Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  While suggesting his journey to Ohio that summer was a family visit, Woodrow left for Chillicothe with but one relative in mind. Cousin Hattie had invited him and their cousin Jessie Bones for a round of parties at the end of the social season, which he misinterpreted as a romantic signal. He worked in an uncle’s law office, as a cover for his desire to spend time with Hattie, in whose parents’ house he was staying. He eagerly agreed to attend the dances and picnics, even though he could not dance and dreaded making small talk. Then, in the middle of the third such event, he could contain himself no longer: he strode onto the dance floor and asked Hattie to leave with him so that they could speak alone. In the words of Hattie’s daughter years later, “He told her how much he loved her, that he could not live without her, and pleaded with her to marry him right away.”

  Practically speechless, Hattie declined. She said it would not be right for them to marry because they were first cousins. Woodrow rebutted that he had already secured the blessing for such a union from both his parents and hers, the bloodlines notwithstanding. At last, Hattie uttered the long unspoken truth—that she simply did not love him the way he wished her to. Woodrow packed his bag and checked into a hotel. Unable to sleep, he dashed off a note on a scrap of yellow paper—imploring Hattie to reconsider the rejection and begging her to “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.”

  They met again the next day, but Hattie’s feelings had not changed. She told him that she “dearly loved him as a cousin and always would,” but she had no intention of marrying him. She urged him to return to the house and continue his visit, but he could not bear to. Woodrow asked Hattie’s brother to take him to the train station, where they encountered a man just arriving in Chillicothe for one of Hattie’s parties. He expressed regret at Wilson’s sudden departure; but Woodrow later commented, “If the sentiment was not merely formal, and it probably was, it was not genuine. If he had any feeling at seeing me go away, it was probably a feeling of relief at getting me out of the way.” A few years later, Hattie would marry that man.

  During a six-hour layover in Ashland, Kentucky, Wilson wrote Harriet—“My darling”—once more. In accepting her desire for him to withdraw, he made one delusional request. He wanted the local photographer to take a formal portrait of her, for which he would pay. Not only that, he specifically requested that she wear her pink dress with its modestly cut neckline and that she appear in profile. Furthermore, he instructed: “Let the picture include your figure to the waist; let your head be slightly bent forward and your eyes slightly downcast”; and he wanted her hair off her face, gently braided and piled high in the back. He insisted that he alone should possess the photograph. It took a week before Wilson reached Wilmington, and, after several nights of “sound and dreamless” sleep, he wrote Hattie again, with the realization that “my love for you has taken such a hold on me as to have become almost a part of myself, which no influences I can imagine can ever destroy or weaken.” Hattie sent the photograph, almost exactly as directed; and then she ended her correspondence with her cousin.

  He wandered lonely as a cloud. Woodrow visited more relatives in the South; he entertained an offer to teach at a preparatory school; he wrote pseudonymous letters to local newspapers; he deliberated over where to hang his law shingle. After considering several Northern cities, he settled on Atlanta, which he considered “the centre of the new life of the New South.” He wrote Charlie Talcott—then launching his own legal career in New York—that Atlanta, “more than almost every other Southern city, offers all the advantages of business activity and enterprise.” Since the war, its population had trebled to forty thousand, further strengthening his reasons for remaining in the South. “After standing still, under slavery, for half a century,” he added, “she is now becoming roused . . . and waking to a new life.” Perhaps he could do the same. At twenty-five, Wilson had never lived in a major city, and, except for the occasional token fee for an article, had never earned a dollar.

  Outside forces nudged Wilson into motion. Upon the death of an uncle, his mother received a share of a legally entangled estate, the handling of which she turned over to Woodrow. Just as he was running out of excuses for taking a professional leap, he heard from a Virginia classmate with a business proposition. Edward I. Renick (a distant relative, in fact) wrote from Atlanta that he had recently secured very good office space there and offered to share it and its costs. After perseverating for several more months, Woodrow Wilson accepted the offer.

  Atlanta was a boomtown, determined to become a center of industry as its population would double in the next decade. Edward Renick’s second-floor corner office at 48 Marietta Street was opposite numerous government buildings; and Wilson’s portion of the rent was less than seven dollars. Renick’s living accommodations proved just as fortunate—a gracious house at 344 Peach Tree Street, in a fine residential neighborhood, where Mrs. J. Reid Boylston admitted a few boarders for twenty-five dollars a month and was able to take one more. Counting the ten dollars it would cost to supply his office and a forty-five-cent monthly shave and haircut—to trim his new full mustache and muttonchop sideburns (called “paddies”)—Woodrow could live quite comfortably on the fifty-dollar allowance his father continued to provide.

  Renick supplied most of the companionship he needed. Also the son of a minister, with roots in Virginia and Chillicothe, Renick was a student of the classics as well as the law. The two young attorneys spent hours reading the Aeneid to one another when they were not discussing the injustices of the protective tariff against the South. Within weeks, the office mates chose to become partners in business, their strengths complementing one another: Renick preferred the “office work” of the solicitor, while Wilson wished to play the barrister, arguing cases in court. He wrote Robert Bridges that Renick was “a perfect enthusiast in his profession.”

  Wilson was not. That very week he had told his parents that he was ready to close up shop—even before he had become a member of the Georgia Bar. “All beginnings are hard,” his father wrote back, “whatever occupation is chosen:—but surely a fair beginning must be made before the real character of the thing begun can be determined. As it is your future is in the land of imagination, and imagination is used to color. Get your feet fully upon the ladder of actual practice—and then, sh’d the ascent prove intolerable, it will not be too late to see what other hill may be attempted. It is hardly like you, my brave boy, to show a white feather before the battle is well joined.” Plainly more interested in the subject of the law than in its practice, Wilson never considered it anything more than a stepping stone. Unwilling to solicit business, he procured not a single client. He wrote political articles on the side and waited for clients to come to his door.

  That fall a small opportunity knocked when Walter Hines Page dropped in on his friend Renick. Page had done undergraduate work at two Southern colleges before becoming one of the first twenty graduate fellows at Johns Hopkins University. A restless spirit, he dropped his studies to pursue a career in journalism. At twenty-seven, he was reporting for the New York World, just then researching a story on the Tariff Commission. Wilson impressed Page with his knowledge of that very subject; and with the Commission’s hearing the next day at Atlanta’s Kimball House, Page persuaded him to address the group.

  While he had yet to appear before the local bar, Wilson had no reservations about standing before the city fathers and a national investigative committee, confident that he was better versed in the subject of tariffs than they. Convinced that the current tariff unfairly taxed the agricultural populations in the South and the West, Wilson scribbled some shorthand notes. He did not believe his comments would “make any impression on the asses of the Commission,” but he felt they would at least make their way into the committee’s printed report and attract attention.

  The next day, the young atto
rney lectured the officials for half an hour. Walter Page accorded him several praiseworthy column inches, as did The Atlanta Constitution. While Page was still in Atlanta, a vitalized Wilson assembled a few like-minded friends in his office for further discussion of the issue. He even organized a discussion group he called the “Georgia House of Commons,” for which, of course, he promptly drafted a constitution.

  On October 18, 1882, Woodrow Wilson appeared before Judge George Hillyer in the Superior Court of Fulton County for his bar examination. The judge and four lawyers interrogated him for two hours on matters of the law, somewhat more severely than usual because of his recent notoriety. Hillyer would later assert that Wilson’s performance was “not short of brilliant”; and when one of the attorneys posed an intentionally tricky question regarding “equity practice,” Wilson pled ignorance—only to find the judge himself interceding to say, “Mr. Wilson needn’t respond to that question. The Court himself could not answer it.” His certificate to practice law in the Georgia state courts was dated October 19; and the following March, he was approved to practice in the federal courts as well. Being licensed did not affect the practice of Renick & Wilson in the least. “The fact of the matter is that the profession here is in a very disorganized state,” Wilson wrote Heath Dabney in January 1883, “and young attorneys are unfairly out-bid by unscrupulous elders.” He and Renick filed no cases in either the city court or the Superior Court, collecting only a few “minute fees” and “desperate claims.”

  For months, he had a wealth of time on his hands. He wrote political pieces, including a long-winded tract called “Government by Debate,” which was an extension of his prior essays about reconfiguring the federal government. He visited the Georgia Senate gallery and watched what he considered a pitiful display of governance. The dearth of capable public officials made him think he might run for office, but he realized that he was still too new to the region to launch a campaign. Besides, he wrote Bridges on May 13, 1883, “no man can safely enter political life nowadays who has not an independent fortune, or at least independent means of support.” He considered an offer to lecture at a local college for African American students. (“It may serve to bring you more into notice; and, if any fool object because the pupils are negroes, just let him object,” his father counseled.) Wilson’s constant dithering continued to affect his intestinal tract. His brother-in-law Dr. George Howe believed he was ailing from “liver torpor.” Wilson’s father accepted Woodrow’s physical condition but suggested the real ailment he had to conquer was his “mental liver.” He urged his son to choose a path and commit to it.

  “What do I wish to become?” Wilson asked himself that May; and he responded: “I want to make myself an outside force in politics.” Toward that end, Wilson decided to forsake the law for something he loved. Heath Dabney had left America to study for a doctorate in Berlin, and it filled Wilson with envy. “I can never be happy unless I am enabled to lead an intellectual life,” he realized; “and who can lead an intellectual life in ignorant Georgia?” In Atlanta, he said, “the chief end of man is certainly to make money, and money cannot be made except by the most vulgar methods. The studious man is pronounced unpractical and is suspected as a visionary.” He applied to become a fellow at Johns Hopkins.

  Worst of all, Wilson had made only a handful of casual friends. He showed some interest in his landlady’s niece, but his courtship never got beyond the parlor, where he read aloud to her and taught her stenography. He was, as he would later recall, “absolutely hungry for a sweetheart.”

  Nothing remained for him in Georgia except the final settlement of the William Woodrow estate, which was to be divided between Wilson’s mother and her late sister’s husband, James W. Bones. More than $35,000 worth of land in Nebraska was at stake. In order to hasten the process and maintain amity between the co-beneficiaries, Wilson chose to deal with his uncle in his hometown of Rome, Georgia, sixty miles away in the northwest corner of the state. Besides the pleasure of leaving the city for a few days, Woodrow would have a chance to visit with his uncle and cousin Jessie Bones—the little girl he had shot from the tree with an arrow in Augusta. She was now living in Rome with her new husband, Abraham T. H. Brower.

  Built upon seven hills, Rome was a charming town situated at the confluence of three rivers. While he visited his cousin Jessie that Saturday, one of her neighbors stood on a porch and asked her friend, “Who is that fine-looking man?” The other replied that it was “Tommy Wilson.” The next day, the unknowing object of their admiration attended the Presbyterian Church, where he noticed a young woman of luminous innocence. Even though she was wearing a veil, Woodrow could discern her “bright, pretty face,” her “splendid, mischievous, laughing eyes.” Or perhaps he saw what he wanted to see, for her eyes were somewhat wistful and dark brown. But she possessed, no doubt, an air of gaiety—a kindliness about her round cheeks and delicate mouth. She had burnished copper hair, parted in the middle and combed back almost to her shoulders, with curly bangs. After the service, Woodrow stole another glance in her direction and decided to seek an introduction. She was the minister’s daughter, Ellen Louise Axson.

  Her grandfather Isaac Stockton Keith Axson had served as a pastor in South Carolina and rural Georgia and as a president of two different Presbyterian female colleges before shepherding the flock who worshipped at the Independent Presbyterian Church in Savannah. Known in church circles as “the Great Axson,” he had four children, including Ellen’s father, Samuel Edward Axson, who became pastor at the First Presbyterian Church of Rome.

  Axson had four children, twenty-one years apart, and his wife, the former Margaret Jane Hoyt, died weeks after her last baby’s birth. Thus, at twenty-one, Ellen Louise became a mother to her siblings. Her father had periodically suffered from depression, and the death of his wife put Ellie Lou in the position of his caretaker as well, mistress of the manse. Family lore often spoke of happier days, when the Axsons had once visited the Wilsons in Augusta, and a very young Tommy Wilson had asked if he might hold the infant Ellen Axson in his lap.

  It was not startling, then, for Woodrow Wilson to call on the Reverend Axson. “I had gone to see him,” Wilson would later record, “for I love and respect him and would have gone to see him with alacrity if he had never had a daughter; but I had not gone to see him alone.” Woodrow was unable to forget the face of the pretty girl in church, and he asked after his daughter’s health. Axson summoned Ellen to the parlor, oblivious to the young man’s intentions.

  “I am quite conscious that young ladies generally find me . . . tiresome, and often vote me a terrible bore—and that I have not the compensating advantage of being well-favoured and fair to look upon,” Woodrow would later write the woman standing before him. But in the right company, when he felt comfortable enough to be himself, he was perfectly capable of becoming “highly popular by making a fool of myself, making any and every diversion rather than [being] simply dull.” He had pined for female companionship for so long, he had particularized the attributes he sought. As he would later explain, “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; who had taken to the best literature from a natural, spontaneous taste for it, and not because she needed to make any artificial additions to her attractiveness; whose mind had been cultivated without being stiffened or made masculine . . . and I still thought that ‘somewhere in the world must be’ at least one woman approaching this ideal, though I had about given up expecting to make her acquaintance.”

  Woodrow quickly learned that Ellen was a gifted artist, having studied at the Rome Female College and privately with a graduate of New York’s National Academy of Design. When she was eighteen, her portfolio won a bronze medal in a competition at the Paris International Exposition, which brought statewide fame and a number of commissions for portraits. Having arranged to take a few walks with her befor
e returning to Atlanta, Wilson also discovered that she was more widely read than he, generally more cultured, and a forthright conversationalist. Woodrow fell in love.

  Through May and June, he kept returning to Rome. Settling his uncle’s estate was the pretext for all his visits, on which he was accompanied by his other new love—a No. 2 Caligraph from the American Writing Machine Company. Only a decade after typewriters had entered the American market, Wilson purchased this contraption—with its six rows of keys and capable of printing both upper- and lowercase letters—for a whopping $87. It seemed like a sound investment for a man of letters eager to begin graduate school and a literary career. The machine served a more immediate purpose: once he typed the final Woodrow estate papers, he would be released from his legal occupation and free to return to his preoccupation—which, he revealed to his mother, was winning the hand of Ellen Louise Axson.

  His courtship was tender but relentless, as quaint as the times and place. He called on Ellen with offers of buggy rides along the country roads, walks along the Oostanaula River, and boat rides where it met the Etowah and flowed into the Coosa. Jessie Brower planned a large picnic by a spring almost ten miles out of town and arranged to transport a party in a pair of wagons. For the ninety-minute ride down a winding dirt road, Woodrow and Ellen sat together in the back on a pile of wheat straw, their legs dangling side by side. While the others waded in the brook and unpacked the luncheon baskets, Woodrow and Ellen found a meadow of their own, where they looked for four-leaf clovers, blew fluffy dandelion tops, and pulled petals off flowers while chanting, “Loves me, loves me not.” When Jessie inquired as to their whereabouts, a youngster among them said he saw Woodrow carving a heart on a beech tree.