The war came home to the Wilson family in Augusta when wounded Confederate soldiers began to arrive. In 1863, the government took over the church to use as a military hospital and its grounds to use as a temporary detention camp for captured Union soldiers on their way to the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville. Fortunately for Augusta, the enemy bypassed the city the next year when William Tecumseh Sherman’s army made its March to the Sea, but Union forces did occupy Augusta at the end of the war.
The early 1860s were an often exciting, sometimes frightening, time to be a young boy there, but what effect this Civil War childhood had on the Wilsons’ son is hard to judge. He almost certainly saw and heard wounded and dying soldiers in the town and in his father’s church and prisoners of war in the churchyard. At the end of the war, he watched a conquering army occupy his hometown, and he saw the captured former Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, being transported to prison. Yet those sights and sounds do not seem to have affected him deeply. “To me the Civil War and its terrible scenes are but a memory of a short day,” he wrote in a note to himself when he was in his early twenties. Nor did his boyhood experiences fill him with repugnance toward fighting or war. He may or may not have gotten into fights as a boy, but he certainly liked the idea of fighting, and like many other boys he would dream about adventure in arms. Later, when he was about to become president, he remarked that he “thought there was no more glorious way to die than in battle.” If the Civil War left a psychological imprint on the boy or the man, it was buried so deep as to be imponderable.12
Except for the war, he seems to have had a happy, healthy childhood. His mother later confessed to him, “I always wanted to call you Woodrow from the first.” But they called him Tommy, and that was the name he would use until his early twenties. His older sisters reportedly adored their little brother, and his mother unquestionably played the biggest role in his early life, while his father was often away. Her son wrote to his wife, “I remember how I clung to her (a laughed-at ‘mamma’s boy’) till I was a great big fellow; but love of the best womanhood came to me and entered my heart through those apron-strings.” As an urban minister’s son, he had a more sheltered upbringing than did the mischief-filled, rough-and-tumble southern white boys depicted in Mark Twain’s stories. One of his friends in Augusta later recalled him as “a dignified boy” who on horseback was “a conservative rider … very careful and very orderly.” He and his friends organized a baseball club after the war, and the same friend remembered him as “not active or especially strong, although his figure was well knit and he was what you would call a ‘stocky’ boy.” Yet like Tom Sawyer, Tommy Wilson had a rich, elaborate fantasy life and enjoyed a certain amount of mischief; he once recalled that he had liked cockfighting, evidently using the family rooster.13
Tommy’s closeness to his mother did not spring from any need for shelter from boyhood’s knocks and scrapes. Rather, what was most important was that his “love of the best womanhood” had come from her. The next sentence in his letter to his wife read: “If I had not lived with such a mother I could not have won and seemed to deserve—in part, perhaps, deserved, through transmitted virtues—such a wife—the strength, the support, the human source of my life.” Throughout his life, Wilson would spend more time with women and enjoy female companionship more than most men of his era. He would value women not only as wives and lovers but also as friends and confidants with whom he could share his deepest thoughts and emotions.14
In those early years, his mother did help to shelter him from one significant childhood travail. Tommy Wilson did not appear at first to be very bright. He was slow in learning to read. His presidential physician, Cary T. Grayson, later claimed that Wilson told him that he had not learned his letters until he was nine, and one of his daughters said that he did not read comfortably until he was twelve. It is not clear just what Tommy’s problem was. He told Dr. Grayson that his mother and his sisters would read to him by the hour, “and he would listen as long as anyone chose to read.” The story smacks of rationalization, although it hints at how protective Jessie Wilson was of Tommy. He was her favorite of all her children, and he enjoyed his primacy even after the birth of a second son, in 1867. Born when Tommy was ten, Joseph (Josie) Ruggles Wilson, Jr., was the last of the family’s children. People later described Josie Wilson as a smaller, brown-eyed, less sparkling version of his older brother. Josie would never enjoy the attention and solicitude that Tommy received from both his parents.15
Tommy’s difficulty with reading most likely stemmed from some physical cause. His vision may have contributed to the problem. As an adult, Wilson would wear glasses to correct astigmatism and farsightedness, but he did not begin to wear them until after college. A better explanation may be that he suffered from some kind of developmental disorder. At the age of thirty-nine, when he suffered from semiparalysis in his right hand, Wilson easily shifted to writing with his left hand, producing the same neat script with almost no practice. Such ambidexterity, which can manifest itself in childhood as a lack of preference for either hand, often accompanies slowness in speaking and reading.16
Young Tommy Wilson may also have suffered from a form of dyslexia, a condition that would not begin to be identified for another thirty years. Several known facts support this explanation. He never became a rapid or voracious reader, and he developed ways to compensate for that shortcoming. As a freshman in college, he wrote in his diary, “I sometimes wish that I could read a little faster but I do not know that it would be an advantage.” His brother-in-law Stockton Axson later remembered Wilson saying in his thirties, “I wonder if I am the slowest reader in the world.” As an adolescent, Tommy eased the burden of writing by teaching himself shorthand. When he was sixteen, he began a two-year correspondence course in the Graham method. As a writer, Wilson would later confess that he composed entire paragraphs and even longer passages in his mind before putting them down on paper. As a speaker, he would deliver long, well-organized addresses from the sketchiest of notes—usually just a few shorthand jottings—or no notes at all. Other known facts, however, work against the notion that he suffered from dyslexia. He soon did learn to read, and he never made the grammar and spelling mistakes that often plague dyslexics. Foreign languages also pose problems for dyslexics, but in college he earned good grades in Latin and Greek and French, and he used German in his scholarly work, although he never became fluent in any foreign language.17
In any case, this experience left the boy with no discernible psychological scars, much of the credit for which belonged to his parents. His mother took the lead at first, giving her son more than comfort and protection. The letters she wrote to him after he went away to college show how fervently she believed in his gifts. In one, she told him, “I hope you will lay aside all timidity—and make the most of all your powers, my darling.” One of the few people who appreciated the deep imprint Jessie Wilson left on her son was David Bryant, one of the family’s African American servants in Wilmington, North Carolina, who would tell one of Wilson’s biographers, “Outside Mr. Tommy was his father’s boy. But inside he was his mother all over.”18
Almost everyone recognized his father’s influence. After the Civil War ended, Joseph Wilson began to play a bigger role in his son’s life. From the time Tommy was eight or nine until he went off to college, he spent a lot of time in his father’s company. “He was good fun,” Wilson recalled in his fifties; “he was a good comrade; … and by constant association with him, I saw the world and the tasks of the world through his eyes.” Even after Tommy started school, he spent Mondays, which was a minister’s day off, with his father, who took him to see sights he thought “might interest or educate a boy.” Afterward, his father would have Tommy write an essay about what he had seen. After his son had read the essay aloud, Dr. Wilson would say, “Now put down your paper and tell me in your own words what you saw.” Tommy would then give a shorter, more direct account, and his father would respond, “Now wr
ite it down that way.”19
After he mastered his letters, Tommy helped Dr. Wilson with his duties as stated clerk of the southern Presbyterians. He would attend the meetings and help keep the minutes and review parliamentary procedure. Those experiences may have given Tommy a taste for debate and organization, but the type of politics that he witnessed in those denominational gatherings was more like what he would later find in college faculties—usually self-righteous and self-important, frequently petty, often grudge-ridden. As for his interest in “real-world” politics, it seems to have grown out of his father’s having him study speeches by celebrated orators with an eye to improving them and out of the surrounding environment. Later, Tommy remarked to a college friend, “As usual politics is the all-engrossing topic of conversation. Southerners seem born with an interest in public affairs though it is too often of late a very ignorant interest.”20
As those Monday jaunts and the essay writing suggest, Joseph Wilson gave Tommy more than companionship. His son later called him the “best teacher I ever had,” and his father did spend much of their time together teaching the boy, particularly about the use of words. The core of his teaching consisted, in his son’s recollection, of an analogy to firearms: “When you frame a sentence don’t do it as if you were loading a shotgun, but as if you were loading a rifle. … [S]hoot with a single bullet and hit that one thing alone.” The son remembered his parental instruction as nothing but joyful and loving. The elder Wilson began his letters with “My darling son” or “My darling boy” when Tommy was in college and even afterward, the letters themselves reading like elaborations of Polonius’s advice to Laertes in Hamlet. In one, he admonished, “Let the esteem you have won be only as a stimulant to fresh exertion.” In other letters, he exhorted, “Study manner, dearest Tommy, as much as matter. Both are essential.” His father also bucked Tommy up when he encountered setbacks. “You are manly. You are true. You are most lovable in every way and deserving of confidence.” Plainly, Joseph and Tommy Wilson regarded each other with warmth and happiness and love. One of his nieces supposedly declared, “Uncle Joseph never loved anyone except Cousin Woodrow.”21
From Tommy’s late teens on, Joseph Wilson’s circumstances conspired to make his older son the main object of his hopes and dreams. In 1870, the ambitious clergyman took another step upward in his southern Presbyterian world. The family left Augusta for Columbia, South Carolina, where Dr. Wilson became a professor at the Columbia Theological Seminary. With just over 9,000 residents, Columbia was smaller than Augusta, but it was the capital of the state and the home of the state university, as well as the seat of the Presbyterians’ most prestigious seminary in the South, where James Woodrow was on the faculty. This was a plum assignment for Joseph Wilson. The idyll lasted less than four years. Joseph Wilson was a popular teacher, but he entangled himself in the kind of political snare that often afflicts churches and faculties. Students balked when he tried to require them to attend his chapel services rather than the services at other churches in town.22 Wilson consequently resigned from the seminary faculty and moved to a well-paid pulpit in Wilmington, North Carolina. He would spend the rest of his working life on a gradual downhill slide in professional esteem.
Not surprisingly, Joseph Wilson would yearn for Tommy to redeem his own thwarted ambitions. Indeed, the boy was beginning to show promise as a vehicle for his father’s hopes. Columbia had broadened Tommy’s horizons. From the time he was thirteen until he first left for college three years later, Tommy lived in an environment that was as much academic as it was clerical. Moreover, thanks mainly to having on its faculty James Woodrow and George Howe, a New England–born and–educated theologian whose son married Tommy’s sister Annie, this environment was sophisticated in intellectual matters and liberal in religious thinking.
The schools Tommy attended did not challenge his mind, but his imaginative life continued to flourish, with his fantasies now turning to armed exploits at sea. He fantasized about organizing his friends into such units as the “Royal Lance Guards,” assigning them ranks, and giving them knighthoods, and he fancied himself “Lord Thomas W. Wilson, duke of Eagleton, Admiral of the blue.”23 He continued to play baseball, and music offered another diversion. He also became an accomplished singer, a tenor, and music, both sacred and secular, would remain his main artistic interest outside literature for the rest of his life.
Tommy Wilson also grew fascinated with the subject that would become his life’s work. A cousin recounted that he showed her a picture in his room of the British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone and “remarked that when he was a man he intended to be a statesman such as this hero of his.” A friend in Columbia chided him, “Never mind Tom you just wait till you and me get to be members of the US Senate.” It might seem surprising that as the son, grandson, and nephew of Presbyterian ministers, he did not want to become one too. Some evidence suggests that his father wanted him to follow in his footsteps, perhaps to assuage his own disappointments over his career setbacks. But it is more likely that Joseph Wilson never pushed Tommy toward the ministry and viewed his son’s nascent interest in politics with relish, not regret.24
Not choosing the ministry as his vocation implied no want of religious commitment on Tommy’s part. He took the serious step of joining the church when he was fifteen, which evidently required a personal decision to accept Christ as his savior, as young Presbyterians were expected to do. Tommy resembled his father more than he did James Woodrow and others on the seminary faculty in having little taste for Calvinist theology or metaphysical speculation. Religious books would rarely figure in his reading. When he was twenty-four, he confessed to a friend that his reading had been “very unusual in kind. I’ve been looking into some Biblical discussion, thus coming at least to the outskirts of theology.” He added, “As an antidote to Biblical criticism I’ve been reading aloud to my sister and cousin a novel by Thomas Hardy.” Eight years later, on his thirty-third birthday, he would record in a private journal, “I used to wonder vaguely that I did not have the same deep-reaching spiritual difficulties that I read of other young men having. I saw the intellectual difficulties, but I was not troubled by them: they seemed to have no connection with my faith in the essentials of the religion I had been taught.”25
Still, Tommy Wilson’s upbringing in one of the most liberal and sophisticated religious and intellectual environments in America at that time gave him familiarity with the basic concepts of Protestant thought, Lutheran as well as Calvinist. He believed that Christians were instruments of God’s will and must fulfill their predestined part, but his upbringing among learned Presbyterians stood in stark opposition to evangelicals who stressed emotional commitment and personal salvation. Attitudes and approaches borrowed from evangelical Protestantism had spawned the pre–Civil War moral reform movements, such as the temperance and anti-slavery crusades. Those attitudes would flourish again in such varied incarnations as the Protestant Social Gospel, anti-liquor and anti-vice crusades, and an overall evangelical style of political reform. Yet despite a deep religious faith and a look and manner that would later strike some observers as preacherish, the man Tommy Wilson grew up to be would not adopt those approaches. It was not this preacher’s-son-turned-president but rather his greatest rival, himself a religious skeptic, who would call their office a “bully pulpit.” Wilson did not call the presidency by that name, nor did he think about it and politics that way, largely because his religious upbringing had inoculated him against such notions.
Tommy Wilson’s upbringing also inoculated him to a degree against the influence of the larger environment around him—the South. With an Ohio-born father, an English-born mother, and foreign-born grandparents, he did not have deep roots in the South or any place in the United States, and he raised the question of his southern identity whenever he opened his mouth. By the time he went north to college, at the age of eighteen, he lacked the distinguishing characteristic of his native region—a southern accent. The close-kn
it nature of the Wilson family may have insulated him somewhat from his surroundings, but Tommy had plenty of exposure to southern-accented playmates and schoolmates, together with the family’s African American servants and the general populace of Augusta and Columbia. In adolescence, he seems to have consciously rid himself of a southern accent, training himself to speak with a broad a, which he considered more pleasing and more refined. He would also try, without success, to get his Georgia-born and -raised fiancée, Ellen Axson, to rid herself of her southern accent.26
Yet Tommy Wilson was still a southerner. A friend during his freshman year in college remembered him as “very full of the South and quite secessionist. One night we sat up until dawn talking about [the Civil War], he taking the southern side and getting quite bitter about it.” As an adult, he would avow that “a boy never gets over his boyhood, and never can change those subtle influences which have become a part of him, … [so] that the only place in the country, the only place in the world, where nothing has to be explained to me is the South.”27 Being a southerner made him identify with a defeated, impoverished, disadvantaged region. As the son of a well-regarded and well-paid minister, he never knew poverty or social inferiority firsthand, but his local advantages paled in comparison with the wealth and status that he encountered when he went north to college. His southern allegiance also fixed his choice of party identification. Wilson would remain a Democrat throughout many years of residence in the North, but unlike many northern Democrats, he would never carry disaffection with the party’s later turn toward agrarian reform and evangelical-style politics to the point of switching parties or turning into a disgruntled conservative. Identification with his underdog native region would help to keep him on the side of reform.
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