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PRESIDENT WILSON

CHAPTER I

EARLY YEARS

We are confused by a war of interests, a clash of classes, a competition of powers, an effort at conquest and restraint, and the great forces which war and toil amongst us can be guided and reconciled only by some man who is truly a man of the people, not caught in the toils of any special interest, united by wide sympathy with many kinds of men, familiar with many aspects of life, and led, through many changes, to a personal experience which unites him with the common mass.—Lincoln Centenary Address, 1909.1

WOODROW WILSON is an American of the second generation. His father's father, James Wilson, an Ulsterman from County Down, landed at Philadelphia to seek his fortune in 1807. His mother's father, the Rev. Thomas Woodrow, a Scotch Presbyterian minister who had held a charge at Carlisle for sixteen years and then migrated to Canada, crossed the American border in 1837 and settled at Chillicothe, Ohio, as pastor of the first Presbyterian Church in that town.

James Wilson, the immigrant, rapidly found his feet at Philadelphia, where he secured a post on Duane's Democratic journal, the Aurora, published 'The passages at the head of each chapter are from Mr. Wilson's writings and speeches.

where the greatest of American journalists, Benjamin Franklin, had turned out his unpretentious sheets nearly a century before. But Philadelphia was not to be the goal of young Wilson's pilgrimage. The drang nach westen that followed the restoration of peace with England in 1814 laid hold of the young journalist-printer, and carried him inland over the Pennsylvanian border into Ohio. There he settled first at Steubenville, the capital of Jefferson County, and then at Pittsburg, establishing in the former town the former town the Western Herald and in the latter (which lies on the eastern side of the Ohio-Pennsylvania border) the Pennsylvania Advocate. It was at Steubenville that President Wilson's father and mother first met.

The youngest of James Wilson's seven sons was Joseph Ruggles, who after a sound education at Jefferson College at Canonsburg, in Pennsylvania, supplemented by a year at the Western Theological Seminary and another at Princeton, had been licensed as a preacher in the Presbyterian Church, and then appointed, not to a pulpit, but to a post in the Steubenville Male Academy. At the same time Dr. Thomas Woodrow's daughter Janet was a pupil at the companion academy for girls. A friendship, and then an intimacy, sprang up, and in 1849 Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Janet Woodrow were married. Joseph Wilson was ordained by the Presbytery of Ohio almost immediately after his wedding, but he continued his educational work at Steubenville, and then successively at Jefferson College and at Hampden Sydney College, Virginia, till 1855,

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