Wilson’s four years at Princeton had transformed a sheltered and aimless boy from the South into a thoughtful young man with ambition and vision—even an outlook on the world and the place he hoped to hold in it.
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A few years later, a relative visited him in Pennsylvania. While she was leafing through one of his college books, a piece of paper fell out: it was a handmade business card, fashioned while he had been a Princeton undergraduate. In his finest penmanship, he had written:
Thomas Woodrow Wilson
Senator from Virginia
4
SINAI
They wandred in the wildernes, in a solitary way: they found no citie to dwell in.
—PSALMES, CVII:4
Adjustment,” Thomas Woodrow Wilson would write years later in When a Man Comes to Himself, approaches most men incrementally, a little at each stage of life: “A college man feels the first shock of it at graduation. . . . Of a sudden he is a novice again, as green as in his first school year, studying a thing that seems to have no rules—at sea amid crosswinds, and a bit seasick withal.” Upon leaving Princeton, Wilson embarked upon a ten-year odyssey—stopping anxiously at numerous ports but never dropping anchor.
After three weeks in Wilmington, Tommy escaped the summer heat with his family, traveling three hundred miles west—fifteen hours of which were by stagecoach climbing rough roads up the Blue Ridge Mountains. They finally reached a country retreat called Horse Cove, three thousand feet above sea level. Bad weather kept him indoors much of the time, reading Green’s Short History of the English People and writing a twenty-thousand-word piece called “Self-Government in France.” By September’s end, he had begun to chart his career course. “The profession I chose was politics,” Wilson would explain a few years later; “the profession I entered was the law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other.” He enrolled in the School of Law at the University of Virginia.
Charlottesville sits at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, equidistant from the capitals of both the nation and the Commonwealth of Virginia. The spirit of Thomas Jefferson infused the town, where the third President had lived most of his adult life at Monticello, the home he had designed. In his final years, he conceived and also designed a second great monument for the community, the University of Virginia, an “academical village” of red-brick buildings trimmed in white, spread across twenty-eight acres.
Inspired by the Pantheon of Rome, the Rotunda commands the campus, rising almost eighty feet to its white dome. A massive portico of Corinthian columns greeted visitors to the college library, offices, and classrooms. Two long rows of connected pavilions, including living quarters, ran south down a terraced slope, embracing a great lawn almost 250 yards in length. The pavilions—with faculty housing evenly spaced among student accommodations—backed onto gardens with serpentine brick walls, which gave way on either side to another row of buildings, the Ranges.
Law schools barely existed in America until the middle of the nineteenth century. Before that, young men “read the law,” generally apprenticing to attorneys as they mastered its basic texts. A few colleges offered courses in the subject and, in time, developed curricula. Harvard Law School, founded in 1817, had recently appointed a new dean, Christopher Columbus Langdell, who revolutionized his field by introducing the case method, a dialectic approach to the subject. But by the time “Thos. Woodrow Wilson”—as he enrolled on October 2, 1879—cracked his first law books in Charlottesville, Langdell was the only practitioner of this Socratic method in America.
The School of Law at Virginia, which began in 1826, was more traditional. It had been run since 1845 by an alumnus many considered the outstanding legal scholar of his day, John Barbee Minor. He and another graduate, Stephen O. Southall, taught all the courses to their seventy-nine students. English common law was Professor Minor’s religion, Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England his Bible. “He who is not a good lawyer when he comes to the bar,” Minor wrote in the course catalogue, “is not a good one afterwards.”
In his late sixties and an expert in Scripture and Shakespeare, Minor taught in the standard form of lecture and recitation, drilling his classes with questions about their reading. Students considered his lectures masterpieces. “Thought is requisite as well as reading,” Minor wrote in describing the course; “for the purpose of thought, there must be time to Digest, as well as the Industry to acquire. One cannot expect to gorge himself with law as a Boa Constrictor does with masses of food, and then digest it afterwards.” Second only to Wilson’s father, the major educational influence in Wilson’s life was Minor.
Professor Minor’s own four-volume Institutes of Common and Statute Law served as the basic text, and Wilson scratched his own shorthand comments in its margins. On the page where Minor justified certain instances of slavery, because its discontinuance would result in “more injury . . . to the body politic” than its maintenance, Wilson wondered, “How about its gradual abolition?”—because of the practice’s “curse to industry and to morals.” In class, one fellow student recalled, “no responses to Mr. Minor’s questions were prompter, more precise, or more satisfactory, in every respect, than his.” After his first month, Tommy Wilson was still undecided as to how he felt about the University of Virginia. “The course in Law is certainly as fine a one as could be desired,” he wrote Bobby Bridges. “Prof. Minor, who is at the head of the ‘school,’ is a perfect teacher. . . . But to like an institution one must be attracted by something besides its methods of instruction.”
Wilson lived in an uninspiring brick dormitory on the perimeter of the campus—House F in Dawson’s Row, which looked out upon open fields and a Confederate cemetery. He missed the Witherspoon Gang and the camaraderie he had enjoyed at Princeton. Since he was an avowed Federalist—an ardent admirer of Alexander Hamilton; a believer in dominant central government; a Southerner without Southern blood who did not embrace states’ rights—all the surrounding Jeffersoniana was lost on him.
Having arrived on campus a published writer and accomplished debater, he set about creating new social circles for himself. He ate at a boardinghouse at the end of West Range, where he made his first and most lasting friend in Charlottesville, an undergraduate from Virginia. Richard Heath Dabney was a student of history and an avid reader—four years Wilson’s junior but in a three-year program that would award him a master’s degree—and he and Tommy took long walks and read to each other. They found a few like-minded students—including one Charles W. Kent, also in a master’s program—with whom they liked to roam the hills and discuss their current texts. The three men pledged Phi Kappa Psi together, and Wilson was chosen that semester to represent its chapter at the fraternity’s annual convention in Washington; the next year he was elected general president of his chapter. He made even more friends as a member of the chapel choir. After a month on campus, a few of the singers peeled off to form a glee club; and tenors Wilson and Kent sang all the popular tunes of the day. Sunday evenings after chapel services, he repaired to Dr. Minor’s house, where several of the men sang hymns long into the night.
Wilson’s voice was strongest, however, as a member of the Jefferson Society, one of the university’s literary and debating organizations. The “old Jeff” convened every Saturday night in a red-carpeted room in West Range. Within weeks, he was named club secretary; and in signing his first set of minutes, he added a flourish. As though shedding a skin—and suggesting new seriousness—he endorsed the record as T. Woodrow Wilson.
Just days before Christmas 1879, he was asked to present the school’s athletic medals at the university field day, and he combined serious comments with some playful doggerel of his own invention. “When all was over,” the University of Virginia Magazine observed, “Mr. Wilson in that happy manner so preeminently possessed by that gentleman made a perfect little medal delivery speech.” Ove
rnight, Wilson became a star on campus, with people awaiting his next public appearance.
The occasion arrived in March, when an overflow crowd that included townspeople came to hear him deliver a serious speech. He selected a predictable subject—John Bright—and his profile of his idol revealed just the sort of statesman Wilson intended to be. “Tolerance is an admirable intellectual gift: but it is of little worth in politics,” he said of the great reformer. “Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles. . . . Absolute identity with one’s cause is the first and great condition of successful leadership.”
Wilson used his remaining moments to take a stand of his own, defending Bright on a controversial matter—his opposition to the Confederacy. Standing in the middle of the Old Dominion, Virginia-born Wilson declaimed, “I yield to no one precedence in love for the South. But because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy.” Taking no moral stand, he explained, “The perpetuation of slavery would, beyond all question, have wrecked our agricultural and commercial interests, at the same time that it supplied a fruitful source of irritation abroad and agitation within. We cannot conceal from ourselves the fact that slavery was enervating our Southern society and exhausting to Southern energies.” He concluded his long oration with the words of his subject, who had said, “I see one people, and one language, and one law, and one father over all that wide continent, the home of freedom, and a refuge for the oppressed of every race and of every clime.”
Wilson made his local reputation that night. The Virginia University Magazine printed the text of his speech in March. In April he delivered an equally deliberative biographical essay on William Gladstone—almost ten thousand words extolling his “poetical sensibility,” an intuitive understanding of interests beyond his own. Wilson admired Gladstone’s ability to change his views on issues over his long career. As the leading student of politics at the University of Virginia, T. Woodrow Wilson seemed well on his path to the Senate. He was unrivalled at Virginia—except by one man.
William Cabell Bruce shared Woodrow Wilson’s political and literary ambitions and seemed to be chasing, if not outpacing, him. Born four years after Wilson in a Virginia town called Staunton Hill, he too demonstrated his literary proclivities and his oratory prowess in the Jefferson Society. When it was announced that these two stars would face off in a debate on the afternoon of Friday, April 2, the contest had to be moved to the Washington Society’s larger hall to accommodate the unprecedented crowd. The subject before the two men: “Is the Roman Catholic element in the United States a menace to American institutions?”
A packed house awaited the debaters; and the audience was so enthralled, the faculty judges decided not to render an immediate decision but to publish the results a month later. “Being required to decide between these two gentlemen,” they wrote at last in a letter to the school magazine, “our committee is of opinion that the medal intended for the best debater should be awarded to Mr. Bruce.”
They voted to bestow a second medal for oratory to Wilson, who considered it a consolation prize and contemplated refusing it. A fellow law student recalled his saying that “he made no pretensions to oratory; that he was a debater or nothing; and that his acceptance of such a trophy would be absurd.” Wilson’s friends urged him to back down, which he finally did. Decades later, Bruce spoke graciously of his old rival, saying: “I had a more commonplace, conventional mind than his. . . . Extraordinary as his intellect was, he was too abstract, too oracular for a debater.” Wilson, he thought, “was much better fitted for the public platform than for a debating assembly.” A month later, the university presented a prize for that year’s best contribution to the Virginia University Magazine. It cited Wilson’s excellent work; but it awarded the gold medal to an essay by William Cabell Bruce.
Wilson’s earlier sound health gave way to a persistent cold and severe dyspepsia. His father suggested different living accommodations for the next year, though he added that he thought it “queer that, since it came off, you have never referred to your debate . . . nor did you send me a copy of yr. magazine article as you promised.” It established a pattern that followed Wilson for the rest of his life: the direct correlation between his physical and emotional health. After a few months at Virginia, he tired of studying the law. “I think that it is the want of variety . . . that disgusts me,” he wrote Charlie Talcott. “Law served with some of the lighter and spicier sauces of literature would no doubt be at all times to us of the profession an exceedingly palatable dish. But when one has nothing but Law, served in all its dryness . . . he tires of this uniformity of diet. This excellent thing, the Law, gets as monotonous as that other immortal article of food, Hash, when served with such endless frequency.” At twenty-three, the weary student also confronted a new malady—he became lovesick.
After a virtually monastic existence at Davidson and Princeton, Wilson had fantasized about Charlottesville as the setting for his sexual initiation. “I’m still a poor lone laddie with no fair lassie,” he had written Bobby Bridges before arriving on campus. “I’m reserving all my powers of charming for the Virginia girls, who are numerously represented around the University, I have heard. Do you think that Law and love will mix well?” Wilson had grown out of his undergraduate gawkiness into a fine-looking man, with strong features and a chivalrous manner. Raised by an adoring mother and two older sisters, he enjoyed not only the company of women but also the pleasure of playing to them. He ached to be in love.
Several of Wilson’s cousins attended the Augusta Female Seminary in Staunton, his birthplace, a forty-mile train ride from Charlottesville. The school was run by Mary Baldwin, under whose name the seminary would eventually operate. At Princeton, Tommy had struck up a correspondence with one of those cousins, Harriet Augusta Woodrow—known as Hattie—the daughter of Thomas Woodrow in Chillicothe, the uncle for whom he was probably named. Hattie was no beauty, but she was vivacious and talented and religious. She excelled in French, and she displayed talent for singing and playing piano and organ. Throughout his first year of law school, Wilson took advantage of the proximity and spent holidays in Staunton, where his aunt’s spare bedroom was always available. Over the next few months, he took the train into the Shenandoah Valley to spend weekends specifically with Hattie. And before he knew it, Tommy had fallen in love with his first cousin.
It was the first romance for either of them. Hattie kept him at bay, but her resistance only stimulated him further, nearly to the point of desperation. He bought her a beautiful edition of Longfellow, her favorite poet; and he whiled away hours just listening to her sing and play piano, requesting Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” over and over. After Hattie had performed at a concert at Miss Baldwin’s, Tommy applauded exuberantly enough to embarrass her. He took to ditching class and missing trains back to school. He made unauthorized trips to Staunton, and he spent hours writing long letters to her. At last, the university reprimanded him. His parents approved of their son’s romantic intentions but not at the cost of his education. As always, they defended him—his mother insisting the school’s warnings were “wrong and cruel,” while his father said, “You were foolish, not criminal. . . . Your head went agog.”
Tommy granted himself the summer to loaf. A family party gathered, this time on a farm in Fort Lewis, close to the West Virginia border. He spent most of his time outdoors, rowing on a little stream; when the weather turned too hot, he stayed indoors, revising another piece on Congressional government and reading the speeches of Bright and Webster. In declaring this his last summer of boyhood, he officially bade goodbye to his first name, announcing to friends and family that Tommy was “unsuitable” for a grown man.
Woodrow Wilson returned to Charlottesville happy to be in new quarters for the year. His Spartan room at 31 West Range offered the convenience of being just a garden away from the law school and the novelty of being just up the row from No. 13, where Edgar Allan Poe had roomed
as a student. But no sooner had he unpacked than he returned to his own midnights dreary, having “to plod out another long weary session” studying law. He tried to brighten his spirits by writing to Hattie, though his feelings toward her were confused, especially as she planned to move to Cincinnati to further her music studies.
Over the next few months, Woodrow never missed a class. While he had indulged in extensive extracurricular reading his first year—histories, books about oratory, and Shelley’s poetry—the only book he checked out from the library his second autumn was on contracts. He tethered himself to the campus, diverting any excess energy into the Jefferson Society, where Providence delivered an unexpected windfall: William Cabell Bruce left Virginia to pursue his studies at the University of Maryland. At the first meeting of the Society that October, the membership unanimously elected Woodrow Wilson its president.
Within weeks, President Wilson introduced his first order of serious business, the “urgent necessity” of revising the Constitution and Bylaws of the Jefferson Society. Under his leadership, the new document was the first reworking of the rules in twenty years. But before his list of reforms could be voted upon, he withdrew from the university due to failing health. He had suffered from respiratory and gastric troubles since the semester began. His parents repeatedly suggested his dropping out, but Woodrow resisted. Just before Christmas, his father wrote at last “that the state of your health absolutely requires your return to us”; and, regardless of the college’s willingness to refund any tuition, he urged his son simply to “pack up and leave.” He was home for the holidays.
“I will not return,” Woodrow wrote Robert Bridges from Wilmington on the first day of 1881, “but will prosecute my studies here for the rest of the Winter, when I will settle upon a place to practice and plunge immediately into business. I will be able to study very satisfactorily alone, I am quite sure; for I have had enough guidance from skilled and competent guides to set me fairly in the right track.” Mid-January his books arrived from Charlottesville, and he created a study for himself in his parents’ home. He kept regular hours reading, writing editorials for the local newspaper, and tutoring his twelve-year-old brother in Latin. In spare moments, he returned to his father’s pulpit to recite the great speeches of famous orators. While Wilson maintained a few literary and political correspondences with former schoolmates, he could not shake his cousin Hattie from his thoughts. He resumed sending her long letters. She reciprocated, without realizing that he was, in fact, suing for her affection.
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