Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Because Dr. Wilson believed in educating all God’s children, he taught a Sunday school class for Augusta’s black youth. He welcomed Negro membership to his sermons, so long as they stayed in their place in the balcony. Considering segregation a policy that fostered harmonious race relations by preventing discord, he stood among the more liberal-minded preachers within the Southern synods. Far more typical of this new branch of the Presbyterian Church was pastor Robert Lewis Dabney of Virginia, who said, “The black race is an alien one on our soil; and nothing except . . . his subordination to ours, can prevent the rise of that instinctive antipathy of race, which, history shows, always arises between opposite races in proximity.”

  A schism in the Presbyterian Church paralleled the chasm along the Mason and Dixon Line. Two weeks after Joseph Wilson’s discourse on slavery, Georgia became the fifth state to secede from the Union and to join the Confederate States of America under the leadership of Jefferson Davis. Two more states would immediately follow, and another four after the outbreak of war in April 1861, when Confederate forces attacked a United States military outpost at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The next month, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church denounced secession as treasonous and required pastors to swear political allegiance to the federal government of the United States. Pastors of the 1,275 Presbyterian churches in the South acted instead on behalf of their 100,000 communicants, organizing the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America. Dr. Wilson offered to host its first general assembly in Augusta. Once the organization had drafted its constitution, the other ministers elected him Permanent Clerk, a position he maintained for the next thirty-seven years. Even though two of his brothers would become Generals in the Union army, Joseph Wilson became an ardent spokesman for the Southern cause.

  Over the next four years, Augusta escaped most of the horrors that ravaged the South, where the numbers worked against the Rebels from the start. The Union had twice as many soldiers as the Confederacy; it had superior transportation abilities, almost three times the railroad miles and four times the shipyards; and the North produced 97 percent of the nation’s firearms. The Confederacy’s chief advantage lay in the fervency of its beliefs, a defense of the way its people had lived for 250 years.

  At the outset, the local militia appropriated the United States arsenal in Summerville for its own cause. Because the Medical College of Georgia stood just a block from the Presbyterian Church, Augusta became an important health center during the war. After the bloody Battle of Chickamauga, Dr. Wilson removed the pews from his church and converted it into an auxiliary hospital; a stockade to keep prisoners was built in the churchyard. He left town for several months in the middle of the fighting to serve as a chaplain to Southern troops in North Carolina.

  By 1864 Union General William Tecumseh Sherman had captured Atlanta. Believing the most efficacious way of ending the war was to obliterate his enemy, he commenced his Savannah Campaign, burning everything in his three-hundred-mile path to the sea. As Sherman approached Augusta, the population took its cotton from the warehouses and piled it high in the main street, hoping the offering might satisfy the bloodthirsty General and spare the town. Inexplicably, Sherman did leave Augusta standing—with its cotton—later explaining that destroying the Augusta Powder Works offered no great military advantage. For years rumor held that the town escaped destruction because of a former local love from Sherman’s early days in training, Cecilia Stovall, whose family was close to the Wilsons.

  During the war, Tommy grew into a hypersensitive child. Small and frail, he developed an irritable digestive system that cursed him all his life. Becoming farsighted, he looked inward—turning shy and deeply emotional. The church organist could not help noticing how some of the hymns—especially the line “’Twas on that dark and doleful day”—would literally reduce the boy to tears.

  Surprisingly, he did not become a bookworm. There was no mandatory schooling in Augusta at the time, and had there been, it would have been suspended because of the war. And so Tommy was still learning his letters at age nine and would not learn to read on his own until he was eleven. But he loved listening when his father read aloud. With his family gathered around him, Dr. Wilson delivered dramatic renditions of narrative poems and travel books along with Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. He turned regularly, of course, to the Good Book. Tommy delighted in fairy tales and those occasions when one of the household servants would read Joel Chandler Harris stories, the affectionately told tales in the Negro dialect of Uncle Remus.

  Dr. Wilson let Tommy embrace language on his own, never pushing him or humiliating him for being so slow in learning to read. Tommy would later call himself “lazy”; but because of his faulty vision, ambidexterity, and ensuing problems with spelling and calculating, doctors a century later would suggest that he suffered from developmental dyslexia. He learned to compensate, and in his own time, he picked up Parson Mason L. Weems’s mythic biography of George Washington, which was among the first books he read on his own.

  Joseph Wilson had no desire to rush his son into a schoolroom. He put no faith in dogmatic education, believing that information had to permeate in order to penetrate. And so, the core of Tommy’s early education came in accompanying his father on his ministerial rounds. On any given day, they might visit a munitions plant or a foundry, a mill or a cotton gin. Afterward, his father would drill him on what they had seen and challenge the way he expressed himself. “What do you mean by that?” Joseph Wilson would ask his son when he spoke in incomplete sentences. After the boy explained, his father would reply, “Then why don’t you say so?” Thus, by the time Tommy Wilson had learned to transliterate words from sounds to letters, he had developed a strong ear for language, especially for the rolling cadences his father emitted from the pulpit.

  For all his love, a powerful ego ruled Joseph Wilson, and he treated his family as subjects. He controlled all discussion at home. As Tommy matured and committed more of his thoughts to paper, his father came down harder in his demands for perfection. “When you frame a sentence,” he would say, “don’t do it as if you were loading a shotgun, but as if you were loading a rifle. Don’t fire in such a way and with such a load that while you hit the thing you aim at you will hit a lot of things in the neighbourhood besides; but shoot with a single bullet and hit that one thing alone.” He sent the boy to the dictionary time and again. Above all, Dr. Wilson wanted his son not just to absorb but to analyze. The mind, he would tell Tommy, “is not a prolix gut to be stuffed. . . . It is not a vessel made to contain something; it is a vessel made to transmute something. The process of digestion is of the essence, and the only part of the food that is of any consequence is the part that is turned into blood and fructifies the whole frame.” To limber up for his own writing, Dr. Wilson would parse the speeches of Massachusetts statesman Daniel Webster—more for what Tommy would later call the “magic” in his rhetoric than for the Yankee politics—“to see if he could substitute other words to strengthen the speech.” But never in the elder Wilson’s experience, his son noted, could he find one word that might “improve the meaning of the address.”

  Like his father, Tommy had a lighter side. Dr. Wilson loved to engage in horseplay and never withheld displays of affection. Father and son kissed each other upon greeting for the rest of their lives. They played games together—chess and billiards, though never cards, which smacked of the devil. But the reverend’s humor often turned mordant. One relative remembered that “Uncle Joseph was a cruel tease, with a caustic wit and a sharp tongue, and I remember hearing my own family tell indignantly of how Cousin Woodrow suffered under his teasing.” In 1867, a younger brother, named for his father, was born into the family—eleven years Tommy’s junior.

  Tommy’s “incomparable” father dominated his existence. He was “one of the most inspiring fathers that ever a lad was blessed with,” Woodrow Wilson would later remark. And if he had his father’s “face
and figure,” he would add, “it wouldn’t make any difference what I had said.” Although Joseph Wilson imposed few academic demands on his son, he had great expectations. And as Tommy got older, the most instructive moments of his youth came when his father relaxed on Sunday afternoons, after his sermon. With Tommy sitting on the rug beside him, they would have “wonderful talks.” Wilson remembered one conversation in particular, in which his father talked to him of the old casuists—“students of conscience”—who had “resolved all sins into the one great sin of egotism, because that consists in putting oneself before God.” Tommy realized, “If you make yourself the center of the universe, all your perspective is skewed. There is only one moral center of the universe, and that is God. If you get into right relations with Him, then you have your right perspective and your right relation and your right size.” Nothing impressed Tommy more than sitting with his family in the fourth-row pew of the Presbyterian Church, looking up to the man in the pulpit whose booming basso made the Gospel thunder within the church walls.

  By her constant example, Jessie Wilson taught her son a different but equally important lesson—humility. She was homely in every way—not just in her unadorned appearance but also her devotion to all household matters. “Aunt Jessie was a typical gentlewoman, delicate, refined, quiet, and dignified in manner, but with a firm Scotch character and will,” one of her nieces recalled. “She was very domestic, loved her home and family, and always had beautiful flowers.” Although she generally deferred to her forceful husband, she was not without opinions; and Tommy could always find comfort in her quiet devotion. “I remember how I clung to her (a laughed-at ‘mamma’s boy’) till I was a great big fellow,” he would later write his first wife, “but love of the best womanhood came to me and entered my heart through those apron-strings.”

  “She was so reserved,” Wilson would remember toward the end of his life, “that only those of her own household can have known how lovable she was, though every friend knew how loyal and steadfast she was. I seem to feel still the touch of her hand, and the sweet steadying influence of her wonderful character.” But she remained the more passive and often joyless parent, from whom Tommy inherited severity and aloofness. As an adult he would admit, “When I feel badly, sour and gloomy and everything seems wrong, then I know that my mother’s character is uppermost in me. But when life seems gay and fine and splendid, then I know that the part of my father which is in me is in the ascendance.” As an adult, he gravitated toward women who could both nurse and nurture.

  Cosseted though he was, Tommy Wilson was indelibly scarred by the Civil War. For four years the fighting destabilized daily life. More than 600,000 soldiers died during that time, the greatest loss of human life in American military history; and even the most sheltered child heard constant talk of death and disease. Tommy saw suffering firsthand—the wounded and the imprisoned; and while his family escaped actual desolation, he tasted deprivation, eating his mother’s soup made of cowpeas, night after night. Wilson would later recall the end of the war—standing with the rest of Augusta, watching in humbled silence as Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States himself, was marched through the streets, surrounded by federal guards.

  Although only eight years old, he knew that there had been “deep color and the ardor of blood in that contest.” And though the field was “lurid with the light of passion,” he also recognized that in its midst stood a noble figure, Robert E. Lee—a great soldier, a modest man of duty, a gentleman. Wilson never forgot that day in 1870 when General Lee paraded through Augusta on a valedictory tour. Tommy was close enough to the General’s side to look into his face and know forever that he had been “in the presence of consuming force.”

  Indeed, Wilson would note in his middle years, “It is all very well to talk of detachment of view, and of the effort to be national in spirit and in purpose, but a boy never gets over his boyhood, and never can change those subtle influences which have become a part of him, that were bred in him when he was a child.” Woodrow Wilson was not, in truth, a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, what with immigrant grandparents and an Ohio-born father. But he would repeatedly remind people “that the only place in the country, the only place in the world, where nothing has to be explained to me is the South.”

  The war over, Tommy ventured for the first time outside the family sphere. Joseph T. Derry, a twenty-four-year-old veteran of what he called the “War of Southern Independence,” returned to his hometown of Augusta, where he opened a “select school for boys” in a cotton warehouse a few blocks from the Wilson home on Bay Street, near the riverbank. Professor Derry provided a classical education, opening each day with the reading of a psalm and the students’ recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Courses in history and Latin followed, and then a colleague taught writing and bookkeeping. A remarkable class of teenagers would emerge from that warehouse—including Joseph Rucker Lamar, Tommy’s next-door neighbor and closest friend, who became a Supreme Court Justice; a dean of Columbia Law School; a Congressman; a Consul to Beirut; and Pleasant Stovall, a future newspaper owner whom Wilson would appoint as the American Ambassador to Switzerland. Tommy lagged markedly behind the others in his studies—“not because he was not bright enough,” recalled Derry, “but because he was apparently not interested.” What Wilson remembered most was the day the circus came to town, when he and some friends played hooky, following the elephant for hours—even though it meant a whipping upon their return to the classroom, for which they padded their pant seats with cotton.

  Summer days and weekends were often spent on horseback, sometimes riding with Pleasant Stovall to the home of another friend, who lived on a plantation in the country. Other times he would visit relatives—the Boneses—in Summerville, who had a daughter, Jessie Woodrow Bones, a fearless tomboy. They both became enamored of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, especially the tales of Native Americans. In feathers and war paint, they spent hours playing with Indian weaponry—sometimes chasing local Negro children living in the woods just beyond town, sometimes attacking each other. It was all harmless fun, until the day Jessie pretended to be a squirrel up a tree and, carried away with the moment, Tommy shot at her with his bow and arrow. She fell to the ground, and Tommy carried her inside, confessing, “I am a murderer. It wasn’t an accident. I killed her.” She was merely stunned; but it marked an end to thoughtless games.

  Tommy organized many of the neighborhood boys into what he called the “Light Foot Base Ball Club.” The sons of a local merchant had been studying in New Jersey and had brought home this new game—which was just gaining popularity across the country. Tommy’s frailty would never allow him to excel on the playing field, but he loved the sport and showed an increasing interest in being among other boys. It became further evident that his interest in social activities accorded with his ability to run them. With Tommy Wilson’s growing proclivity for neatness and order, his Lightfoots almost certainly became the first baseball team in the United States with its own constitution, written by the second baseman himself.

  Up a wooden ladder, in the hayloft of the stables behind the house, he conducted the Monday and Thursday meetings—all according to Robert’s Rules of Order. There was a schedule for fines: a nickel for swearing, two and a half cents for lesser vulgarities; and absences cost a dime. “We knew how to make motions and second them,” he recounted forty-five years later; “we knew that a motion could not have more than two amendments offered at the same time, and we knew the order in which the amendments had to be put, the second amendment before the first.” Wilson granted that nothing important happened at these gatherings; but, he recalled, “I remember distinctly that my delight and interest was in the meetings, not in what they were for—just the sense of belonging to an organization and doing something with the organization, it did not matter what.” Tommy Wilson realized that he was, by nature, a leader of boys.

  Just as he was finding a place for himself in Aug
usta, his father itched to move on. Like his father before him, Joseph Wilson had a transient nature and a restive soul. Tommy observed the joy his father found in riding from church to church through growing communities in the South, ministering “to the most vital interests of the part of the country in which he lived.” Among his travels in the last few years, he had regularly visited Columbia, South Carolina, home of the Columbia Theological Seminary, the premier academy of the Southern Presbyterian Church, on whose board he sat. In May 1870, the school invited Joseph to accept its professorship of Pastoral and Evangelistic Theology and Sacred Rhetoric. To teach the future preachers of Presbyterianism in the New South carried both honor and responsibility, but with them came a cut in pay and no free housing. But the school did offer $1,500 a year to serve as “Stated Supply” at the First Presbyterian Church, which meant delivering the Sunday sermon. Mid-July—“after much prayer and many misgivings”—he answered the call and re-moved his family.

  Columbia, South Carolina, on the Congaree River, had been the first planned city in the state, a two-by-two-mile grid with the Capitol at its center. A new statehouse was approaching completion when the war had begun. In February 1865, Union forces overtook the city, raising the Stars and Stripes atop the old capitol and the rising new edifice. Ever since the seventeenth of that month, debate has raged as to what happened exactly—whether General Sherman had ordered the city’s destruction, whether Union soldiers had drunkenly taken it upon themselves to set the city aflame, or, as has been suggested, whether evacuating Confederate soldiers had torched it themselves. Whatever the case, one-third of the city burned, including its government and commercial buildings and many of its fabled white mansions, leaving stumps of blackened pillars. Tar-paper shanties blotched the landscape, the seedlings of a new city. By the time the Wilsons arrived in the fall of 1870, Columbia was in the middle of Reconstruction, which many considered worse than the fighting. “And so the war ended, with the complete prostration and exhaustion of the South,” Woodrow Wilson wrote in Division and Reunion, his evenhanded history of the nineteenth-century United States. “The South had thrown her life into the scales and lost it; the North had strained her great resources to the utmost.” The federal government, he tabulated, had spent close to $800 million and accumulated an additional debt of nearly $3 billion. Columbia became one gigantic fire sale, with businesses and properties available for any price.