At first, most of the students found Tommy Wilson somewhat aloof, until they realized his shyness was a shield. It was the first time he had been exposed to so many people unlike himself, especially a number of sophisticated boys from families of great fortune and privilege. Never impressed or intimidated by social status, he easily attracted companions. Starting with his housemates at Mrs. Wright’s, he made one friend at a time.
Within a few weeks, Wilson had found a second home, where he began to assert himself, forging an identity as a thinker and speaker. On September 24, 1875, the American Whig Society—the prestigious literary and debate organization established by Madison—admitted him as one of its 179 members. He took his meals for a while with seventeen Whig men from North Carolina who banded together as the “Tar Heels.” A month later, he delivered his first oration before the literary and debating society, a prepared talk entitled “Rome Was Not Built in a Day.”
Neither was his scholarly character. He steadily found the primary benefits of a college education lay in its extracurricular offerings, especially in providing autodidactic experiences. Many of Wilson’s proclivities had revealed themselves by the time he had arrived at Princeton, and he mindfully spent his hours developing them further. “The rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other men prepare for him,—not even to consent to it,” he realized freshman year; “but to strive to see things as they are, and to be himself as he is. Defeat lies in self-surrender.” His first important “victories” occurred during his frequent visits to the new Chancellor Green Library. In Alcoves II through VI, with their carved butternut bookcases, he discovered the histories of the United States and Great Britain. At the head of the south spiral stairs of this brand-new temple of books, he thumbed through bound volumes of The Gentleman’s Magazine from the preceding year. In the April number, he glommed onto an article called “The Orator,” which evaluated the 653 members of the current House of Commons and singled out the chamber’s “orator par excellence,” the one man who could out-talk Prime Minister Disraeli and surpass even Wilson’s beloved Gladstone. His name was John Bright.
Representing the Midlands, Bright emerged as the leading spokesman for radicalism in nineteenth-century England. For forty years, the gentleman from Birmingham attacked the aristocracy; he believed the human race had more of a vested interest in the American Constitution than in any other such document. During the Civil War, he voiced solidarity with the Union and rejoiced in its victory. “Slavery has measured itself with Freedom, and Slavery has perished in the struggle,” he said. Above all, wrote historian Asa Briggs of Bright’s significance, was “that he turned liberalism into a creed, that he made men seek reform because reform was ‘right,’ and that he refused to separate the spheres of morality and politics.” Wilson made such thinking his own.
Wilson also discovered Edmund Burke, a legendary orator and statesman in the House of Commons, an Irish Catholic who had supported the American colonists against England’s tyranny. Favoring the repeal of the tea duty, Burke had addressed the Americans’ having to bear the burdens of monopoly and unfair taxation. “The Englishman in America will feel that this is slavery,” he said; “that it is legal slavery will be no compensation either to his feelings or to his understanding.” Such would mark the beginning of Wilson’s own thinking about the need to emancipate people economically.
Years later, in an essay called “Interpreter of English Liberty,” Woodrow Wilson would write of another precept he acquired from Burke, one that influenced his own education. Wilson described Burke’s four years at Trinity College in Dublin as “years of wide and eager reading, but not years of systematic and disciplinary study. With singular, if not exemplary, self-confidence, he took his education into his own hands.” And so, while the Princeton syllabi, which listed Milton, Locke, Hume, Kant, Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes, would consume most of his hours, Wilson too created his own bibliography, his list deeper than it was wide. Once a subject caught his attention, he bored in—almost to the exclusion of everything else—until he could claim expertise.
As with many recovering dyslexics, Tommy Wilson read slowly; and he tended to retain more than most, developing a virtually photographic memory. Upon encountering an unknown word, name, or concept, he would pause to research it to the end. Classmate Hiram Woods, Jr., recalled a discussion with Wilson about Macbeth; afterward he found Tommy’s nose deep in an encyclopedia learning all he could about Birnam Wood, acquiring a deeper understanding of the play by learning more about the place where Macbeth’s soldiers had once encamped. On another occasion with the Woods family in Baltimore, a question about Macaulay’s accuracy in his History of England arose, and Hiram recalled how Tommy insisted upon consulting two other sources before deciding what the truth was.
Like his father, Wilson was an editor by nature, challenging authors in the margins of their works. He had not completed reading a book until he had transcribed its highlights and then commented upon them. Remembering his father’s admonition against a prolix gut, Wilson believed the “man who reads everything is like the man who eats everything: he can digest nothing; and the penalty for cramming one’s mind with other men’s thoughts is to have no thoughts of one’s own.” He knew that history offered many examples of great thinkers and leaders who actually “did little reading of books . . . but much reading of men and of their own times.”
In Tommy’s case, reading begat more reading. Macaulay’s History of England referred to Samuel Pepys’s diary, which made Tommy not only want to read that seventeenth-century journal but also to keep his own. Like Pepys, Wilson wrote his diary in shorthand. But the former kept his diary for a decade, starting at age twenty-seven, during which time he shed light on such events as the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London; the latter was nineteen, chronicling six months of readings and activities with a growing group of friends in a quiet college town. After six months, Tommy discontinued the exercise “for want of time to do it Justice.”
He had a longer run emulating John Milton, who famously kept a commonplace book—a locus communis—into which he entered thoughts, sayings, proverbs, and prayers. The notion for what Wilson called his “Index Rerum” evidently came from Andrew Graham, whose shorthand method Wilson employed and who had written a recent article on keeping such a compendium. Biographies of writers and statesmen especially grabbed Wilson’s attention, reflecting his growing interest in history and even more in politics, especially of the British Empire. Burke—his biography, his style, his views on America—commanded more space than anybody else. Wilson also used the commonplace book to record his expenses—every nickel for an apple, dime for a shave, and dollar for cod liver oil—as well as potential topics for books and essays.
By the end of his freshman year, Wilson proved to be a respectable student—ranking twenty-sixth in a class of 114 students; and his extracurricular life continued to blossom. He and his boardinghouse boys formed a baseball team and played as often as they could; and he became a zealot of all things Princetonian—which was just then adopting orange and black as its school colors and later the Tiger as its mascot. Before the semester ended, students went to the treasurer’s office to draw for a room the next semester; and Wilson had the good fortune to be fifth in the lottery, entitling him to a choice room in Witherspoon Hall. It would not be completed for another semester, but Tommy was assured of prime accommodations for the rest of his stay on campus. And for the first time, he expressed interest in the opposite sex: “A great many pretty girls at the church,” he observed in his journal, as he was packing up his room for the summer, “but not nearly as many as we see every day in the sunny south.” He was in much better condition than he had been after his year at Davidson, and most of Tommy’s diary entries were able to repeat the same phrase, until it became a self-fulfilling mantra: “Thank God for health and strength.”
On Monday, June 26, 1876, Tommy Wilson arose early in order to
catch the morning train to Baltimore. From there he went to the port and boarded a boat to North Carolina, getting a good night’s rest in a stateroom. (“No pretty girls on board,” he noted.) The boat arrived in Portsmouth, in the Outer Banks, at dawn, and he spent the entire day riding by coach across dry, dusty roads to Wilmington. He delighted in being “home,” despite its unfamiliarity. He found his mother in fragile health but his father as ebullient as ever, having just assumed the editorship of the North Carolina Presbyterian, following the Wilson tradition of publishing strong opinions as well as preaching them. Nine-year-old Josie eagerly tagged along with his brother whenever possible, though the college man filled most of the summer reading and writing and spending as much time as possible with his father—often in the basement, where the Reverend Wilson had installed a billiard table.
Having completed Macaulay’s History, Tommy had moved on to Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Alongside these major works, he dipped into the American Cyclopedia, studying Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and anything related to the English form of government. He also dove into a few novels and Shakespeare’s plays. With all the surety of a man with a year of college under his belt, Tommy Wilson espoused only bold opinions, sometimes beyond his expertise: he dismissed a review of a book that accused Macaulay of being superficial as “sublimely ridiculous” and Romeo and Juliet as one of the Bard’s “poorest pieces.” On the hundredth anniversary of American independence, he wrote how much happier his nation would be now “if she had England’s form of government instead of the miserable delusion of a republic. A republic too founded upon the notion of abstract liberty! I venture to say that this country will never celebrate another centennial as a republic. The English form of government is the only true one.”
That summer, Wilson submitted six essays on religion to his father’s newsletter. Under the pseudonym “Twiwood,” they were published between August and December of that year. They all explored the daily challenges of being a true man of faith. In one essay, “A Christian Statesman,” he wrote words that should have come back to haunt him late in life—but did not: “When the statesman has become convinced that he has arrived at the truth, and has before his mind the true view of his subject, he should be tolerant. He should have a becoming sense of his own weakness and liability to err.” More and more, even his Scripture-based pieces bore political undertones.
With increasing frequency, Tommy found himself rushing to the First Presbyterian Church that summer, where he climbed to the pulpit to practice his oratory. But any hopes Dr. Wilson might have harbored of his son’s becoming a minister were dashed—for Tommy was not rehearsing sermons. In the empty church, he delivered the great speeches of Webster and Gladstone and Burke and Bright.
Tommy and his father ended their summer in Philadelphia at the Centennial Exposition of 1876, the first World’s Fair to be held in the United States. It was full of wonders, especially the exhibitions in Machinery Hall and Agricultural Hall—displays of such brand-new marvels as Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, a Remington “Typographic Machine,” Heinz ketchup, and Hires root beer. They could visit the right arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty for fifty cents, money earmarked for the assembly of the statue in New York harbor. The Wilsons stopped at Wanamaker’s to buy Tommy winter clothes before proceeding to Princeton, where they took a room at the University Hotel for a night before Tommy returned to Mrs. Wright’s boardinghouse.
With such friends as McCarter close at hand, he resumed his scholarly routine, though his interest in his classes steadily decreased. Apart from McCosh’s course in Psychology—in which Wilson received a final grade of 99.8 percent—Wilson continued to bridle at all the memorization and recitation. Whether the subject was Greek or French or Roman History or Natural History (which, to his surprise, engaged him), the routine led him “to the conclusion that my friends have no doubt come to long ago and that is that my mind is a very ordinary one indeed. I am nothing as far as intellect goes. But I can plod and work.” He was already feeling shackled by the rigors of being a “mere student” and yearned for the freedom of the scholar, who “seeks wisdom because he is inspired with a love for it.”
Although he was sinking in his class standing, no Princeton student became more visible. “We went to college without an objective,” classmate Hiram Woods said of his group of friends, “but Wilson always had a definite purpose.” Tommy remained an especially active participant in the Whig Society. He engaged in debates—winning for the affirmative on the propositions “That a liberal education is to be preferred to an exclusively practical one” and “That a protective tariff is now no longer necessary for the protection of our home industries.” He also delivered speeches, entitling his most notable effort sophomore year “The Ideal Statesman.” It proved to be a blueprint for himself and a book he would later write.
The True Statesman is . . . one who has all the principles of the law carefully arranged in a vigorous mind and to whom all the particulars as well as the broad principles of International law are as familiar as his alphabet. And not only should he have the law of his own country at his fingers’ ends, but he should be intimately acquainted with all the more important legislative actions of every country on the globe.
A year later he delivered an oration on Bismarck, his prose noticeably enriched from another year’s worth of independent reading, which had taken him into the world of belles lettres.
He sat on a number of the Whig Society’s committees, and by junior year, T. W. Wilson had been elected Speaker, its highest honor. One fellow member recalled that Thomas Wilson “steadily grew in the estimation of his fellow members until he was recognized as the best debater in the society. . . . He was especially effective in extemporaneous debate.” More to the point, another friend would recall a half century after their time in school together, “mere records cannot produce the appealing tones of his voice and the fire in his eyes as he exercised his remarkable skill in debate. He got as much fun out of it as a great many men now achieve in athletics.”
But Wilson was not Whig’s most victorious debater. He entered two oratorical contests and placed only once; and in just one of four debate competitions did he take the top prize. This was, in part, because the oratorical style of the day was one of considerable artifice, in which gesticulation garnered more points than articulation and vehemence counted more than eloquence. He recognized as much in the brand-new student-run newspaper called the Princetonian. “Until we eschew declamation and court oratory,” he wrote, “we must expect to be ciphers in the world’s struggles for principles and the advancement of causes. Oratory is persuasion, not the declamation of essays.” England’s House of Commons, Wilson believed, engaged in such modern debate.
With his growing passion for all things British, Wilson decided to establish his own miniature Parliament, what he called the Liberal Debating Club. Naturally, he wrote its constitution. The first of its twenty-three articles defined the society and stipulated that it “shall be founded upon the fundamental principles of Justice, Morality and Friendship.” Toward that end, the club met every Saturday night, at which time the members engaged in debate, speeches, or simply convivial discussion of literature. As in the British system, the presiding officer was a figurehead, while the Secretary of State functioned as a Prime Minister, empowered to execute Article V, which stated, “The questions discussed by this Club shall be political questions of the present century.” They included an overhaul of the United States Constitution so that the nation’s executive power would be vested in a President who is chosen for one six-year term, and that his Cabinet shall form a Ministry, answerable to the House of Representatives. Before the ten members, Wilson honed his speaking skills, developing a powerful mode of speech that was at once heightened but conversational.
In the middle of his sophomore year, the Class of 1879 voted Wilson one of its two representatives on the newspaper’s Board o
f Editors. When the managing editor stepped aside at the start of Wilson’s junior year, Wilson took his place, an office to which he was elected the following semester. “He formulated policies; he was the chief,” McCarter would later recall. “He would come around to me and say that he would like me to write on such and such. If he did not like what I wrote, it would not go in. The editors were not a cabinet and seldom if ever met as a group. He was boss and deserved to be.”
Wilson became a prolific editorial writer himself. He composed forty opinion pieces over the next two years, alongside reviews of books and even a performance by the great-granddaughter of the legendary actress Sarah Siddons. (“Her chief fault is an exaggeration,” the young critic wrote, “which seems to be affectation.”) His editorials were almost entirely directed toward enhancing the college experience, usually through greater promotion of extracurricular activities. The rest of his editorials were haughty admonitions to his schoolmates. One was a direct attack on the privileged student who could afford not to succeed—“the habitual loafer.” Wilson did not begrudge those who had been given much, but he resented those who took such gifts for granted and failed even to pretend to work.
Never an athlete, Wilson was always conscious of his body, mindful of diet and exercise; and Princeton’s sports teams had no more ardent booster. He not only editorialized regularly for greater university support of the athletic programs, but he became active with both the baseball and football teams, getting elected secretary of the Football Association. The game as played in America was rough-and-tumble, with few holds barred—more like rugby than modern-day American football. As with everything else in his life, Wilson’s interest in the teams was primarily about merit and achievement. In his new position, Wilson became the moving force behind the sport on the Princeton campus. He organized the team, raised money for its equipment, and, as a coach, even devised plays, insisting on their being followed.
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