Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Later that day, as they were sitting together in a hammock, Woodrow told Ellie Lou, “You were the only woman I had ever met to whom I felt that I could open all my thoughts.” In truth, he meant much more than that, as he explained in a handwritten letter:

  I meant that I had begun to realize that you had an irresistible claim upon all that I had to give, of the treasures of my heart as well as of the stores of my mind. I had never dreamed before of meeting any woman who should with no effort on her part make herself mistress of all the forces of my natures.

  As virginal as he, twenty-three-year-old Ellen could hardly entertain the romantic thoughts Woodrow espoused. To each of the many letters he wrote to “My dear Miss Ellie Lou,” she responded reservedly to “Mr. Wilson.” After all, she still had younger siblings to care for, to say nothing of her father, who exhibited alarming signs of mental illness.

  With his law career completed—“Atlanta is behind me, the boats are burnt, and all retreat is cut off,” he jubilantly wrote Robert Bridges—Wilson returned to North Carolina to help his family through a rough patch. Disaffection between Dr. Wilson and his congregation in Wilmington was rising, which was affecting his health; and worse, his wife had been stricken with typhoid fever. During the weeks before she showed signs of convalescing, Woodrow spent nights bedside administering his mother’s medication. His only relief came in writing to Ellie Lou.

  When his mother was well enough to travel, Woodrow accompanied her to Columbia, to visit his sister and her family. After a few days, they all went to Arden in the Great Smoky Mountains, outside Asheville, North Carolina, where Wilson hoped to enjoy some time before starting graduate school. In the meantime, Ellen visited friends in nearby Morganton. The two young lovers wrote to each other consistently, but their letters kept crossing in the mail. The second week of September, Ellen heard from her father, who had fallen ill and summoned her home. The best connection she could make required her laying over in Asheville for most of Friday, September 14; and so she checked into the Eagle Hotel. That very day Woodrow left his family in Arden to run errands in Asheville.

  Roaming the streets, he passed the Eagle Hotel. Looking up to the second floor, he noticed a young woman in the window and instantly recognized the coil of golden hair. It was Ellen. The flabbergasting improbability of their meeting helped him convince her to remain in Asheville another two days, as would he.

  The next day, Woodrow took Ellen down the road to Arden to meet his family. His mother was charmed, and she later told Woodrow that “it was impossible not to love her.” On Sunday, just before his departure for school, he blurted all that he had been bottling inside for five months. He quoted Bagehot, who had said that a bachelor was “an amateur at life,” and that a man who lived only for himself had not begun to “learn his use . . . in the world.” He asked Ellie Lou Axson to marry him, and she accepted. And for the first time, they kissed.

  Wilson boarded the train to Baltimore, where his father had come to help him find accommodations. Dr. Wilson immediately discerned a change in his son; and he said that he was already jealous of Ellen—“for having so much of [Woodrow’s] life, to the ousting of everything else.” Checking into a hotel, the young man composed a letter to Ellen’s father, officially informing him that he had “declared my love to her and been accepted.” His only disappointment, as he told him, was that the engagement “must necessarily be prolonged, because my course here will cover two years and our marriage at the end of that period must depend upon my securing a professorship. These facts made me hesitate for some time about declaring my feelings to your daughter, because I felt that I should be selfish to ask her to engage herself to me when my prospects were so indefinite. But our almost providential meeting in Asheville upset my judgment, which is of so little force in such matters.” The Reverend Axson sent his blessing. Jessie Wilson expressed her personal happiness, knowing at last that her son’s “heart is at rest.” Ellen told her brother Stockton she was going to marry “the greatest man in the world.”

  • • •

  “What are we aiming at?” asked Daniel Coit Gilman in 1876 at his inauguration as the first president of the Johns Hopkins University. “The encouragement of research . . . and the advancement of individual scholars, who by their excellence will advance the sciences they pursue, and the society where they dwell.” That accorded with Wilson’s goals as he stated on September 18, 1883, in answering Question VI of the college application. “My purpose in coming to the University is to qualify myself for teaching the studies I wish to pursue, namely History and Political Science.” Except to his fiancée, he kept his underlying motives to himself: “A professorship was the only feasible place for me, the only place that would afford leisure for reading and for original work, the only strictly literary berth with an income attached.”

  Johns Hopkins was a Quaker merchant who had invested in the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and amassed a $7 million fortune, half of which he left for the establishment of a nonsectarian university in Baltimore. Founding president Gilman accepted his post with the understanding that he might build America’s first research university—aiming to advance human knowledge as much as that of its students. It would employ “the German Method,” a system of individual scientific investigation in pursuit of the truth. German higher education had long advocated the principle of Lernfreiheit, a freedom enjoyed by university students to pursue the subjects they wished to study, as they wished. Under a professor’s supervision at a seminar table, they would present their findings to their peers. Reluctantly Gilman opened the university doors to undergraduates. “There can be no question about this being the best place in America to study, because of its freedom and its almost unrivalled facilities, and because one can from here, better than from anywhere else in the country, command an appointment to a professorship,” Wilson wrote Heath Dabney.

  The university then consisted of a few remodeled buildings close to Baltimore’s business district and the Peabody Institute, six magnificent stories of marble and wrought iron, its bookshelves holding sixty thousand volumes. With no dormitories, the 150 graduate students were left to secure their own lodging, an easy task in a city of 350,000—then the seventh largest in the country.

  Wilson settled into a boardinghouse at No. 8 McCulloh Street, where he was surrounded by other university men. Forging no friendships there, he allowed homesickness and self-pity to stoke his work, as, for the first time in his life, he had a “sweetheart” to whom he could unburden himself. “I have never grown altogether reconciled to being away from those I love,” he wrote Ellen on October 2, 1883; “and, my darling, my heart is filled to overflowing with gratitude and gladness because of the assurance that it now has a new love to lean upon—a love which will some day be the centre of a new home and the joy of a new home-life!” He poured practically every other waking minute into his scholarly reading and writing. Whether he addressed Ellen as Ellie, Nell, or ultimately Eileen, the torrent of his effusions followed one path: “I shall not begin to lead a complete life, my love, until you are my wife.”

  Wilson immersed himself in his work at Johns Hopkins. Three days a week, Herbert Baxter Adams, an Amherst graduate and one of America’s first German-trained professional historians, taught a course in international relations; Richard Theodore Ely, educated at Columbia before doing graduate work at Heidelberg and becoming one of the founders of the American Economic Association, taught Advanced Political Economy; and once a week Dr. J. Franklin Jameson, also of Amherst and Hopkins itself, taught English constitutional history. Additionally, Adams offered a one-hour course in American colonial history.

  The specialty of the department was Professor Adams’s Seminary of Historical and Political Science. On Friday nights between eight and ten o’clock, faculty and graduate students gathered in a former biology building, which had become the repository for the archives of Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, a professor of international law an
d Adams’s mentor from Heidelberg. As the laboratory for the study of political science, the seminar room was also crowded with books and periodicals and maps and busts of such statesmen as Hamilton and Calhoun and Washington and Lincoln and Gladstone. From the end of a massive red table that could seat two dozen, Professor Adams presided over free-form discussions, which included students sharing their writings and ideas for group consideration and correction.

  “The main idea here,” Adams told his disciples, “is that it is a place where students lecture, and is distinguished from class in that there the instructors lecture.” Each of the students was given a drawer in the seminar table; and a generation of significant American historians and economists pulled the first drafts of their works from that table. Periodically important guests speakers led discussions. Wilson briefly befriended a minister’s son from North Carolina named Thomas R. Dixon, Jr., who remained only a few months before proceeding to careers in theater, government, the ministry, and literature. His most enduring work—a novel called The Clansman—would be based on a childhood memory of a Confederate soldier’s widow who claimed a black man had raped her daughter, a crime that would be avenged by the Ku Klux Klan. Although a hotbed of political ideas, the seminar left Wilson strangely cold.

  “There’s something very rotten in this state of Denmark,” he wrote Heath Dabney, who was enjoying an authentic experience in “the German Method” in Heidelberg. Wilson recognized the opportunities within the libraries and “stimulating atmosphere” of Johns Hopkins but questioned the level of instruction. He considered Adams a humbug—“superficial and insincere, no worker and a selfish schemer for self-advertisement and advancement”; Ely seemed “stuffed full of information” but without original thoughts; and Jameson, four years younger than Wilson, did little more than parrot Adams. In short order Wilson realized “that everything of progress comes from one’s private reading—not from lectures; that professors can give you always copious bibliographies and sometimes inspiration or suggestion, but never learning.”

  Wilson created a college of one for himself. He had every intention of playing by the university rules, but after less than a month on campus, he asked his chairman if they might bend them. After tea on October 16, 1883, he told Professor Adams that he had “a hobby which I had been riding for some years with great entertainment and from which I was loath to dismount.” Wilson’s Constitutional studies were already of such consequence that Adams could see the value for both his student and the school. He released Wilson from much of the “institutional” assignments so that they would not interfere with his independent work. In so doing, Wilson reengaged in his Seminary work with new vitality. He became the keeper of the class minutes and the most powerful orator in the room. He was especially effective in a debate on the Blair bill, which intended to allocate millions of federal dollars to education in rural areas, largely for the purpose of improving Negro schooling. Wilson opposed the bill because such aid would be a deleterious incursion of federal power. Future educational reformer and Pragmatist John Dewey, then a Hopkins student, confronted his colleague’s “vigorous attack” on the bill at the red table, but to little avail. He never forgot his table-mate’s “eloquence” that day, nor his feeling that Wilson “could go far in politics if he wished.”

  Wilson did his most impressive work in private. Encamping day after day in a snug alcove of the seminar room or beneath the towering skylight of the Peabody, he read prodigiously and wrote profusely. In the fall of 1883, he delivered his first academic lecture, on the subject of Adam Smith. He invested three weeks of research and composition into this one-hour talk about government control of monopolies.

  Wilson’s greatest satisfaction came in writing Congressional Government, a book that grew out of one of his prior unpublished essays. As he wrote his fiancée, “I want to contribute to our literature what no American has ever contributed, studies in the philosophy of our institutions, not the abstract and occult, but the practical and suggestive, philosophy which is at the core of our governmental methods.” In a series of connected essays, Wilson hoped to “treat the American constitution as Mr. Bagehot . . . has treated the English Constitution.” Unlike his unpublished tract, this work would avoid advocacy of specific reforms. “I have abandoned the evangelical for the exegetical,” he wrote Robert Bridges, which he thought would keep it from being nothing more than a political pamphlet. He worked on the book whenever possible, writing first in longhand and then incorporating his corrections while pecking at his Caligraph.

  The book required little new research, as it was largely a collage of other people’s ideas. Wilson wrote Heath Dabney that “its mission was to stir thought and to carry irresistible practical suggestion.” He discussed, especially, a disequilibrium in American government despite the principles of checks and balances. “The President was compelled, as in the case of treaties,” he wrote clairvoyantly, “to obtain the sanction of the Senate without being allowed any chance of consultation with it.” Tellingly, he added, “He has no real presence in the Senate. His power does not extend beyond the most general suggestion. The Senate always has the last word.” For the rest of his life, Wilson would question the efficacy of a government in which power rested in its legislative body while the Chief Executive was the only person elected by all the people. He believed “the prestige of the presidential office has declined with the character of the Presidents. And the character of the Presidents has declined as the perfection of selfish party tactics had advanced.”

  Wilson slaved from the time he entered Johns Hopkins until the day he left. A doctor friend who saw him feared he was verging on a breakdown. “I am working for big stakes,” he wrote Ellen. “I am working for you, my darling; and the better my work the sooner you shall be won!” Beyond his long epistles of news, observations, and pining, the only respite Woodrow allowed himself was in joining the newly organized University Glee Club and the Hopkins Literary Society, for which, of course, he wrote a new constitution, rechristening it the Hopkins House of Commons. By the end of October, he had already overtaxed his eyes, which resulted in throbbing headaches. His health steadily worsened, as he remained in Baltimore and worked through the holidays.

  It did not improve his mood when he learned that several others in his family were feeling even worse. At a time when his father should have been considering retirement, he began suffering from vertigo and was looking for work beyond Wilmington. At sixty-one he would soon be teaching at South-Western Presbyterian University in Clarksville, Tennessee. His mother continued to languish in malarial fever. “I have, it would seem, been given your love to be my stay and solace,” Woodrow wrote Ellen. But she had her own sorrows to deal with, as her father’s depression forced him to surrender his parish and move into his father’s manse in Savannah. In January 1884, the Reverend Samuel Axson turned violent and was committed to the Georgia State Mental Hospital in Milledgeville.

  Ellen joined the rest of her family in Savannah; and, while he could ill afford it, Woodrow scraped together enough money to take the train to Georgia. She spoke of having to break their engagement, but he would hear none of it. After a week together, Ellen realized how deeply in love she was. Woodrow had completely altered her mood, as his presence alone left her “strangely, deeply happy, with a new kind of happiness.”

  Wilson thought of dropping out of school. At age twenty-seven, he was eager to take responsibility for his life—to marry Ellen and support her younger siblings. His father ascertained that there were few teaching positions available, even fewer without the “signal endorsement” of Johns Hopkins. So Woodrow returned to the grind of graduate studies and his work on Congressional Government. Between January and March 1884, he wrote the first half of the book—its introduction and two essays on the House of Representatives. On April 4 he submitted the chapters to Houghton Mifflin in Boston for publication, with a proposition: “If you approve of the parts I send, and would publish the whole as a
small volume . . . I shall set out upon the completion of the plan indicated as soon as possible.” The publishers would not commit to an incomplete manuscript but wrote back assuring Wilson of their confidence in his ability to “produce an interesting and acceptable book.” Wilson read most of the chapters he had finished to the Seminary and submitted them to the administration with his application for one of the university’s twenty coveted fellowships.

  The Hopkins semester for graduate students ended in late May; in bidding him goodbye, President Gilman informed Wilson that he was going to receive one of the two fellowships in his department—a stipend of $500 along with various academic privileges. He had not even told Ellen that he had applied, for fear of disappointing her had he failed. Now, it seemed, nothing could stop him from completing his book. On the very day that Woodrow reported his joyful news, the Reverend Samuel Edward Axson committed suicide.

  For Ellen and Woodrow, the stars remained crossed most of that summer. Again she felt it best to break their engagement, while he thought he should leave school so they might marry at once. A job possibility appeared likely at Arkansas Industrial University in Fayetteville, and she spoke of teaching art in Atlanta. Each talked the other out of any such ideas. Then Woodrow asked if Ellen would visit him in Wilmington, which he could not leave, as his father was away and his mother was ill; Ellen suggested that her grandmother would not hear of such a visit, an unwed girl visiting her fiancé’s family. In truth, Ellen had so many things on her mind, she could not focus on marriage. Her seventeen-year-old brother, Stockton, was exhibiting early signs of the mental illness that lay ahead, and her eight-year-old brother, Edward, had begun stuttering. Woodrow slumped into his predictable maladies, virtually unrelieved until news came that Ellen’s grandmother had reversed herself about the visit to Wilmington. By summer’s end, he had completed Congressional Government, having only to run the pages through his Caligraph.