For the first ten years of his life Tommy as he was known was the only boy in a family of girls. His parents destined him for the ministry as a matter of course. It was a trial to Dr. Wilson, who was a passionate reader of books with a palate for the modulations of English style, that his son learned to read slowly and that he had difficulty in mastering the Shorter Catechism. Dr. Wilson had a sharp Scottish tongue. His sarcasms lashed the dull student. “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.” At the same time tales were handed down in the family of most unministerial frolickings when Dr. Wilson roughhoused with the children in the garden of the manse.
When Tommy was fourteen the father was called to a chair at the theological seminary in Columbia, South Carolina’s inland capital which Sherman had so thoroughly laid waste during the war. Dr. Wilson had a salary from his teaching and another from one of the principal pulpits in the town, and Mrs. Wilson had come into a legacy from a brother in the North who had died without issue. Amid the general impoverishment of the ruined South, all this meant opulence unusual for a minister’s family. They built themselves a brick house. The Lord was indeed providing. The children grew up steeped in righteousness and drilled in admiration of good English prose.
In the summer of 1873 Thomas Woodrow Wilson, with two other boys from the Sunday school, (according to the church register) “after free confession during which they severally exhibited evidences of the work of grace, were unanimously admitted to the membership of this church.”
Woodrow Wilson never wavered in his strict adherence to the Presbyterian creed. He prayed on his knees. He wore out Bibles reading them. “The Bible,” he said, “reveals every man to himself as a distinct moral agent responsible not to men, not even to those men he has put over him in authority, but responsible through his own conscience to his Lord and Maker.” So far as religion was concerned, he told Cary Grayson years later, argument was adjourned.
He loved his mother but so long as Dr. Wilson lived his father ruled his life. A warm, admiring, almost reverent affection grew up between father and son. Even so Tommy Wilson’s ambitions strayed early from the ministry. As a boy he’d read deep of Cooper’s and Captain Marryat’s seastories. Before he ever saw the sea he had drawn plans of frigates and entertained the phantasy of being admiral of an American fleet pursuing pirates in the Pacific. When his father accepted a call to a large church in Wilmington, North Carolina, young Wilson had his first sight of real seagoing ships. The story is told that it was only his mother’s supplications that kept him from shipping before the mast.
Meanwhile a new daydream intervened. His father subscribed to the Edinburgh Review and to Godkin’s Nation. Tommy began to read of debates in the British House of Commons. These were the years of the great liberals. England was in a period of fervid parliamentary activity. The slender shy awkward lad—“an old young man” the Wilsons’ colored butler called him — began to throw all his youthful passion into imagining himself a Cobden or a John Bright thundering from the opposition benches under the hallowed rafters of St. Stephen’s. Instead of drawings of fullrigged ships a portrait of Gladstone appeared above his desk.
When at sixteen he was sent to Davidson College near Charlotte he began to show an aptitude for hard work. He made good marks in his courses. He taught himself shorthand. In deportment his score was perfect.
He worked so hard at Davidson that he began to show signs of acute dyspepsia — all his life his nerves were too taut for good digestion—; he was ordered home to Wilmington for a rest and began to tutor in Latin and Greek for the entrance examinations at Princeton.
At nineteen he entered Princeton as a freshman carrying a letter from his father, which he was too shy to present, to that notable Scottish divine the Reverend James McCosh, who was president. Dr. McCosh was a scholar and a speaker famous for force and wit. In the Darwinian controversy then raging through schools and pulpits he had the courage (as did Tommy’s scholarly uncle Professor James Woodrow who fell into hot water with the Presbytery because of it) to take the side of science: “If it is found to be true,” Dr. McCosh affirmed, “… it will be found that it is consistent with religion.”
At Princeton young Wilson paid enough attention to the curriculum to get through with moderate honors, but his real interest was in reading and debating about politics, statesmanship and constitutional law. He devoured the witty accounts of the debates in British parliament he found in the library in bound volumes of The Gentleman’s Magazine.
Debating was popular with undergraduates at Princeton in those days. He joined the Whig Society, which was still operating under a constitution devised by James Madison, and became its star debater. Not content with that he founded a new society: The Liberal Debating Club, modelled on the British parliament, for which he himself furnished the constitution. He showed a lively interest in campus affairs generally, served as president of the Athletic Committee and of the Baseball Association and as managing editor of the Princetonian.
He found himself associating with a generation of young Americans who were beginning to think that they should emulate the English gentry and take politics away from the wardheelers. Among a gang of friends, mostly members of an eating club known as the Alligators, who used to meet in eachother’s rooms in Witherspoon Hall, there appeared a comic tag line to break off a discussion: “When I meet you in the Senate I’ll argue that out with you.”
Tommy Wilson went so far as to put his name on some visiting cards as “Senator from Virginia.”
With the Utica boy who later went to Congress from upstate New York he entered into one of those youthful compacts that do so much to mould men’s lives.
“I remember forming with Charlie Talcott, a class-mate and very intimate friend of mine,” he wrote in reminiscent vein, “a solemn covenant that we would school all our powers and passions for the work of establishing the principles we held in common; that we would acquire knowledge that we might have power; and that we would drill ourselves in all the arts of persuasion but especially in oratory (for he was a born orator if ever man was) that we might have facility in leading others into our ways of thinking and enlisting them in our purposes.”
He saw himself as part of the procession of the great parliamentarians. He read Macaulay with rapture; he tried to model his style on Bagehot’s.
Greene’s Short History of the English People delighted him so that he planned to follow it up with a History of the American People. He decided to be a writer as well as a talker. He wrote his father excitedly that he had discovered he had a mind. In vacationtime down at Wilmington, on days when the church was empty, he practiced oratory by reciting Burke’s speeches from his father’s pulpit.
He was obsessed with the beauties of the British parliamentary system. By his senior year he had produced an article on “Cabinet Government in the United States” which was printed in The International Review, then the foremost American journal of theoretical politics. He used the same theme for his commencement address when he graduated.
He carried some of the aura of that publication along with him when he went to the University of Virginia to study law. “The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was the law. I chose the one because I thought it would lead to the other,” he explained in a letter to his fiancée a few years later.
He hated the law but he plugged away at it. He had done well at Princeton, but at Charlottesville he was almost fulsomely admired. He had a good clear tenor voice; he sang in the glee club and in the chapel choir. He was described as having “rare charm and courtesy of manner” and as carrying himself “with an air of quiet distinction.” He was developing a sense of humor. He was in demand whenever a graceful speech was called for at some public function.