As part of Reconstruction, the Republican Congress had divided the Southern states into military districts under the command of Army Generals; it also temporarily deprived fifteen thousand Confederate officials and senior officers from voting for delegates who were to compose state constitutional conventions. All this came at a moment when newly freed slaves were becoming enfranchised. As Wilson later wrote sympathetically, “Unscrupulous adventurers appeared, to act as the leaders of the inexperienced blacks in taking possession, first of the conventions, and afterwards of the state governments; and in the States where the negroes were most numerous, or their leaders most shrewd and unprincipled, an extraordinary carnival of public crime set in under the forms of law. . . . Negroes constituted the legislative majorities and submitted to the unrestrained authority of small and masterful groups of white men whom the instincts of plunder had drawn from the North.”
In fact, the entire country encountered massive taxes, debt, fraud, and bribery. Industrialization and capitalistic expansion stimulated unbounded corruption in the North; and the South faced something worse. America’s most pungent commentator, H. L. Mencken, would observe a half century later that the Confederates had gone into battle free but came out “with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary.”
Although slavery had been illegalized by 1870, fundamental prejudice could not be legislated away. Embittered whites felt they had been given good reason to scapegoat blacks. Granting full rights of citizenship to ex-slaves did not come easily, as the South Carolina constitution continued to limit suffrage to whites and adopted what was known as “Black Codes,” which consigned blacks to the same menial positions they held before the war. These laws, the legislators claimed, were for the Negroes’ protection. Into this society that one real estate broker described as “polite, refined, intelligent and sociable,” the Wilsons arrived, amid its congenial but unsettling segregation.
A large number of local whites took advantage of the reigning confusion. And while many decent Union veterans migrated to the South simply to start new lives for themselves, the impressionable teenaged son of Columbia’s new Presbyterian minister recalled only the unethical “carpetbaggers,” swarming “out of the North to cozen, beguile, and use” the Negro.
Tommy Wilson could not but admire his father’s new offices: the seminary was the most prestigious in the South, if not the country; and the First Presbyterian Church, built in 1853, was the tallest structure in town—a veritable Gothic cathedral with a 180-foot spire, surrounded by dozens of ornamental pinnacles rising from a crenellated roof. The interior was unadorned but grand—with high vaulted ceilings, lancet arches, and a white, horseshoe-shaped gallery encircling most of the vast sanctuary. It sat in the corner of a large, wooded churchyard and burying ground. They lived for a short while in a house opposite the seminary. Then Jessie Wilson came into a small inheritance from her brother William, a bachelor who had speculated in land and died young.
For $1,850, the Wilsons purchased one acre on Hampton Street, a block from the seminary and not much more than that from the church. For several thousand dollars more, they built a two-story wooden house in the Tuscan Villa style, white with green shutters. A three-sided bay window greeted visitors to the left of the front-door portico, and a verandah sat to the right. As in Augusta, a parlor, a dining room, and Dr. Wilson’s study filled most of the ground floor; the upstairs contained four large bedrooms, a sitting room, a sewing room, and a bath. Each floor had a back porch. Magnolia trees shaded the yard and house, which sat behind a white picket fence.
Columbia had boasted a state university, a female college, and several private academies before the war, all of which were just rebounding. Tommy came under the tutelage of a neighbor, Charles H. Barnwell, whose family had distinguished itself in education. For seven dollars a month, he offered a classical course of study—to as many as four dozen boys—in a barn in the back of his house. Tommy remained less than a remarkable student.
Turning sixteen, he came under the sway of a young seminarian in his twenties named Francis J. Brooke. Preparing for the ministry, Brooke held services in his room, which Tommy attended, casually at first. A spellbinder, Brooke developed a local following; and, in time, he moved his prayer meetings to the seminary chapel. Within months—on July 5, 1873—young Wilson applied for membership in the First Presbyterian Church, and his admission became a turning point in his life.
Years later Woodrow Wilson would write an essay called “When a Man Comes to Himself,” a treatise on finding oneself and one’s place in the world. While he could not have articulated the thoughts at age sixteen, the essay recounted that first moment “when he has left off being wholly preoccupied with his own powers and interests and with every petty plan that centers in himself; when he has cleared his eyes to see the world as it is, and his own true place and function in it.” For Tommy Wilson, embracing religion was his first step toward self-realization. “Christianity gave us, in the fullness of time, the perfect image of right living, the secret of social and of individual well-being; for the two are not separable, and the man who receives and verifies that secret in his own living has discovered not only the best and only way to serve the world, but also the one happy way to satisfy himself,” he wrote. “Then, indeed, has he come to himself.”
With the Grant Administration in Washington mired in scandal, Tommy’s interest turned to Great Britain. He obsessed over the Prime Minister, William Gladstone. This great Liberal politician and orator in an age of parliamentary giants was born in Liverpool to Scottish parents. Like Wilson, he had Presbyterian roots, as one could divine from the high moral purpose that infused his speeches. Elementary education and individual liberties were the cornerstones of his policies, and he was said to be an avid reader of Sir Walter Scott. Tommy Wilson read everything by and about him that he could obtain. He found a portrait of Gladstone as well, which he hung over his desk. One day Jessie Woodrow Bones asked who it was. “That is Gladstone,” Tommy replied, “the greatest statesman that ever lived. I intend to be a statesman, too.”
At last he embraced his studies, absorbing information wherever he could find it. After school, he would attend his father’s lectures at the seminary, dissecting both the substance and the style of his discourse. While he remained a plodding reader, he surmounted his dyslexia. In so doing, he fell in love with writing—not just reading the written word but the physical act of writing. He practiced penmanship until it approached calligraphic perfection. Over and over he would write his name—in block print with serifs, in cursive with flourishes. That same fall that he met Brooke, Tommy read the latest issue of Frank Leslie’s Boys’ and Girls’ Weekly, which featured a series of articles by Joseph F. Snipes, a stenographic law and news reporter in New York City. One article discussed Andrew J. Graham’s Hand-Book of Standard or American Phonography, a book about a modern American system of shorthand. He was so stimulated by the concept of speed-writing, he struck up a correspondence with Snipes himself and within months was learning the Graham method. Wilson never lost proficiency in the technique.
The ability at last to read and write with fluency unlocked Tommy’s imagination. Moving past the Leatherstocking Tales, he became consumed with knights and pirates and then naval stories, especially those of the British fleet. He clipped pictures of boats from periodicals and studied details of every class of ship, which he could draw with precision. Although he had never seen an ocean, Wilson began imagining that he was an admiral of his own navy, about which he wrote daily reports. Other times he fancied that he commanded his own regiment of Guards, the orders for whom he signed “Thomas W. Wilson, Lieutenant-General, Duke of Eagleton, Commander-in-chief Royal Lance Guards.” For several years he continued issuing orders, granting promotions, and “
decorating” himself with knighthoods of the Garter and the Star of India, even a seat in Parliament.
At the same time, Joseph Wilson’s self-esteem suffered a blow. Much as he enjoyed the vibrant Presbyterian community in Columbia, the church was not satisfied with him. Fortunately, learned and dynamic preachers were always in demand, and the First Presbyterian Church of Wilmington, North Carolina, offered him $4,000 a year to be its pastor. Accepting the position meant leaving a city he liked—all at a moment when his entire family was entering a period of readjustment. The daughters were embarking on their own lives—Marion had just married Anderson Ross Kennedy, a newly ordained Presbyterian minister, and Annie was about to marry the celebrated Reverend George Howe’s son, a doctor named George. And, that fall, at age sixteen, Tommy Wilson was starting college.
One hundred twenty-five miles due north of Columbia lay the village of Davidson, North Carolina. In 1837, Presbyterians founded a college in the piedmont. The war had interrupted its growth, but by the 1870s, the mangled single track along the way to Charlotte had been re-laid, and the Atlantic, Tennessee and Ohio was again running trains to Davidson. According to its charter, the school was meant to “educate youth of all classes without any regard to the distinction of religious denominations, and thereby promote the more general diffusion of knowledge and virtue.” But there was no mistaking Davidson College’s sectarian mission. Students preparing for the ministry and sons of ministers received free tuition; five of the six professors were ministers; and a third of its alumni had become preachers. Clerical members of the faculty preached on the Sabbath, and chapel attendance was compulsory, as were morning and evening prayers. Each week commenced with Bible instruction.
Davidson was still a struggling, rustic village, with little more than one main street. But across the street from the general store and the few other shops that made up the town, a patch of land had been cleared to support the college. Its centerpiece was the Chambers Building, an unadorned three-story brick structure behind a portico supported by four Doric stone columns. It contained dormitory rooms for half the student body, classrooms, laboratories, a library, and meeting halls; its cupola offered a panorama of the entire community and beyond to distant hills. By 1873, the school had 121 students.
By necessity, admission was based more on character than academic standards. Testimonials mattered more than transcripts, though incoming freshmen were examined in English (which included grammar and modern geography), Latin (Caesar, Virgil, and Cicero), Greek (mostly grammar), and mathematics (arithmetic and algebra). Students who did not meet basic requirements could still be admitted on probation, with certain conditions to be met within the first year. All students had to be at least fourteen.
Tommy Wilson would turn seventeen at the end of his first term, roughly the age of most of his forty-one classmates, though he was emotionally younger than his years. He arrived on probation in mathematics and Greek and with conditions in geography and Latin. He moved into the first floor of the north wing with a roommate named John William Leckie, also from Columbia. For $7.15 he was able to furnish his room with a wardrobe (the big-ticket item at $4), a bookcase, a washstand and bowl, two chairs, and two buckets—one old, one new. The college did not provide meals but licensed locals in town to do so. For about twelve dollars a month, Tommy Wilson ate at Mrs. Scofield’s boardinghouse. He kept meticulous accounts of every penny he spent, every one of his 103 articles of clothing . . . and, as the semester began, class schedules and books he had borrowed and read, and the number of letters he had sent to and received from each of his family members.
Life at Davidson was Spartan. Students fetched their own water from a central well and cut their own firewood—an absolute necessity in the winter. For all his fragile health, Tommy Wilson engaged as a serious student for the first time in his life. He read rigorously, satisfying his class assignments and his own growing interests, especially in history and politics. His shorthand skills advanced to a level of professional proficiency; and he kept refining his penmanship—writing his name over and over, performing handwriting exercises, producing a signature worthy of great documents. Most of his first-term grades were in the 90s—Logic and Rhetoric, Latin, Composition, and Declamation—with an 87 in Greek; his lowest mark was a 74 in Mathematics. By the second term, the high marks sustained themselves, and his work in Mathematics earned an 88. He found growing satisfaction along with reward in diligence, earning 100 in Deportment.
Two other buildings commanded attention on the Davidson campus, both red-brick Greek Revival temples: the Eumenean and Philanthropic Literary Societies. They had been formed for “the acquirement of literary knowledge, the promotion of virtue, and the cultivation of social harmony and friendship.” Tommy joined the former—known as “the Eu”—and became its most zealous member. As newly elected secretary, he kept records and took minutes; he even had a hand in its new constitution—at the very least serving as copyist with his filigreed cursive. Most of all, he discovered a nascent talent for debating. That year, the Eu and the Phi mooted such issues as the superiority of republics to monarchies, the value of the two-party system, and the justifiability of slavery (which the affirmative team won). There in the wilds of North Carolina—among an ardent cohort of similarly motivated teenaged boys and in the absence of his father—Tommy had his first opportunity to find his own voice.
It was the next step in the process of his coming to himself, which he would later describe as a “process of disillusionment.” Wilson wrote, “He sees himself soberly, and knows under what conditions his powers must act, as well as what his powers are.” Debating the issues of the day also deepened his faith, forcing him to realize how much of his life he had already squandered. “I am now in my seventeenth year and it is sad, when looking over my past life, to see how few of those seventeen years I have spent in the fear of God and how much I have spent in the service of the Devil,” Tommy wrote in one of his Davidson notebooks. “If God will give me the grace, I will try to serve Him from this time on.” His fellow Eumaneans appointed him to lead them in their devotional exercises. And at that moment, Tommy Wilson’s path began to diverge from his father’s, as he considered that his powers might be best suited for a life of politics instead of religion.
Never in the best of health, he maintained his classroom attendance; but by the end of the spring term, he had worn himself down and could not keep up with his activities at the Eu. A terrible spring cold overcame him along with an extreme case of the blue devils. With the severity of life at Davidson, he wallowed in feelings of unworthiness and homesickness.
Suffering from headaches of her own, his mother immediately recognized his symptoms and wrote him on May 20, 1874. “You seem depressed,” she observed, “—but that is because you are not well. You need not imagine that you are not a favorite. Everybody here likes and admires you. I could not begin to tell you the kind and flattering things that are said about you, by everybody that knows you.” Having moved from Columbia, she tried to sell him on the virtues of Wilmington, assuring him of “an unusual number of young people about your age there—and of a superior kind—and they are prepared to take an unusual interest in you particularly. Why my darling, nobody could help loving you, if they were to try!”
For all his warm feelings for Davidson and some scholastic strides, he stumbled there. The year had been a false start. When Tommy Wilson packed up his room in the spring of 1874, he showed no signs of returning; but with his family uprooted from Columbia, he was not exactly going home again. Boasting a population of fifteen thousand, the North Carolina seaport of Wilmington was the largest town in which the Wilsons had yet resided, and in several ways the most interesting. Situated in the southeast corner of the state, between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic, it was a curious mixture. Big-masted brigantines and clipper ships anchored just a few blocks from antebellum mansions. Christians of all sects found a home there, as did a few Jews, who were
organizing the first synagogue in the state. Sailors from around the world—Germans, Russians, and Dutchmen—roamed the town. Three blocks from Front Street, with its two- and three-story shops and businesses overlooking the water, was the Presbyterian Church, simple and dramatic with its sharp Gothic spire. The manse sat adjacent to the church, at Fourth and Orange, elm-lined residential streets.
Tommy cocooned himself in his new surroundings—his fifth home in seventeen years—and he was already setting his sights on his sixth. During a Davidson vacation and one of his last days in Columbia, a visitor had entered the Wilsons’ lives—the eminent minister and educator Dr. James McCosh, an imposing Scot who was president of the College of New Jersey. President McCosh had given the gawky teenager the once-over, turned to Dr. Wilson, and said with his exaggerated burr, “The boy’ll be comin’ to Princeton, no doubt.”
Tommy had tucked the thought in the back of his mind. He studied with a tutor—especially in brushing up his Greek—and he read ravenously. “When I wanted to find Mr. Tommy in those days,” recalled David Bryant, the Wilsons’ butler, “I would go to his room, and generally there he would be sitting with his elbows on his knees and his nose in a book. . . . Why sometimes I had to wait a meal; the old Doctor would not let me serve till Mr. Tommy came down. And how proud the old Doctor was of the boy—and the boy of him, too!”
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