2

WOODROW

In the fall of 1879, twenty-two-year-old Thomas Woodrow Wilson followed the path of many young college graduates when he bowed to family pressure in preparing himself for a career. Dr. Wilson had long assumed that his older son would become a lawyer, and he had aimed much admonition and advice toward that end. Unlike his Princeton friends and classmates, Wilson did not follow the usual path of the time, which was to read law under an established attorney’s tutelage. Instead, he enrolled in the law school of the University of Virginia. This seemed an academically more respectable way to enter the legal profession, but law school and Wilson were a mismatch from the start—and the fault lay with the student, not the institution.

The University of Virginia still bore the impress of its founder, Thomas Jefferson. Even fifty years after young Wilson entered the law school, according to Jefferson’s leading biographer, “they still talked of Mr. Jefferson as though he were in the next room.” Much about the place did strike a responsive chord with this youthful would-be statesman. The university had an intellectual seriousness he had not found at Princeton. “Study is made a serious business and the loafer is the exception,” Wilson wrote to Robert Bridges. He found the teaching at Virginia much better than any he had encountered before: “The course in Law is certainly as fine a one as could be desired,” he told Bridges. Professor John Barbee Minor, whom he called “a perfect teacher,” would be the only instructor whom Wilson would praise in any of the four colleges and universities that he eventually attended; he would later rank Minor among the greatest teachers he ever had, surpassed only by his father. “And the place is cosmopolitan,” he added, “—at least as far as the South is concerned … and one feels that the intellectual forces of the South are forming here.”¹

At Virginia, Wilson made some good friends, sang in the glee club, joined a fraternity, and continued to occupy himself with writing and debate. In an essay he had written the preceding summer, “Self-Government in France,” he contrasted the convulsions of French politics with the gradual achievement of self-government in Britain and America. Openly borrowing from Alexis de Tocqueville’s L’ancien régime, he concluded that France’s “liberties are insecure. They rest upon habits of revolution.” Wilson was stressing the relativity of institutions, and in leaning on Tocqueville, he chose the most insightful interpreter yet of the French Revolution. In another essay, “Congressional Government,” he called the American Constitution “a cornerstone, not a complete building. It is a root, not a perfect vine.” He defended political parties against currently fashionable denigrations, dubbing party government “the best that human wisdom has yet been able to devise,” and he again called for bridging the separation of powers by having the president choose the cabinet from among members of Congress. In that essay, he coined the phrase that would become the title of his first and most influential book, and he showed his lack of reverence for the Constitution and took for granted that a Hamiltonian centralist position was the only one worth considering.²

During his first year in law school, Wilson published some other essays in The Virginia University Magazine. In one, he maintained that it was “next to impossible” for new ideas to flourish “in agricultural communities or rural neighborhoods. … Trade, indeed, is the great nurse of liberal ideas.” Saying that at Jefferson’s university was tantamount to pulling the beard of the Sage of Monticello in his own house. He uttered an even more daring declaration of apostasy when he wrote, “I yield to no one in precedence in love of the South. But because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy.” Successful secession would have perpetuated slavery, which was “enervating our Southern society and exhausting our Southern energies. … Even the damnable cruelty and folly of reconstruction was to be preferred to helpless independence.”³

The debating club at Virginia, the Jefferson Society, was where Wilson had his first real encounter with rivalry and jealousy. In 1879, the society’s other star speaker was William Cabell Bruce, a handsome nineteen-year-old scion of a distinguished Virginia family. The two young contenders disliked each other from the start. Many years later, Bruce dismissed Wilson as a socially stunted Presbyterian minister’s son and noted, “In all my life, I think, I have never known any one so covetous of fame as he was, or so confident that he would attain it.” For his part, Wilson later confessed to his fiancée, “I admire my friend (?) Bruce’s striking face and brilliant talents, but the words would stick in my throat if I were to try to tell him so, because I thoroughly dislike the man.”⁴ It was when he encountered Bruce that Wilson told a cousin that if he had had his father’s looks, it would not have mattered what he said.

The pair collided head-on in April 1880, when they competed in the Jefferson Society’s annual oratorical contest. The question assigned for debate was “Is the Roman Catholic element in the United States a menace to American institutions?” Bruce drew the affirmative, Wilson the negative, stands that allowed these polar opposites to draw on their respective strengths. At his energetic, gesticulating, fiery best, Bruce painted a lurid picture of the menace posed by Catholics, especially the Irish. Wilson, an eyewitness later recalled, “did not use oratory. He adopted the English style. No gestures. No step forward.” He maintained that “the vitality of Anglo-Saxon institutions … had stood the test of centuries” and America’s vital, superior culture would easily assimilate Catholics.”⁵After two days of deliberation, the judges, three professors at the law school, awarded the first prize to Bruce and a consolation prize to Wilson.

Most members of the Jefferson Society regarded Wilson as the better speaker, but one of them recalled long afterward that Bruce excelled in “brilliant oratorical flights” and in “[p]owerful summary of affirmative facts in unanswerable logic.” Bruce and Wilson reacted differently to what happened. One of Wilson’s friends recalled that Bruce “seemed nettled and sour because the judges had not immediately awarded him the medal.” After the judges’ decision, another friend remembered that Wilson admitted to being fairly beaten but added, “Bruce beat me in this, but I will beat him in life, for I’m a worker, he is not.” The wounds from this encounter left a smoldering resentment. In the last year of his life, Wilson would warn a Democratic Party official about Bruce: “He is by nature envious and intensely jealous, and cannot take part in disinterested service of any kind.”⁶

Dealing with Bruce and knowing that he would meet others like him did not endear the young man to the law. After three months at Virginia, he confessed to a Princeton classmate, “I am most terribly bored by the noble study of Law sometimes.” It was like eating “that other immortal article of food, Hash, when served with such endless frequency.” Wilson wanted to be studying and writing about politics. In February 1880, he told Bridges that his “brightest dream” was “the great work of disseminating political truth and purifying the politics of our own country. … [W]hen I get out of this treadmill of the law I intend to devote every scrap of leisure time to the study of that great and delightful subject.” Joseph Wilson did not share his son’s dream. He warned him against “a mere literary career such as you seem to dream about now and then. At any rate, far, far, better conquer the law, even through all its wretched twistings and technical paths of thorn.”⁷

This time witnessed the closest approach to an open clash that ever occurred between father and son. The words “a mere literary career” sparked another smoldering resentment in Wilson. It would flare up thirteen years later, when he published an essay titled “Mere Literature,” in which he figuratively flung his father’s words and views back in his face. He remained a dutiful son who respected and loved his father, but their relationship was changing as the son began to have his own ideas about his future. He also changed his name. During his first year at Virginia, he gave up calling himself Tommy in favor of Woodrow. Such experimentation with names was common among young men of that era. He would still be Tommy to his old Princeton cohorts, but family and new friends would now call him Woodrow. The shorter, alliterative pairing, Woodrow Wilson, had a nice literary ring to it.

His attitude toward assignments and classes did not change. He dutifully read and made shorthand notes in his texts, but he found a new reason for cutting classes: he was falling in love. His affections settled on his first cousin, Harriet (Hattie) Woodrow, who was a student at the Augusta Female Seminary in nearby Staunton. A vivacious young woman of nineteen with brown hair and blue eyes, Hattie was the daughter of Thomas Woodrow, Jr., one of Jessie Wilson’s brothers who had stayed in Ohio. Years later, Hattie remembered that she had taken walks with Woodrow and participated in a group singing around the piano: “I think of him as a rather mature, dignified, serious minded young man—yet with a keen sense of humor.” Wilson got into academic trouble in the spring of 1880 when he cut several classes to attend Hattie’s graduation ceremony.⁸

The second year of law school proved even less palatable because Hattie had gone home to Ohio, and he had to content himself with writing to her. Classwork bored him as much as before, and after he came down with a persistent cold in December 1880, he bowed to his mother’s entreaties to come home. He insisted to Bridges that his plans remained unchanged: “My end is a commanding influence in the councils (and counsels) of my country—and means to be employed are writing and speaking.” He lived for the next year and a half with his parents in Wilmington, where he spent much of his time practicing oratory in the pulpit of his father’s church and writing essays. He read law and prepared himself for bar examinations, but he studied on his own rather than under the tutelage of an established lawyer. He taught Latin to his brother, helped with household chores, and played with his young nieces. He began wearing eyeglasses—the pince-nez that would become a hallmark of his appearance—and he grew a large, flowing mustache, which together with his newly thick sideburns softened the impression made by his long jaw and angular features. In February 1881, the New York Evening Post published an essay by him titled “Stray Thoughts from the South,” in which he condemned Reconstruction for having “held the South back from her natural destiny of regeneration” but applauded the South’s “happy extension” of commerce and manufacturing, “such as the unnatural system of slave labor alone kept her from establishing long ago.”⁹ In getting the piece published, it helped that Bridges was now working for the Evening Post.

He also continued to court Hattie Woodrow. Physical separation and social convention required his courtship to be epistolary and oblique. He wrote long, rambling letters in which he dropped broad hints about deeper feelings. After he returned to Wilmington, he told her, “I simply love you well enough to love to write to you even when I have to write stupidly.” Later, he used expressions such as “You know that I love you dearly” and “You know how much [love] I send—just as much as you desire.”¹⁰ How Hattie responded to such hints of love is not known. If she hinted that she did not return his affections, he failed to take the hint and pushed his suit to a disastrous conclusion.

A moment of truth—and melodrama—came on the night of September 25, 1881. On a visit to the Woodrow home in Chillicothe, Ohio, Wilson got Hattie to leave the dance floor at a party so that he could declare his love and propose marriage. She turned him down, saying they were too closely related. Distraught, he left the party and insisted on moving to a local hotel for the night and departing from Chillicothe the next day. From the hotel, he scribbled an anguished note on a torn piece of paper. “Now, Hattie,” he implored, “for my sake, and for your own, reconsider the dismissal you gave me tonight. I cannot sleep tonight—so give me the consolation of thinking, while waiting for the morning that there is still one faint hope left to save me from the terror of despair.” Hattie stood her ground. Her refusal to marry him because they were first cousins was an excuse to spare his feelings. She did not love him, and the next day, as Wilson waited at the train station and poured his heart out to Hattie’s younger brother, he met Edward Welles, the man she did love and would soon marry. The incident plainly hurt Wilson. Hattie’s letters to him were among the few pieces of correspondence in his life that this compulsive saver of papers would not keep. Two years later, he told Ellen Axson that Hattie had been “heartless,” and he maintained, “I had been mistaken in thinking that she was capable of loving.”¹¹

Like other young men who make fools of themselves in love, Wilson was rationalizing. He soon got over his hurt feelings. A few months later, he told Bridges, “Of course I am not such a weakling as to allow myself to be unmanned even by a disappointment such as this,” although he admitted that it had delayed his plans to begin practicing law. Yet he gave no sign of being in a hurry to hang out his shingle as a lawyer, and he told Bridges he was “intellectually busy in the same desultory manner as of old. I’ve read all sorts of books besides law books.”¹²

Wilson also wrote his first book-length work at this time, which he called “Government by Debate.” As the title suggests, he was revisiting the ground he had covered in “Cabinet Government” and the unpublished “Congressional Government.” In fact, much of this work repeats his previous arguments and his Bagehot-derived observation that the Constitution “has had a great growth. It is now neither in theory or in fact what its framers are thought to have intended it to be.” He did lay a new stress on “reason” as opposed to “passion,” which would become a central element in his political thought. This stress on reason did not lead him down paths of conservatism, because he called for “regulation of its [America’s] vast and innumerable industries” and “the restraint of monopolies.” As a piece of writing, “Government by Debate” bounced between scholarly analysis and political exhortation and was long on rhetoric and short on specifics. Wilson was clearly having trouble making the shift from writing essays to writing a book. “Government by Debate” fell flat with publishers, three of which turned it down. A portion of the manuscript finally appeared as an article titled “Committee or Cabinet Government?” in the January 1884 issue of The Overland Monthly.¹³

By the time that magazine article appeared, Wilson’s life had taken several significant turns. In May 1882, he began his law practice, in Atlanta. This city was the boomtown of the post-Civil War South, the capital of Georgia, and the unofficial but generally recognized capital of the “New South,” where Henry Grady, the editor of its leading newspaper, the Constitution, beat the drum for the South’s commercial and industrial renaissance. Wilson heartily endorsed the economic side of the New South vision, and he had earlier identified himself as a member of “that younger generation of Southern men who are just now coming to years of influence … [who are] full of the progressive spirit.”¹⁴ The impetus to move to Atlanta had come in January 1882, when Edward I. Renick, a classmate at Virginia, invited Wilson to share a law office and take a room in the boardinghouse where he lived. The arrangement worked well. They made a division of labor in which Renick did the office work and Wilson handled the court appearances. In October 1882, Wilson passed the Georgia bar examination with the highest score among the test takers, and he was admitted to practice in the federal district court the following February.

Unfortunately, the fledgling attorneys lacked work. Wilson argued only two or three cases in court during his time in Atlanta, and he and Renick had little other business. The two young men whiled away idle hours in the office reading Virgil’s Aeneid aloud to each other, and Wilson read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and biographies of Alexander Hamilton and John C. Calhoun, in which he wrote marginal notes. “I allow myself my afternoons for writing,” he told Bridges.¹⁵ As an outlet for public speaking, he and Renick organized a branch of the New York Free Trade Club, at which they discussed questions of political economy and promoted opinions opposing tariff protection. Wilson went to observe sessions of the Georgia legislature a few times, but he made no effort to get involved in local politics or take part in election campaigns.

A fortuitous event allowed him to address a significant audience on a weighty subject. In September 1882, the Tariff Commission, an investigatory body created by Congress, held hearings in Atlanta. Covering the commission as a reporter for the New YorkWorld was a friend of Renick’s, Walter Hines Page. This lanky, cigar-smoking North Carolina native, who was a year older than Wilson, arranged for him to testify before the commission. In his thirty-minute talk, the young lawyer called the tariff “one of the leading questions of political discussion” and advocated “a tariff for revenue merely.” He doubted that he made much of an impression on the commissioners, but he was grateful for the exposure, particularly Page’s report in the World that “[n]o argument of dignity was made to-day except by Mr. Woodrow Wilson.”¹⁶ That was a bit of puffery, but Page prided himself on being a talent spotter, and he marked Wilson as someone to watch and keep in touch with. Their paths would cross again, and they would play important roles in each other’s lives.

Wilson could have enjoyed himself in Atlanta, but he did not. He evidently complained from the outset about his situation, because his father resumed writing letters of advice and admonition. Joseph Wilson counseled his son to overcome “your law-distaste” and exhorted him to “fight the future with a brave front not only but also with a smiling [one].” Wilson almost never argued with his father, but he lamented to Bridges “the dreadful drudgery which attends the initiation into our profession.” His discontent grew to include his fellow lawyers and his newly adopted hometown. He might identify with the New South as an intellectual proposition, but confronting the reality of it and trying to make his way in its heartland filled him with disgust. “Here the chief end of man is certainly to make money,” Wilson told a Princeton classmate, “and money cannot be made except by the most vulgar methods.” Worse, he confessed to a friend from Virginia, he found that “the practice of law, when conducted for purposes of gain, is antagonistic to the best interests of the intellectual life,” which was “the natural bent of my mind. … I can never be happy unless I am enabled to lead an intellectual life; and who can lead an intellectual life in ignorant Georgia?”¹⁷

In the spring of 1883, Wilson decided to abandon his law practice and pursue graduate study in order to become a college professor. Leaving a legal career for teaching had been on his mind even before he went to Atlanta. He had mentioned it to Harriet Woodrow at the time of his ill-fated proposal to her, and just after he moved to Atlanta, he told Bridges that he wanted to go into college teaching. Bridges tried to talk him out of the idea, warning him, as he recalled later, “that the material results of the course you propose to follow appear even more slowly than in the law.” Still, the decision was a wrench. He believed he was turning his back on his heartfelt dream of holding office. He claimed to Bridges that he was not forsaking politics completely: “I want to make myself an outside force in politics. No man can safely enter political life nowadays who has not an independent fortune, or at least independent means of support: this I have not: therefore the most I can hope to become is a speaker and writer of the highest authority on political subjects. This I may become in a chair of political science, with leisure and incentive to study, and with summer vacations for travel and observation.” The following fall, he told Ellen Axson, “The law is more than ever before a jealous mistress. Whoever thinks, as I thought, that he can practice law successfully and study history and politics at the same time is wofully mistaken.”¹⁸

Yearning to write and lead “an intellectual life” was what pulled him away from the law. In the same letter to Ellen Axson, he confessed his “unquenchable desire to excel” in both political and “imaginative” writing, by which he meant “something (!) that will freshen the energies of tired people and make the sad laugh and take heart again.” College teaching was not the only or necessarily the best alternative to the law for fulfilling that desire. He had earlier told Bridges, “I sometimes find myself regretting that I too had not gone into journalism.” Bridges had started writing for the high-toned, influential magazine The Nation, and that kind of work would have given Wilson greater opportunity to study, observe, write about, and influence politics than a college professorship. But Wilson shied away from journalism. He saw himself as a slow learner and methodical thinker who was not naturally given to ready observation and description. Conversely, college teaching attracted him because it would allow him to live in a milieu that he found conducive to “an intellectual life.”¹⁹

Wilson may also have chosen college teaching because of his family’s opinion. When he informed his father of his wishes early in 1883, Dr. Wilson urged him to stick with the law, but added, “I will not object to any decision you may come to, and will do my utmost to secure you a position.” His parents sought advice from the family’s arbiter in matters academic, James Woodrow, who urged that his nephew attend the graduate school at the Johns Hopkins University. The better colleges were increasingly looking for faculty from “the Johns Hopkins,” James Woodrow explained, and a fellowship there would give their son excellent visibility in the changing job market.²⁰ When Wilson applied for a fellowship in April 1883, he was told that all of the slots for the next year had been filled; his father then agreed to pay his son’s expenses.

Before Wilson left Atlanta, he made two further changes in his life. One was mundane, but it would have a big impact on the way he did his work. In June 1883, he bought his first typewriter, a Caligraph, which cost the substantial sum of $87, and thereby jumped aboard the technological bandwagon of the time. Typewriters had been on the market for less than a decade and did not yet feature either standard keyboards or common mechanisms for producing capital letters. Nonetheless, the typewriter gave Wilson another means with which to overcome his slowness in reading and writing, and he quickly learned to use it, typing with two fingers on each hand. In later years, he produced most of his correspondence, even intimate letters, on a succession of typewriters. He would also compose on the typewriter his manuscripts for publication and speeches that required a prepared text, often working from shorthand notes.²¹

The other big change in Wilson’s life was that he had fallen in love again. On April 8, 1883, he met Ellen Louise Axson. “The first time I saw your face to note was in church,” he recalled a few months later. It was a fitting place for them to meet, since she was the daughter of the Reverend Samuel Edward Axson, a friend and colleague of his father’s and a member of a family that stood even higher than the Woodrows in Presbyterian circles. Wilson had gone to Rome, Georgia, to do legal work for his mother in a dispute over the estate of one of her brothers. On Sunday he attended the church where Ellen’s father was minister. He probably did not pay much attention to the service because, he told Ellen later, “I remember thinking ‘what a bright, pretty face; what splendid, mischievous, laughing eyes! I’ll lay a wager that this demure little lady has lots of fun in her!’” After the service, he further recounted, “I took another good look at you, and concluded that it would be a very clever plan to inquire your name and seek an introduction.”²²

If this was not love at first sight, it came close. Ellen Axson, who would celebrate her twenty-third birthday the following month, was an attractive young woman. She stood five feet three inches tall, weighed about 115 pounds, and had a slightly rounded face, dark blond hair, and haunting, expressive brown eyes. When Wilson called on the Axsons after the service, his first conversation with Ellen did not proceed beyond pleasantries because her father talked about church matters. The young man fared better on his next visit to Rome, at the end of May. He got Ellen to go for a carriage ride and a walk up a hill. “Passion,” he later confessed, “… had pretty nearly gotten the better of [me] by the time we had climbed to the top of that hill.” After this visit, he confided to his mother that he was in love with Ellen Axson and intended to ask her to marry him. On a walk during his next visit, he recalled, “I was quite conscious that I was very much in love with my companion, and I was desperately intent upon finding out what my chances were of winning her.” He told her about his plans to be a teacher, including “the narrowness of my means,” all “with a diplomatic purpose, in order to ascertain whether she was inclined to regard such an alliance as a very dreary and uninviting prospect for any maiden free to choose.” Soon afterward, as they sat together in a hammock at a picnic, “I declared that you were the only woman I had ever met to whom I felt that I could open all my thoughts[.] I meant much more than I dared to say.”²³

Within the conventions that governed courtship between respectable middle-class people of the time, especially ministers’ children, the young man made his intentions unmistakable. This time, Wilson was giving his heart to someone who was prepared to receive it. For her part, Ellen remembered feeling during their walk “a quiet little glow and thrill of admiration, tingling out of my very finger-tips,” as she got her “first glimpse of your [Wilson’s] aims in life,” especially his “generous enthusiasm” about attempting to do great things and striving to be “one who could live the best and fullest life.” Yet Ellen had a reputation among her female friends as a “man-hater.” She had rejected at least three marriage proposals, in part because no man had yet come up to her standards. Her husband must be, she had once told a friend, “good, nice, handsome, splendid, delightful, intelligent and interesting.” Woodrow Wilson filled the bill except in the matter of being handsome, but with his mustache and sideburns he cut an attractive figure.²⁴

Ellen may have had other reasons for her reluctance to marry. She had a deep, searching mind and a complex personality. From childhood, she had shown great intelligence, excelling in school and leading her class at the Rome Female Seminary. Unlike Wilson, she had a flair for mathematics, as well as foreign languages, and she showed exceptional talent at drawing and painting. She also had a taste for philosophy and the deeper aspects of religious thought. Her dearest wish was to continue her education, but her father could not afford to send her to college, a circumstance that outraged her best friend, who told her, “Ellie, I feel bound to believe that you won’t always live in Rome.”²⁵

Ellen was clearly expressing her own yearnings when she said she recognized that Wilson wanted to “live the best and fullest life.” For her, such a life had seemed to grow even further out of reach when her mother, Margaret Jane Hoyt Axson, died in November 1881, soon after giving birth to her fourth child, a daughter. Ellen had lost the parent who understood her best and sympathized with her aspirations, and Samuel Axson’s wife’s death shattered his fragile mental composure. Showing signs of the severe depression that would later also afflict Ellen and two of her siblings, he was unable to work or cope with people for long periods of time. The burden of keeping the family together fell on Ellen, who now had to look after her father and her younger brothers, Stockton and Edward, who were fourteen and five. Her infant sister, Margaret (Madge), was put for the time being in the care of their mother’s sister. In the midst of this ordeal of managing the household, watching over her increasingly unstable father, and looking after her brothers, Woodrow Wilson must have struck Ellen like a ray of hope. Even his poor financial prospects as a consequence of his going to graduate school may have seemed like an advantage, since the situation could allow her time to sort out her life.²⁶

The romance between these two young Presbyterians had a happy though madcap ending. Wilson began to write serious, intimate letters to “Miss Ellie Lou.” In July, he told her that “I had longed to meet some woman of my own age who had acquired a genuine love for intellectual pursuits without becoming bookish, without losing her feminine charm. … See, therefore, what a delightful lesson you have taught me!” He faced the problem of how and where to make his move. After pulling up stakes in Atlanta, he went to Wilmington and then accompanied his mother, brother, sister Annie, and her children to the mountains of North Carolina, planning to leave from there for Johns Hopkins at the middle of September. Ellen also went to North Carolina in early September, and Wilson desperately angled to get together with her so that he might have the chance to declare his love.²⁷

The fateful encounter almost did not take place. Ellen’s father’s illness took a turn for the worse, and she decided to return to Rome. Her letters to Wilson about her change of plans went astray, and they met only by a coincidence. In order to return home, Ellen had to wait for several hours between trains in a hotel in Asheville on September 14. Wilson, who was to leave for Johns Hopkins two days later, chanced to be in Asheville that day. As he walked down the street where the hotel stood, he looked through a window and recognized Ellen by the way she wore her hair. Rushing into the hotel, he persuaded her to postpone her trip until he had to leave. The couple walked and talked and went for a drive in the mountains. Wilson took Ellen to meet his mother, and when the time came for him to leave, he told her that he loved her and asked her to marry him. Flustered, Ellen said yes. “I had no smallest idea how much I loved you,” she wrote him a few days later, “until I found how wretched I was made at the thought of your leaving … and felt my heart give a great suffocating throb.” For Wilson, there could have been no better send-off for his venture into “an intellectual life” and no sweeter token of the transformation signaled by his newly adopted name. Ellen’s letters to him would now begin “My darling Woodrow.”²⁸

Journeying northward to Baltimore in September 1883 to begin graduate study at Johns Hopkins was another big change for Wilson. Baltimore, with around 360,000 residents, was much larger than any city in the South and had a population that was mixed in religion and ethnicity as well as race. Not yet a decade old in 1883, Hopkins, as it was commonly called, was modeled on a German university and occupied a few drab edifices in downtown Baltimore. The student body consisted largely of men pursuing the Ph.D. degree in academic subjects. Wilson made friends with his fellow graduate students in the seminary in history and political science and at the boardinghouse where he lived, went to the theater, and under Ellen’s influence, took an interest in the visual arts for the first time. The university drew a stream of visiting intellectual luminaries, of whom the most interesting to Wilson was James Bryce, a professor at Oxford and a member of Parliament in Britain. He told Ellen that he marveled at the “strength and dash and mastery about the man which are captivating.”²⁹ This was the first of what would turn out to be several encounters with Bryce over the next four decades.

The seminary in history and political science offered Wilson an outlet for public speaking. Students and faculty gathered for weekly Friday-evening meetings around a large table covered with a red tablecloth in what Wilson described to Ellen as “a large cheerful room,” during which students read papers “upon special subjects political and social.” From the beginning, he shone in those sessions. The seminary also staged debates on current issues, including one in which Wilson argued against a Republican-sponsored bill in Congress for the provision of federal aid to public schools, particularly in the South. The minutes of the seminary noted that he called it “both unconstitutional … and politically inexpedient.” That was a good characterization of his position: the critical words werepolitically inexpedient, and he almost certainly stressed what he considered the unwise nature of the proposal more than the constitutional limitations. His mostly northern fellow students teased Wilson about his southern background and views by greeting him as Colonel.³⁰

Once more, Wilson could have been happier than he was. The fault again lay more with him than with the institution, but not entirely. Six weeks after he arrived at Hopkins, he told Ellen that he wanted “to get a special training in historical research and an insight into the most modern literary and political thoughts and methods” so that he might achieve his “ambition to become an invigorating and enlightening power in the world of political thought and [that] a master in some of the less serious branches of literary art may be the more easy of accomplishment.” But he had discovered that no one at Hopkins seemed to care about how to express thoughts: “Style is not much studied here; ideas are supposed to be everything—their vehicle comparatively nothing.” He was balking at the ruling intellectual dispensation of Johns Hopkins—the German model of rigorous, painstaking “scientific” research in all fields, based on the belief that the steady, progressive accumulation of knowledge would yield precise, measurable standards and explanations. He told Ellen that his professors “wanted to set everybody under their authority to working on what they called ‘institutional history,’ … and other rumaging [sic] work of a like dry kind, which seemed very tiresome in comparison with the grand excursions amongst imperial policies which I had planned for myself.” He also disliked carrying a heavy load of courses on top of work for the seminary, admitting to Ellen, “I have a distinct dread (partly instinctive and partly instilled by my home training) of too much reading.”³¹

Wilson likewise had scant respect for his professors. The three faculty members in his field were Herbert Baxter Adams, who had earned a doctorate at Heidelberg before becoming Hopkins’s first professor of history and political science; Richard T. Ely, who also held a doctorate from Heidelberg and worked in economics; and John Franklin Jameson, who had just received Hopkins’s first Ph.D. in history. Wilson quickly took their measure, telling Ellen in November, “I have been much disappointed to find that the department of history and politics is more weakly manned as regards its corps of instructors than any other department of the University.” Wilson found Adams “insincere and superficial,” Ely “full of information but apparently much too full to have any movement which is not an impulse,” and Jameson “merely a satellite” of Adams.³² Further contact did not improve those impressions. Wilson’s judgment was not wide of the mark. Adams and Ely subsequently built reputations as academic organizers, whereas only Jameson would do much original work as a scholar.

Physical separation from his fiancée also hurt him keenly. He settled again for an epistolary romance, but because he and Ellen had already committed themselves to each other, he could write freely, frankly, and revealingly to her, and he did so to a greater degree than he would to anyone else in his life. During the three decades of their engagement and marriage, the couple would write more than 1,400 letters to each other—the most remarkable set of letters between a president and his spouse, except for the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams. They usually wrote letters to each other every day or two; this period before they were married, between September 1883 and June 1885, yielded well over a third of their letters (306 by Wilson and 280 by Ellen).

As an engaged couple, they wrote about many things—family, friends, respective doings, art, music, physical surroundings, hopes, dreams, plans, thoughts. But from first to last, these letters were expressions of love. “Why, my darling, I can’t tell you how completely I am yours, in my every thought,” Wilson declared in his first letter from Baltimore. “I did not know myself how much I loved you until I found out that you love me.” Ellen—who soon insisted that he call her that instead of Ellie Lou, which she disliked—responded, “I love you. Ah, my darling, I have no words—will never find them—to tell how much; nor how very, very happy it makes me to hear you say—and repeat it—that you love me.” Each one’s tone of passionate love for the other never faltered. In her last letter before their wedding, Ellen quoted from one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and avowed, “When I feel that you give me such a love as that, my heart is flooded with a deep peace—a perfect joy in loving and … being loved, such as no other thought can give.”³³

Since Wilson seemed more comfortable with the written word, his letters were usually longer than hers, although the literary quality of her letters does not suffer in comparison. At least twice a week during his first two months at Hopkins, he sent her letters that covered many pages with his neat handwriting. The longest and most revealing of these is dated October 30, 1883. Avowing that “there can be no greater delight in my life, my love, than making you the keeper [of] all my secrets, the sharer of all my hopes,because I am sure of your love,” he filled nineteen pages about his “object” in studying at Hopkins, his original political ambition, his disappointment with the law, his settling for “becoming an outside force in politics,” his literary aspirations (“an unquenchable desire to excel in two distinct and almost opposite kinds of writing: political and imaginative”), his description of the meetings of the seminary, his assessment of his own abilities, and his mixed desires and doubts about “reaching the heights to which I aspire.” He said that writing “this profuse epistle … had done me lots of good. I’ve worked off any amount of stored-up steam.”³⁴

Some of Wilson’s discontent found a constructive outlet when he went to see Professor Adams and, as he told Ellen, “made a clean breast” of his distaste for “institutional” research. To his surprise, Adams “received my confidence with sympathy … and bade me go on with my ‘constitutional’ studies.” Wilson began research for the project he really wanted to undertake—a book about Congress. “My desire and ambition are,” he told Ellen, “to treat the American constitution as Mr. Bagehot (do you remember Mr. Bagehot, about whom I talked to you one night on the veranda at Asheville?—) has treated the English constitution,” although he admitted, “I am not vain enough to expect to produce anything so brilliant or so valuable as Bagehot’s book.” In January 1884, Wilson had to interrupt writing this new work in order to make an emergency visit to Ellen in Savannah. Her father’s mental state had apparently turned violent, forcing the Axsons to commit him to a state asylum. After the visit, Wilson returned to Baltimore doubly determined to write his book and marry Ellen as soon as he could.³⁵

The nine months from January through September 1884 would give him the most concentrated, least interrupted, most satisfying experience of writing he ever had. Evidently not yet completely comfortable composing directly on the typewriter, he first wrote and revised a draft in longhand and then typed a copy on his Caligraph. In early April, he submitted some chapters to the Boston publishing house Houghton Mifflin, which gave an encouraging though noncommittal response. In May, he read parts of those chapters to the seminary and submitted them as part of his fellowship application, which was successful this time. He wrote the last three chapters over the summer at his parents’ home in Wilmington.³⁶

In early October 1884, Wilson sent the revised manuscript to Houghton Mifflin. On November 26, after what seemed to him an interminable wait, the publishers accepted the book. “They have actually offered me as good terms as if I were already a well-known writer!” he exulted to Ellen. “The success is of such proportions as almost to take my breath away—it has distanced my biggest hopes.” By mid-December, he was reading proofs, and on January 23, 1885, he received the first bound copies of the book, one of which he immediately sent to Ellen. “It is a very nicely gotten up, and attractive looking book, is it not?” she wrote back. “It’s truly delightful to behold it—almost as delightful as to read it. It seems to me, darling, that it sounds better than ever ‘in print.’ The style is really wonderful; not the most fascinating novel could ‘hold’ one more closely.” Lovers are prone to exaggerate, but Ellen did not overestimate her fiancé’s book by much. Congressional Government would be the best book that Wilson ever wrote. Some people thought that this first book by an unknown twenty-eight-year-old was the feat of a prodigy, but it was not. Wilson had been working on this subject for more than five years, and he had found his voice and viewpoint in ways that he had not been able to do before. Rereading Bagehot’s English Constitution during the summer of 1883 had helped, as had his successful wooing of Ellen Axson—requited love had concentrated his mind wonderfully.³⁷

Congressional Government has a different tone from that of his earlier efforts. “I have abandoned the evangelical for the exegetical—so to speak!” he told Bridges. From its opening sentences, Congressional Government purports to present a dispassionate look at the American system. “The most striking contrast in modern politics is not between presidential and monarchical governments,” Wilson asserted, “but between Congressional and Parliamentary governments. Congressional government is Committee government; Parliamentary government is government by a responsible Cabinet Ministry.” Elucidating the contrast between these two systems is the “chief aim” of the book, which Wilson pursues through the next 330 pages. He briskly argues that the American system of checks and balances has grown outmoded, that the government is a living organism in which the Constitution is “only the sap-centre,” that the major development was centralization of power in Congress at the expense of both the states and the other branches of the federal government, and that this centralization stemmed from the ways in which “the whole face of that world has changed.”³⁸

In his treatment of the House of Representatives, Wilson again painted his portrait of a body dominated by standing committees that meet in secret and stifle meaningful debate on the floor, but he leavened that familiar mix of criticisms with a more extensive comparison than anyone had yet made between the ways of Congress and the British and French parliamentary practices. He broke fresh ground when he contrasted the methods by which Congress and Parliament handle the tasks of raising revenue and funding executive departments and when he described the Senate. Rejecting what he regarded as an excess of both condemnation and praise of that body, he judged senators to be no better than congressmen because they all rise out of the same pool of talent: “No stream can be purer than its sources.” He regretted that the Senate was not spawning “a new order of statesmanship to suit the altered conditions of government,” and he argued that it also suffered from domination by committees, absence of debate, lack of party leadership, and divorce from executive responsibility.³⁹

Another fresh contribution was his consideration of the executive branch. The president, in Wilson’s view, falls victim to the same fundamental flaw as the houses of Congress. “The business of the President, occasionally great, is usually not much above routine. Most of the time it is mere administration, mere obedience of directions from the masters of policy, the Standing Committees.” This subordinate role is “the practical result of the piecing of authority, the cutting of it up into small bits,” which fragments responsibility. “Power and strict accountability for its use are the essential constituents of good government,” Wilson declared. “The best rulers are always those to whom great power is intrusted in such a manner as to make them feel that they will surely be abundantly honored and recompensed for a just and patriotic use of it, and to make them know that nothing can shield them from full retribution for every abuse of it.”⁴⁰ It sounded as if he was arguing for a stronger presidency, but he did not say so directly.

Wilson did not entirely forsake evangelism for exegesis. At the end, he argued that the demands of physical and economic progress require still greater and more efficient centralization of power. Therein lay the problem: “As at present constituted, the federal government lacks strength because its powers are divided, lacks promptness because its processes are roundabout, lacks efficiency because its responsibility is indistinct and its action without competent direction.” The cure lay in taking a leaf from British practice and requiring those who talked in the legislature to execute their policies. Wilson did not think such a result would be easy to achieve in America, and he closed with a call for “fearless criticism,” scrutiny “without sentiment,” and assessment “by the standards of common sense.”⁴¹

The book’s reception exceeded Wilson’s wildest dreams. Some critical, even hostile, reviews dismissed it as long on rhetoric and short on solutions, but there were few of those. The most gratifying review came in The Nation, from Gamaliel Bradford, an influential political writer whom Wilson admired and read regularly. Bradford called Congressional Government “one of the most important books, dealing with political subjects, which have ever issued from the American press.” He found the book, which was “evidently modeled on Mr. Bagehot’s ‘English Constitution,’” so good that “it will, though the praise is so high as to be almost extravagant, bear comparison to that inestimable work.” In the longer view, Congressional Government came in for additional criticism and regard. A year after its publication, The Atlantic Monthly published an article by A. Lawrence Lowell, a Boston lawyer and part-time instructor at Harvard, who took exception to Wilson’s borrowing from British models and castigated him for not appreciating the need to restrain the power of the majority. Those two points—misplaced Anglophilia and unchecked majoritarianism—formed the main lines of attack on Congressional Government for several years after its publication.⁴²

Wilson responded to those criticisms with good-humored silence, although he did stick to his guns in prefaces to later editions of the book. In the case of his critic in The Atlantic, he took direct action. As Lowell recalled, “A few weeks later there appeared at my office a tall, lantern-jawed young man just my age. He greeted me with the words: ‘I’m Woodrow Wilson. I’ve come to heal a quarrel, not make one.’” He availed himself of The Atlantic’s offer to respond to Lowell’s criticism: he insisted that the written Constitution, though useful in fostering “conservatism” to check public opinion, did not make the situation in the United States fundamentally different from that in Britain, and he continued to call for responsible party government. “The grave social and economic problems,” Wilson argued, “now putting themselves forward as the result of the tremendous growth of our population, and the consequent sharp competition for the means of livelihood indicated that our system is already aging, and that any clumsiness, looseness, or irresponsibility in governmental action must prove a source of grave and increasing peril.”⁴³

The early critics were not particularly perceptive about the book’s shortcomings. The allegation of Anglophilia did not stick because Wilson simply measured Congress and Parliament by standards of efficiency and accountability. The charge of majoritarianism carried greater weight. At the time, however—given persistent inertia, divided party control, and gridlock on Capitol Hill—that did not seem like much of a danger. A stronger criticism was that in his analysis he had mistaken the political deadlock between the major parties and fumbling over old and new issues for endemic structural flaws. Those conditions would soon change, first with the Republicans’ imposition of party discipline in the House under Speaker Thomas B. “Czar” Reed in 1889 and then with the major party realignment over economic issues in 1896. Actually, Wilson observed that the present state of affairs had come to pass as a result of changing conditions and that the political system was an evolving, ever-adapting organism. When he stressed party discipline and leadership as cures for current ills, he was anticipating what would soon come to pass.

It was and remains a remarkable book. In the century and a quarter after its publication, Congressional Government would never go out of print. Part of the book’s longevity has obviously sprung from its author’s becoming president of the United States, but there is more to it than that. In Congressional Government, Wilson put his finger on enduring problems engendered by the separation of powers and the fragmentation of responsibility in the American system. Masterful Speakers of the House such as Reed, Joseph G. Cannon, and Sam Rayburn might periodically tame that rambunctious chamber, but entrenched committee chairs would limit even their ability to impose discipline. The Senate would fare even worse; it would be plagued by seniority and virtually limitless debate and brought in line only rarely through leadership of genius, as with Lyndon Johnson.

Wilson’s achievement was all the more remarkable because of the way he wrote the book. He never made the short trip from Baltimore to Washington to observe Congress in person and would not set foot in the Capitol until 1898. This lack of curiosity seems strange because he had gone to observe the legislature in Georgia and had attended campaign events there and in North Carolina as recently as the summer before the publication of Congressional Government. Lowell later believed he had an explanation when he claimed that Wilson “lacked a scientific mind” and saw everything “through the haze of his own preconceptions.” That judgment contained a kernel of truth. Wilson admitted to Ellen shortly after the book’s publication, “I have no patience for the tedious toil of what is known as ‘research’; I have a passion for interpreting great thoughts to the world.”⁴⁴

Yet it is doubtful whether firsthand observation and more primary research would have improved Congressional Government. Ironically, for all his worship of British empiricism and disdain for “literary theory,” Wilson followed the path that he professed to scorn. Though not exactly a theorist, he did belong to the class of thinkers who take an idea and develop it. He recognized and regretted that he worked that way. “The fault of my mind is that it is creative, without being patient and docile in learning how to create,” he told Ellen. He likened himself to a pianist who did not like to learn music or a soldier who wanted to lead without learning how to follow. This approach to scholarship also helps to explain why Wilson never wrote as good a book again. WithCongressional Government, he had gone about as far as he could go with the inspiration from Bagehot. In order to do other work of this caliber, he would need a new inspiration.⁴⁵

Life did not stand still while Wilson was writing his book and basking in the glory of its reception. The Axson family’s ordeal had worsened in the spring of 1884, and Ellen’s situation looked grim. Confinement in the Georgia state mental hospital had not helped her father, and his deterioration raised the question of what would become of his four children. Only Ellen was in a position to contribute to their support, which she decided to do by seeking a teaching job. The prospect filled Wilson with chagrin. He wished “most earnestly to keep my darling from its wearing, harassing trials,” and he bemoaned that “I have never yet been of any use to anyone: I have yet to become a bread-winner.” He wanted to marry Ellen immediately, but his father advised against it and admonished, “Imitate her, my son, in the sacrifice she is making for independence.”⁴⁶

Wilson tried to do that. Through his sister Marion, who was married to Anderson Ross Kennedy, a Presbyterian minister in Little Rock, Arkansas, he learned of a possible opening at the University of Arkansas. Wilson told Ellen he did not like the university’s being “co-educational, admitting women to its classes, and even to its faculty,” and going for this post would also mean taking a “foot-hold of places lower down” in the academic world, but “a good offer is not to be despised whencesoever it comes.” Ellen knew what he craved, and she discouraged him from going to Arkansas. In any event, the prospect of a professorship there fell through in early summer. Then a turn of events brought both tragedy and salvation to Ellen and her siblings. On May 28, 1884, Samuel Axson died suddenly in the state mental hospital, probably a suicide. The news shook Ellen so badly that she told Wilson, “I sometimes wish I could go to sleep and never, never wake again.” Her fiancé rushed to Georgia as soon as he could get away from Hopkins and spent two weeks with her and her seventeen-year-old brother Stockton, whom he met for the first time. Years later, Stockton Axson recalled that his sister’s fiancé “was so very cordial that I lost my heart to him at once.”⁴⁷ This was the beginning of what would become the closest and longest-lasting friendship of Wilson’s life.

The tragedy had a true silver lining. Samuel Axson left his children an estate of $12,000, a substantial sum at that time. When Ellen learned about the inheritance, her brother recalled, she blurted out, “Now that we are rich, you can go to college and I can go to the Art League.” For Stockton, college meant Davidson, while Ellen intended to go to New York to study at the Art Students League so that she might develop her talent as a painter under the best possible tutelage, a decision that Wilson reacted to with mixed feelings. Since he was going to spend another year at Hopkins, he was in no position to object, but he confessed that he was disappointed by “the indefinite postponement of our marriage. … I cannot live or work at my best until I have, not your love only, but your self, your companionship, as well.”⁴⁸ He came as close as propriety permitted to confessing his sexual desires.

The couple spent two weeks together in September and early October when Ellen stayed with the Wilsons in Wilmington and he traveled with her to New York, with a sightseeing stopover in Washington. In New York, Wilson escorted Ellen to her boardinghouse. She reveled in her work at the Art Students League, and she enjoyed New York’s cultural attractions, especially the museums and theater. Those months formed a happy interlude in her life as she developed a new sense of herself and her artistic gifts.

Yet she felt no pangs about giving up this independent life for marriage. After Wilson spent a week with her in New York over Christmas in 1884, he nerved himself to ask whether she really wanted to abandon it to marry him: “I hate selfishness, it hurts me more than I can tell you to think that I am asking you to give up what has formed so much of your life and constituted so much of your delight.” Ellen put his fears to rest: “Sweetheart, I would never give you a divided allegiance; I owe you my little all of love, of life and service, and it is all my joy to give it. Believe me, dear, it is an absolutely pure joy—there is in it no alloy, I have never felt the slightest pang of regret for what I must ‘give up.’ Don’t think there is any sacrifice involved, my darling, I assure you again there is none whatever.“⁴⁹

Wilson was right when he told Ellen that he could not work at his best apart from her. Except for the success of Congressional Government, his second year at Hopkins pleased him even less than the first, and he was a bit at loose ends. Even before the book was accepted for publication, he decided not to try for a doctorate. He told Ellen he would “profit much more substantively from a line of reading of my own choosing,” although he did concede “that a degree would render me a little more marketable.” With another graduate student, he did join a collaborative project initiated by Richard Ely to produce a textbook to be titled “History of Political Economy in the United States,” a collection of accounts of American writers on political economy. Wilson plunged into the work, and by May 1885 he had completed his section of the volume—seventy legal-size pages on seven political economists. The book never would be published, most likely because Ely never wrote his part of it.⁵⁰

Wilson was also looking for a job, which turned out to be easier than he anticipated. His fondest wish was to go back to Princeton as a member of the faculty, but nothing opened up there. In the meantime, another institution snapped him up, a newly founded and well-publicized college for women scheduled to begin classes in the fall of 1885: Bryn Mawr. Although the prospect of teaching there excited Wilson, Ellen raised the inevitable question:” But do you think there is much reputation to be made in a girls school,—or [if] it please you, a ‘woman’s college’?” He responded: “I have none of the same objections … that I have to a coeducational institution: and the question of the higher education of women is certain to be settled in the affirmative, in this country at least, whether my sympathy be enlisted or not.” He would, “of course, prefer to teach young men,” but Bryn Mawr offered better opportunities “than elsewhere for original work: and, after all, it’s my writing, not my teaching, that must win me my reputation.”⁵¹Wilson accepted an offer at the rank of associate in history with a salary of $1,500. Herbert Adams also held out the prospect of a part-time lectureship at Johns Hopkins, which would pay an additional $500.

Yet Wilson was having second thoughts about academic life. Before the Bryn Mawr prospect arose, he told Ellen, “I want to be near the world. I want to know the world; to retain all my sympathy with it—even with its crudenesses. I am afraid of being made a mere student.” Later, he told her he worried about “avoiding the danger peculiar to a professor’s position, the danger of being accounted a doctrinaire. I must make all my writings so conspicuously practical that the sneer will be palpably absurd.” Now that the Democrats had regained the presidency with Grover Cleveland’s victory in the 1884 election, he made inquiries about a position in the State Department. Journalism offered another possibility. In March 1885, the editor of a New York newspaper approached him about working as a Washington correspondent. He admitted to Ellen that he was intrigued by the “chance such work would give me for my favourite studies, in Washington, the place of places for the purpose.”⁵²

That journalistic feeler turned out to be a last temptation before Wilson entered academic life. He rejected that path, he explained to Ellen, because writing “strictly scientific study of institutions” was the only “field of journalism that I care to enter ever. … I should like an occupation which would leave me foot-loose, living on my wits, as it were.” But his internal voice of prudence said no: “This excellent, conservative mentor says reprovingly, ‘Wilson keep your head! Don’t let your love of active affairs tempt you to hover on their outskirts. You know well enough that you can’t enter them ever. If you understood the practical side of government and extracted a bit of its philosophy as a college pupil, there’s no reason why you should not hope to do more and better of the same as a professor if only you keep out of scholastic ruts and retain your sympathetic consciousness of the conditions of the practical world.’”⁵³

One last, happy task remained before Wilson could embark on his career as a professor. At the end of May 1885, he and Ellen separately made their way southward. On the evening of June 24, 1885, they were married in Savannah, Georgia. Out of respect for her father’s recent death, the ceremony took place in the manse rather than in the sanctuary of her grandfather’s church, with no flowers or music and only immediate family and a few friends in attendance. As befitted this union of two distinguished Presbyterian families, Ellen’s grandfather Isaac Stockton Axson and Joseph Ruggles Wilson jointly performed the ceremony.⁵⁴ When the couple journeyed northward in September 1885 to Bryn Mawr, the new Mrs. Woodrow Wilson was two months pregnant, and her twenty-eight-year-old husband was eager to get on with the business of living.