six years, he would devote himself to explaining how American politics and government really worked and how to make them work better. During his four years at Princeton, he had experienced an intellectual awakening that was changing his life and taking him away from being Tommy Wilson.