And one day, in one of their regular conversations, Tommy told his father that he had experienced a “Eureka!” moment, that he had “found it” at last. When his father inquired what he had found, Tommy replied, “A mind, sir. I’ve found I have an intellect and a first-class mind.” He explained that he had been reading an abstract book, “and the ease with which he mastered it convinced him that he had a mind.”
While Tommy stuck mostly to himself, he did venture into the town. He spent hours at the water’s edge, musing about a life at sea. He fantasized once again about what he dubbed “the Royal United Kingdom Yacht Club.” He even composed a constitution for his mythical flotilla, an elaborate list of rules and regulations for his make-believe organization, complete with details of officers’ duties, times of meetings, fees for entrance, fines for absences, and requirements for bills and resolutions, which demanded the signature of the Commodore—himself.
And he made a friend—John Bellamy, a neighbor and a recent Davidson graduate, two and a half years older, who shared his love of books. Together they went on “reading raids”—sometimes hiking in the pines, other times lying on mounds that had recently covered stashes of Confederate ammunition. They read in silence or, just as often, to each other. Sir Walter Scott was their mutual passion—especially his Bride of Lammermoor and The Pirate. For Wilson, it was not enough simply to read the books; he insisted that they analyze them. When there was not a book at hand, Bellamy remembered, Tommy launched into discussions of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and, of course, Gladstone. Such was the first real friendship Wilson had ever permitted himself with anybody outside his family. “The only trouble with Woodrow Wilson,” Bellamy said years later, “is that he was a confirmed and confounded Calvinist.” He could not be otherwise. His faith had become his lifeline, just as it had been for his mother—that little girl on the boat, clutching the rope that had been provided to keep her from drowning.
“A man’s rootage,” Woodrow Wilson would later comment, “means more than his leafage.” As he was about to be transplanted in New Jersey soil, his belief in Providence allowed him already to envision his flowerage.
3
EDEN
Now the LORD had said vnto Abram, Get thee out of thy countrey, and from thy kinred, and from thy fathers house, vnto a land that I will shew thee.
And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will blesse thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt bee a blessing.
—GENESIS, XII:1–2
At the end of a spur track of the Pennsylvania Railroad line, eighteen-year-old freshman Thomas Woodrow Wilson stepped off the “dinky” train at the little station in Princeton. In few other places within the thirty-seven reunited states did so much educational, political, and religious history converge as they did in this town of three thousand people in the middle of New Jersey.
The first seeds of higher education in the United States had, in fact, been planted elsewhere centuries earlier—only sixteen years after the Pilgrims disembarked the Mayflower. In 1636, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony authorized the founding of what became Harvard College. Almost six decades later, a second college—William and Mary—was founded as an Anglican institution in Virginia; and eight years after that, in 1701, the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut permitted ten Congregationalist clerics to organize a college to train ministers, naming it after its primary benefactor, Elihu Yale.
In 1718 the Reverend William Tennent, a Scottish-educated Ulsterman, immigrated to the middle colonies, where he and his sons helped ignite what became known as the Great Awakening, an evangelical movement that started in the Congregationalist churches of New England and ran the length of the Appalachians to the Presbyterian churches in the South. On October 22, 1746, Governor John Hamilton issued a charter for the College of New Jersey. While its founders included several of Tennent’s disciples who hoped to prepare ministers of the Gospel, they believed equally in educating young men of various religious persuasions for other professions.
One hundred fifty years later, Professor Woodrow Wilson would praise those divines, for they “acted without ecclesiastical authority, as if under obligation to society rather than to the church. They were acting as citizens, not as clergymen, and the charter they obtained said never a word about creed or doctrine.” They selected the Reverend Jonathan Dickinson to serve as the school’s first president in his parsonage in Elizabeth. He died within a year, leaving his student body of ten pupils to his successor, the Reverend Aaron Burr, Sr., who moved the college to his parish in Newark. He established entrance criteria and a curriculum; and, in his tenth year in office, he provided his most enduring contribution.
Burr moved the enterprise to Princeton—then a forty-house village halfway between New York City and Philadelphia. Its position on a low ridge of fertile farmland that close to two of the most thriving cities in the Colonies promised academic seclusion and cultural access. Nathaniel FitzRandolph, the son of an original Quaker settler in the area, donated four and a half acres and twenty New Jersey pounds. He passed the hat among his neighbors, while Burr solicited funds from donors who might contribute enough to construct a grand edifice that would serve as the entire college for several years to come. They chose local Stockton sandstone, ochre in color and faintly iridescent. When the building was completed two years later, the trustees wished to name it in honor of the Governor, Jonathan Belcher; but he generously declined—sparing future generations incalculable sophomoric ridicule—and suggested they honor the late King William III, the Prince of Orange, a member of the House of Orange-Nassau.
For years, Nassau Hall reigned as the largest building in the Colonies. Set back from the main street of the town, behind a low iron gate, the building was almost two hundred feet long and fifty feet deep, with a central transept-like projection that added four feet in the front and twelve in the back. A row of windows spanned the length of each of the three floors, with the tops of the basement windows poking their heads just above ground. There were ninety-four of them at the front of the building alone. The exterior walls were more than two feet thick. With its forty-two rooms, Nassau Hall could house a library (mostly Governor Belcher’s five hundred books) as well as dormitories and classrooms for as many as 150 students and faculty members and an office for the president; the basement contained the kitchen and refectory. The building’s primary feature was the two-story prayer hall that projected from the rear. Not long after the building opened, students discovered the virtues of its long corridors for bowling. Perched atop the hipped roof was a cupola, which housed a large bell that rang at five o’clock in the morning, summoning the students to morning prayers, and throughout the day signaling periods of study, meals, and prayer.
Within a year of taking occupancy, Burr died at forty-one. His wife died less than a year later, orphaning their two young children—including Aaron Burr, Jr., the future Founding Father who turned treasonous. Fortunately, the trustees had been able to impress upon Burr’s father-in-law the presidency of the college. And so, in January 1758, Jonathan Edwards, America’s foremost theologian—whose sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” epitomized the First Great Awakening—moved from Massachusetts to become the new master of Nassau Hall. That March he received an inoculation for smallpox, from which he succumbed. The untimely deaths of his next two successors did not demoralize the college trustees. In fact, they raised their sights and turned to one of Scotland’s most eminent scholars and preachers.
Educated at the University of Edinburgh and ordained by the Church of Scotland, John Witherspoon, then in his mid-forties, was an activist evangelical within the Kirk—who had expressed no desire to leave his homeland. Providentially, two persuasive alumni of the College of New Jersey were in Britain that year, and they convinced him and his wife to pack up their five children and venture overseas for a more primitive life and an even more challenging opportunity. To commemo
rate the night of their arrival in Princeton in 1768, the students lit a candle in each of Nassau Hall’s windows.
Witherspoon found a college not living up to its potential—what with an ill-prepared student body and insufficient funds. The preacher in him unabashedly solicited money beyond the confines of the town, and the educator within pushed the curriculum beyond the strictly classical and Christian. He recruited a professor to teach mathematics and natural philosophy and another to teach divinity and moral philosophy. And nobody taught more than Witherspoon himself. “He lectured upon taste and style as well as upon abstract questions of philosophy, and upon politics as a science of government and of public duty as little to be forgotten as religion itself in any well considered plan of life,” Wilson would note. Combining his personal library of three hundred books with that of the college, Witherspoon enabled students to sample contemporary politics and literature. He also delighted in the green space surrounding Nassau Hall and its neighboring buildings and contributed to the English language a new word for the college grounds, from the Latin for “field”—“campus.”
“It was a piece of providential good fortune that brought such a man to Princeton at such a time,” Wilson added. “The blood of John Knox ran in Witherspoon’s veins. The great drift and movement of English liberty from Magna Charta down was in all his teachings.” He became one of New Jersey’s signers of the Declaration of Independence—the only clergyman among the fifty-six delegates.
When the American Revolution began, the college soon had to face the harsh realities of war. On Christmas Night 1776, General George Washington crossed the Delaware River, and a week later Princeton became a battleground. Nassau Hall, which had served as an infirmary until the British converted it into barracks and a jail for suspected rebels, reverted to American hands when Washington delivered a surprise attack and chased the enemy from the building. In time, the college returned to its educational mission, having made activists of many of her sons, including Burr, the poet and pamphleteer Philip Freneau, cavalry officer “Light-Horse” Harry Lee, and—most significant—the young Virginian who became the first Princetonian to return to Princeton for postgraduate study, James Madison. From July to November 1783, the new federal Congress convened in Princeton, turning Nassau Hall into its temporary capitol.
Witherspoon remained president of the college until his death in 1794, getting to witness an astonishing number of his disciples engage in the nation’s service. They would include twenty Senators, twenty-three Representatives, thirteen Governors, three Supreme Court Justices, one Vice President, and a President. “No man,” noted Wilson, “had ever better right to rejoice in his pupils.”
Like the United States itself, American higher education came of age in the nineteenth century. Building colleges proved an effective way to tame the American wilderness, and religion was no longer their justification. Public schools and libraries also became the tent poles of towns, as essential as churches had once been. With the Morrill Act of 1862, the federal government granted land for the creation of schools that would train students in engineering, agriculture, and even military tactics, establishing colleges in all the states. Still, higher education largely remained the province of the privileged, as few young men could afford time away from their farms or factories to get an education, to say nothing of having to pay for it. For the most privileged, the Eastern college campuses became preserves where sons of the well-to-do could consort with one another and even learn enough to pursue a profession, if necessary. Social clubs, fraternities, and secret societies took root on many campuses, private enclaves where the wealthiest students might enjoy privileges the rest of the student body could not.
After Witherspoon, the adolescent Princeton spent several decades in search of its identity. Under the next few Presbyterian ministers who served as president, Princeton steadily loosened its clerical collar, adding modern languages and current literatures, chemistry, and geography to its curriculum, while a separate theological seminary opened, specifically for the training of church leaders.
The school compensated for its fluctuating enrollment by recruiting heavily in the South. Naturally, debate on campus raged over the issue of slavery. During the Civil War, seventy sons of Princeton gave their lives, half from each side, illustrating its having become the northernmost of the Southern schools and the southernmost of the Northern schools. In December 1864, Princeton conferred an honorary degree upon President Lincoln. Just before the war, a fire had gutted Nassau Hall; so, like the rest of the nation, the college had to reconstruct. In 1868, retirement left a vacancy in its presidency; and, exactly a century after Witherspoon’s arrival, Princeton called upon Scotland to send another of her sons on the same mission.
James McCosh was born in Ayrshire—“Bobby Burns” country—and educated at the University of Glasgow and then Edinburgh. He became a preacher and philosophy professor of international repute at Queen’s College, Belfast. Some forty years later, Professor Woodrow Wilson would write of McCosh, “He found Princeton a quiet country college and lifted it to a conspicuous place among the most notable institutions of the country.” Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University said simply that McCosh shook up “the dry bones of an institution which had been little more than a country high school in New Jersey.”
During this period—when Charles William Eliot at Harvard, Andrew White at Cornell, Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard at Columbia, James Burrill Angell at the University of Michigan, and Daniel Coit Gilman, who had just left the presidency of the University of California for the new Johns Hopkins University, blazed new trails in higher education—McCosh expanded the Princeton curriculum and campus. He introduced courses in biology, geology, psychology, art, philosophy, and such social sciences as economics and political science. McCosh encouraged required classes in several disciplines, with some leniency in electives. As the debate over Darwinism raged through the country, the Reverend McCosh asserted, “When a scientific theory is brought before us, our first inquiry is not whether it is consistent with religion, but whether it is true.” Rare among ecclesiastics, McCosh argued that Darwin’s theory did not diminish the existence of God, but tended to “increase the wonder and mystery of the process of creation.” Princeton’s student body and faculty doubled in size.
Nothing demonstrated McCosh’s intention to elevate Princeton into the ranks of world-class universities more than his building the free-standing Chancellor Green Library—a fanciful work of Victorian Gothic architecture at the right hand of Nassau Hall—to house the college’s growing collection of seventy thousand books. McCosh also built the first significant college gymnasium in the country, a Romanesque castle of a building. These and other architectural anomalies, spread among their statelier predecessors across the twenty-acre campus, illustrated Princeton’s commitment to innovation as well as tradition.
• • •
Tommy Wilson—brown-haired, lanky, and wide-eyed—walked from the station onto a thriving campus that first week of September 1875. On the hill just above the tracks, the most modern college dormitory in America was about to be built—sited to impress arriving passengers, and to be named for Witherspoon. Princeton had abrogated the burden of feeding its 483 students but could not ignore the challenge of housing them—though there was not room for all the incoming freshmen that year, Wilson among them. Fortunately, a number of private homes surrounding the campus were eager for boarders; there was even a hotel at one corner of the campus. Except for his passing acquaintanceship with President McCosh, Tommy knew hardly a soul for hundreds of miles; but no student ever arrived in Princeton more determined to find a place and make a name for himself.
Joseph Wilson had provided his son with an introduction to a local minister and mathematics professor, who put him up for a few nights. Then Tommy found lodging just beyond the new library at the large house of Mr. and Mrs. Josiah Wright. They charged each of seventeen Princeton students t
en dollars a week for bed and board. Tommy Wilson’s second-floor single room overlooked Nassau Street—a wide, shop-lined dirt road with newly installed gas lamps—which a single rain could turn into a muddy bog.
On Wilson’s second morning, all new students assembled in the College Chapel, where McCosh asked them to pledge that so long as they were enrolled at Princeton, they would have “no connection whatever with any secret society”—the school’s latest effort to rid itself of at least some of its social divisiveness, especially the ritual of hazing within the already forbidden Greek-letter fraternities. Students were also informed of a compulsory hour-long meeting every Sunday at 2:45 for religious instruction. Furthermore, there would be weekly class meetings with McCosh for recitation on the Bible and his lectures.
Such was the pedagogical model on college campuses, even under the enlightened McCosh. Professors would feed information, and students would routinely regurgitate what they had ingested. Tommy dutifully attended courses in Latin (Livy and Horace), Greek (Demosthenes and Herodotus), Algebra, and an array of English classes, which included the study of Rhetoric, Punctuation and Dictation, Elocution, and Essays. Despite his aversion to rote learning, Wilson satisfactorily performed the stultifying schoolroom exercises.
But he rapidly bloomed outside of class, striking up his first college friendship with a young man from New Jersey who also lived at Mrs. Wright’s, Robert McCarter. “He was quiet and retiring and for a time had few, if any, other friends,” McCarter said of Wilson; “we were, therefore, constantly in each other’s room . . . chinning together.” One memorable conversation, about the Civil War, stretched into an all-nighter. “He was very full of the South and quite a secessionist,” said McCarter, “. . . he taking the Southern side and getting quite bitter.” Wilson, a son of four Confederate states, had never heard “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
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