French-born theologian John Calvin responded to Luther’s call by moving to Switzerland, where his sharp-toned polemics helped create “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the Apostles.” So postulated Scottish clergyman John Knox, who visited in 1554 and wrote his “Letter to the Commonalty of Scotland,” a treatise that revived his countrymen and stimulated a branch of Protestantism as progressive as it was obstinate. He considered government God’s plan for preserving order, and wrote, “He hath made all equal”—a declaration that would later cross the Atlantic and help define a new nation. Knox’s deity left nothing to the dark miracle of chance: all men’s fates were predetermined by Divine Providence. By placing every necessity before mankind, the Creator offered divine direction in sending each person on his life’s path. He foresaw all that was to come, as could be proved by looking back and seeing all that He had provided.
Knox did not wish to rid his country of Catholicism or even Anglicanism, but merely to see that Presbyterianism—the Kirk, governed by local elders—would direct the spiritual life of Scotland. When Charles I succeeded to the British throne and imposed new religious policy with an Anglican bias, Scots rebelled. In 1638 thousands flocked to Edinburgh to endorse a National Covenant that would establish Presbyterianism as the national church of Scotland. Some Scots signed the document in blood; other Covenanters shed theirs. Embattled farmers stood their ground, confronting militias of redcoats. Centuries later, Woodrow Wilson would take pride in being a spiritual heir of Knox and boast of his Covenanter blood.
Because a tenet of the Reformation was the allowance of every individual to commune with God, each person was encouraged to become literate enough to read Scripture. Knox stipulated that there be a schoolmaster attached to every church and a college to every “notable town.” Great cities warranted universities. Thus the disciplines of religion, politics, and education were all wed under the canopy of Presbyterianism; and the Scots fought braveheartedly for that trinity. The bells of Protestantism could not be unrung.
With its people reading beyond their Bibles, Scotland quickly became Europe’s first modern literate society; and there, the eighteenth century steaming into the nineteenth saw a confluence of thought from some of the greatest minds in history—Adam Smith, David Hume, and Lord Kames; inventors Baron Kelvin and James Watt; writers James Boswell, Robert Burns, and the master of the historical novel, Sir Walter Scott, who articulated much of the impetus behind what became known as the Scottish Enlightenment when he wrote, “I am a Scotsman, therefore I had to fight my way into the world.”
Amid this renaissance, in 1793, the Reverend Thomas Wodrow was born, himself a direct descendant of several generations of Presbyterian preachers and scholars. He and his wife from the Highlands lived in Paisley until 1820, when he became the first of his family in five hundred years to leave Scotland. They moved to Carlisle, England, where he presided over a Congregationalist church and, in accordance with the local pronunciation, changed the spelling of his name to Woodrow. They had eight children and lived in the house Woodrow Wilson would visit in 1918. On November 10, 1835, Thomas Woodrow took his family to Liverpool, where they boarded a ship for New York, joining a massive exodus of his parishioners who could no longer endure their hardscrabble existence.
Gales prolonged what should have been a six-week trip into a horrific sixty-two days, beset with rationing and flooding. As the ship approached Newfoundland, a storm shredded its sails to rags. One day fair enough for the children to play topside, Janet Woodrow—age nine—was swinging on a rope when the ship suddenly lurched, nearly throwing her overboard. Only her grasp on that lifeline kept her from drowning.
Landing in subzero weather in January 1836, the Woodrows found lodging in the city; and within weeks, the reverend was invited to serve a Presbyterian congregation in Poughkeepsie, New York, eighty miles up the Hudson River. He had preached but two Sabbaths when he was summoned back to Manhattan, only to learn that his wife had died four days prior. “Little did I anticipate that my removal to this country would be effected at so great a sacrifice,” the Reverend Woodrow wrote his father-in-law. He soon accepted “a generous and kind offer” to teach and raise a congregation in Brockville, Ontario, but after one brutally cold winter there, he moved his family to Chillicothe, a town in south-central Ohio in need of a pastor. Over the next twelve years, Woodrow’s sermons failed to fill the pews of his church. In 1843, he married a young widow, Harriet Love Renick, who bore him six more children. Disengaging from his first family, he drifted from one remote parish to another.
His son Thomas—from that first marriage—became a prosperous dry-goods merchant in Chillicothe and took in his sisters Marion and Janet—the girl who had clung to the rope after nearly falling overboard during the rough crossing. Called both Jessie and Jeanie, she never fully recovered from having watched their sickly mother succumb so suddenly, and she lived with depression most of her life. Thomas underwrote her education at a girls’ academy in Steubenville, Ohio, 150 miles to the east. There Jessie Woodrow first saw Joseph Ruggles Wilson.
Although he had been born in America, all the bands in Wilson’s family tartan were as Scottish and Presbyterian as those of the Woodrows, with one distinct variation. His forebears were Ulster Scots. His family’s footprints can be traced only as far back as his father, but Scotsmen had settled in Ulster, the northern province of Ireland, since 1610, when James I offered parcels from half a million acres of the island to any man who would sign the Oath of Supremacy, recognizing him as the head of the English Church. The government imposed onerous restrictions upon those who clung to their Presbyterianism, and they became fiercely clannish. Instead of accepting England’s high-handedness, these transplanted Scots fled, steadily abandoning their homes for America.
By the time the Colonies went to war against the British, Scots-Irish constituted more than a sixth of their population. They were Scottish in their nature, and the only suggestion of Irish influence could be detected in the occasional extravagance of personality. Woodrow Wilson would later admit that he could not document a single drop of Irish blood in his veins, but he insisted there was “something delightful in me that every now and then takes the strain off my Scotch conscience and affords me periods of most enjoyable irresponsibility when I do not care whether school keeps or not, or whether anybody gets educated or not.” That twinkle invariably leavened his inflexibility, and it put him in the company of a dozen United States presidents of Scotch-Irish descent.
Joseph Wilson’s father, James, had been born in County Tyrone, where he worked as a printer’s devil. In 1807, at the age of twenty, this young man in a hurry became part of the great Scottish Diaspora and sailed for the United States of America. His destination was Philadelphia, the most popular port for the Scots-Irish. Within a year, Wilson had proposed to a sixteen-year-old he had met aboard ship; and shortly after that, he was running the Aurora, a radical newspaper that had helped elect Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency. By 1815, Wilson’s work had attracted the attention of a civic leader in Ohio, who encouraged him to relocate to a town barely drawn on maps. The Wilsons moved to Steubenville, where James published the local newspaper, entered the Ohio legislature, and, without any legal training, became a local judge. He and his wife produced ten children.
Their ninth child, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, proved the most prodigious. As a boy, he printed his own small newspaper; and when he turned eighteen, in 1840, he joined the Presbyterian Church of Steubenville and enrolled at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, where he became the class valedictorian. He was articulate, dynamic, and ruggedly handsome—almost six feet tall with a sturdy build and a chinstrap beard, which accentuated his big brown eyes and long, straight nose. He taught briefly in Mercer, Pennsylvania, until his deep faith took hold of him. Yearning to preach, he studied for a year at the Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh and another year at the Princeton Theolog
ical Seminary in New Jersey. While still considering careers, he returned home, to teach at the Steubenville Male Academy. One fall day, while raking leaves in his father’s garden, the twenty-five-year-old professor caught Jessie Woodrow’s glance for the first time, and they fell in love.
Jessie exuded more character than beauty—intelligence, strong spirit, and doleful gray eyes. Her religious heritage was not lost on the aspiring preacher. On June 7, 1849, the Reverend Dr. Thomas Woodrow married his twenty-one-year-old daughter to twenty-seven-year-old Joseph Wilson in what appeared to be a match made in heaven. Two weeks later, the Ohio presbytery ordained Wilson; and after a teaching job had sent him to Hampden-Sydney, Virginia, he received the unusual offer of serving as both a pastor in a nearby town and the principal of the neighboring girls’ school.
Staunton, Virginia—a town of four thousand nestled in the Shenandoah Valley between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Alleghenies—sat midway along the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road. Presbyterian communities dotted this trail, which originated in Pennsylvania and terminated in Augusta, Georgia. In March 1855, Joseph and Jessie Wilson and their two daughters moved into the manse of the Staunton Presbyterian Church, which sat above most of the community. The brick house (two stories at the front with a third—the staff basement—at the rear) bespoke the town’s respect for its new clergyman. The twelve-room residence was built for $4,000 in the Greek Revival style—with high ceilings, center halls, and four chimneys. Behind the house sat a large garden and several out-buildings, including a stable. Joseph Wilson preferred to write his sermons on a back porch from which he could look upon his church, the Augusta Female Seminary, and the homes of most of his congregants. And—arguably—on December 29, 1856, in the ground-floor front bedroom, Jessie gave birth to Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who was almost certainly named for her favorite brother.
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Four months later—after a blizzard had buried Staunton, cutting people off from the outside world for ten days—Jessie Wilson was able to write her father about her son. “Tommy”—as he would be known until adulthood—had become “a fine healthy fellow,” she said. “He is much larger than either of the others were—and just as fat as he can be. Every one tells me, he is a beautiful 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.” She did much of the child-rearing on her own, as Joseph would often leave for a week at a time to preach in outlying areas. His church was “prospering in every respect,” she reported. But like his father, Joseph Wilson had a restless nature: he always looked to supplement his income and trade up.
In early 1857, Jessie’s brother James—a minister as well as a distinguished scholar of theology and science who championed Darwin’s theory of evolution—asked his brother-in-law to officiate at his wedding in Milledgeville, Georgia, that summer. While Joseph Wilson was there, the First Presbyterian Church of Augusta called upon him to deliver a sermon to its congregation. After hearing him preach, the church invited him back on a permanent basis. In early 1859, the Wilsons moved into the parsonage there. As their one-year-old grew to manhood and developed his political consciousness, he never released what he considered his Virginia birthright—that which had sent seven Presidents to the White House, starting with Washington and Jefferson.
After Staunton, Augusta was downright bustling—a dusty but prosperous city of thirteen thousand inhabitants, half of whom were slaves. (The issue of slavery disconcerted Jessie Wilson, but her husband had no second thoughts, creating an ambivalence that would follow Tommy to the White House.) Situated on the south bank of the Savannah River, midway between the Great Smoky Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean 120 miles away, the city flourished on large surrounding plantations of corn and cotton. Augusta thrived on its mills and warehouses and supporting merchantry. The business district ran for several blocks parallel to the riverfront, growing increasingly residential as it moved inland. Wide boulevards, spacious lots, and generous foliage lent an air of grace to the town, which also boasted a large arsenal, an imposing medical school, and a bell tower that was being erected as a fire lookout station. Farther out, and at a higher elevation, rose the Sand Hills district—sometimes called Summerville, because it became the popular retreat for those who could afford to escape the midyear torpor with its periodic outbreaks of malaria.
When a dollar a day was an acceptable working wage and some professionals earned $2,000 a year, the Reverend Wilson received an annual salary of $2,500 in quarterly payments. He also carried the prestige of shepherding a flock that ranged from the gentry of Summerville to the most indigent “colored” residents of Augusta. In his first year alone, he attracted five dozen new members to his house of worship on Telfair Street, in a fashionable part of town. On a block of its own, the fifty-year-old brick-and-stucco church—with a three-tiered Georgian tower, topped by a spire and cross—set the tone for the stately houses of the neighborhood. Within two years, the trustees of the church authorized a $500 raise for Wilson and a new house, kitty-corner from the family’s original home.
The two-and-a-half-story brick manse, complete with a stable and a servants’ building (kitchen, wood room, laundry, and sleeping quarters), had just been constructed on McIntosh Street with such modern conveniences as gas lighting and copper indoor plumbing. The parish bought the house for $10,000. The ground floor offered a spacious parlor and a proper study, which absorbed the sweet redolence of Joseph Wilson’s pipe tobacco. (His son never took up smoking, insisting, “My father did enough of it in his lifetime to answer for both of us.”) The house featured such niceties as porcelain doorknobs, elegant sconces, and decorative plaster surrounding the gas lighting fixtures. The bedrooms were upstairs, Tommy’s at the rear. A low iron fence separated the house from the street corner. Joseph Wilson would continue to accept offers to preach out of town, in order to enhance his income, as he and his wife furnished the home with dark, heavy wood furniture. They lived modestly, but never like church mice.
“My earliest recollection,” Woodrow Wilson would say, “is of standing at my father’s gateway in Augusta, Georgia, when I was four years old, and hearing some one pass and say that Mr. Lincoln was elected and there was to be war.” Tommy Wilson was, in fact, weeks shy of four in November 1860, but he accurately recalled the importance of the moment. “Catching the intense tones of [the stranger’s] excited voice,” Wilson said, “I remember running in to ask my father what it meant.”
Thirty-three years later, as a college professor, Woodrow Wilson would answer his own question, in his book Division and Reunion. “The South had avowedly staked everything, even her allegiance to the Union, upon this election,” he wrote. “The triumph of Mr. Lincoln was, in her eyes, nothing less than the establishment in power of a party bent upon the destruction of the southern system and the defeat of southern interests, even to the point of countenancing and assisting servile insurrection.” As Southerners looked back, they saw twenty years of the North passing “personal liberty” laws, all meant to change the way half the country had successfully and legally operated for centuries. “Southern pride, too,” Wilson wrote, “was stung to the quick by the position in which the South found itself. . . . The whole course of the South had been described as one of systematic iniquity; southern society had been represented as built upon a willful sin; the southern people had been held up to the world as those who deliberately despised the most righteous command of religion. They knew that they did not deserve such reprobation. They knew that their lives were honorable, their relations with their slaves human, their responsibility for the existence of slavery among them remote.” In a powder keg of a decision, the Supreme Court had recently ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that slaves were property, not citizens, and as such had no legal standing. Any preacher worth his salt had plenty to say those days on the subject of this “peculiar institution,” as Scripture offered plenty of fodder.
On the morning of Jan
uary 6, 1861, a Sabbath Day, the Reverend Joseph Wilson preached on the “Mutual Relation of Masters and Slaves As Taught in the Bible.” His mission that Sunday was to “show how completely the Bible brings human slavery underneath the sanction of divine authority.” One of his leading arguments lay in Scripture’s failure to denounce it, that man could not forbid what God did not—for “the Bible could not wink at prevailing error, much less at prevailing crime, least of all at prevailing ungodliness, through any fear of arousing angry opposition against Christianity on the part of such as might hold the civil power, or of such as might direct the sneer of hatred.” Slavery, he contended, existed throughout the Roman Empire, and it was often referred to in the New Testament and never once condemned. Wilson exhorted his predominantly white congregation to be good masters.
That very week, on the Day of the National Fast at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, the most powerful religious voice of the day addressed the same topic but offered a different view. The renowned Reverend Henry Ward Beecher declared slavery “the most alarming and most fertile cause of national sin.” He told his congregation that the South had borrowed its principles of slavery from the Roman law, and not from the old Hebrew, in which “the slave was a man, and not a chattel.” Beecher concluded, “Why, that minister who preaches slavery out of the Bible is the father of every infidel in the community!”
The South’s expressed reason for secession was bigger than slavery. It was, historian Woodrow Wilson explained later, that “power had been given to a geographical, a sectional, party, ruthlessly hostile to her interests.” These Confederate states had long abided by the rules; they lived, as their grandfathers had, according to the Constitution. Their understanding of that document had just been interpreted by the highest court in the land, and now the North wanted to change those rules.
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