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 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,

when he accepted his first pastorate at Staunton, Virginia. In the following year, on December 28, 1856, Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born. There were already two girls in the family, and a younger boy was born ten years later.

There was a singular fitness in the chance that made Staunton Woodrow Wilson's birthplace; for the Old Dominion, Virginia dives avum, had given America four out of her first five PresidentsWashington and Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. By his origin no less than by his office Dr. Wilson stands heir to great traditions. Those who will can convince themselves with no great difficulty that the influences of the warm and generous South have left their mark equally with his Scotch and Irish ancestry in salient traits of the President's character.

Little of Woodrow Wilson's childhood was spent at Staunton, for in 1858 the family moved south to Augusta, in Georgia, a prosperous industrial town, where in a twelve years' pastorate the Rev. Joseph Wilson established a solid reputation as one of the foremost ministers of his denomination in the South. When Woodrow was four years old the Civil War broke out. The earliest recollection clear in his memory is that of two men meeting in the street outside his father's house and one of them declaring, "Lincoln is elected, and there'll be war." Southerners, but they contact with the war.

The Wilsons were strong came into little personal Till Sherman's men came

marching through Georgia in 1864 the State had lain outside the theatres of active warfare,

and Sherman himself left Augusta to his right as he swept north-west from Savannah to Atlanta. There were sundry alarms in the town, but none of them had substance, and all Woodrow Wilson saw of the war was an occasional body of Confederates riding off to join the army, and Jefferson Davis himself passing through in 1865 in the hands of the Federals to his imprisonment in Fort Monroe.

President Wilson was born too late in the nineteenth century for any such romantic boyhood as fell to the lot of Washington on the frontier or Lincoln and Garfield in the backwoods. His education followed conventional lines, and in its earlier stages, at any rate, it brought to light no marked foreshadowings of the gifts that have raised the President to the position he holds today. Joseph Wilson was eminently wise in the training of his son. No attempt was made to force the boy's formal education. He was over nine before he had learned to read; but long before that his mind was being developed and shaped by constant companionship and talk with his father, and he was already familiar with much. of Scott and Dickens from the novels read aloud to the family in the Augusta manse. Father and son took long walks together, sometimes in the country, sometimes to inspect the factories and engineering shops and foundries in which the industrial life of Augusta centred. To this best of all forms of education, contact with a fertile, alert, and sympathetic mind, was added such further training as was dealt out to a group of Augusta