He was filling long arduous days with the law, with debating, with reading, with warm college friendships and with the unsuccessful courtship of one of his Woodrow cousins who attended the Female Seminary at Staunton, when he broke down again with what was still described as dyspepsia. Again the doctor told him to go home and take it easy. For a year and a half he let his mother nurse him back to health while he read law in the comfortable Wilmington manse.
The whole family connection had gone to work to find the most suitable place for Tommy Wilson to practice when he was strong enough to take his bar examination. He settled on Atlanta in partnership with a friend from the university. At twentyfive he was a seriousappearing young man with a mustache and sideburns. He had dropped the childish Tommy and signed himself Woodrow Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson was not cut out for the life of an attorney at law. He wanted a political career but, raised as he was among women, in the protective cocoon of his father’s affection, he didn’t have the brash energy needed to break into politics at the local level as Theodore Roosevelt did in New York. He was too shy and aloof and selfcentered for the rough moneygrubbing Atlanta of reconstruction days. He gave up his law-firm, which had hardly picked up a client, and went to Johns Hopkins, then in its first heyday as a great graduate school, to study for a Ph.D. The life there just suited him. At Hopkins he wrote his first and best book: Congressional Government.
Meanwhile he had fallen in love again. On a trip to Georgia to attend to some lawbusiness for his mother, he met Ellen Axson, the daughter of the pastor of Rome’s First Presbyterian Church, a quiet earnest girl of great charm. Her friends spoke of her “flowerlike” freshness. Their upbringings were so similar they might have been brother and sister.
The Axsons like the Woodrows came of a line of Scottish clergymen. Her grandfather had been known to his Presbyterian parishioners in Savannah as “the great Axson.”
Ellen Axson had been planning herself a career as a painter. She convinced Wilson that he must finish his work at Hopkins and that she must have a year studying at the Art Students League in New York before their marriage. Both families seem to have been overjoyed by the engagement. Ellen Axson’s brother Stockton became one of Woodrow’s most intimate friends.
It was as if they had known each other all their lives. They wrote almost daily. “You are the only person in the world,” he told her, “except the dear ones at home — with whom I do not have to act a part; to whom I do not have to deal out confidences cautiously …”
As usual he was working himself too hard: “One must dig in books,” he wrote from Baltimore, “he can’t find history anywhere else: he can’t understand present experience unless he knows the experience bound up between the senseless covers of ponderous books or recorded on the faded faces of old manuscripts … so that he must focus all his senses in his spectacles, and strive to forget he was not meant to sit all day in a hard chair at a square table … It’s quite as necessary for a Christian to work as for him to be glad.”
He was critical, in his letters, of the dryasdust quality of American scholarship even in the brilliant assemblage Professor Adams had collected in his Historical Seminary: “Style is not much studied here; ideas are supposed to be everything — their vehicle comparatively nothing. But you and I know that there can be no greater mistake … and style shall be, as under my father’s guidance, it has been, one of my chief studies. A writer must be artful as well as strong.”
From earliest boyhood his father had been drilling him in the niceties of English prose. Years later in an address to a teachers’ association he told of his father’s saying to him: “When you frame a sentence 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 you will hit a lot of things in the neighborhood besides; but shoot with a single bullet and hit that one thing alone.”
From the prolix academic style of the period Woodrow Wilson did manage to develop a way of writing suited to the purpose for which it was intended; but his real gift was for public speaking. He seized every opportunity to address an audience. Primarily he was training himself for a career as a college lecturer, afterwards, who knew? “Oratory,” he wrote Ellen Axson, “is not declamation, not swelling tones and an excited delivery, but the art of persuasion, the art of putting things so as to appeal irresistibly to an audience.”
He described to her his joy in speaking “as an intellectual exercise. That is the secret,” he added, “undoubtedly of what little success I’ve had as a speaker. I enjoy it because it sets my mind — all my faculties aglow: and I suppose that this very excitement gives my manner an appearance of confidence and self-command which arrests the attention. However that may be I feel a sort of transformation — and it’s hard to go to sleep afterwards.”
Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Axson, as wellmatched a pair as ever said “I will,” were married in a Presbyterian manse in Savannah, Georgia, in June of 1885.
The following September Wilson settled down to academic life at Bryn Mawr as Associate Professor of History with a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year. The young couple’s board and lodging would cost them twenty dollars a week. It was slim pickings.
Particularly after the first baby appeared it was essential for him to find means of increasing his income. The great work he was planning on the philosophy of politics had to be put aside for a textbook on government. He was beginning to manage to get articles into The Atlantic Monthly. It seemed as if he would have indefinitely to postpone his political ambitions. In the fall of 1886 he wrote his friend Charlie Talcott, who had gone home to upstate New York to practice law and was already city counsel in Utica, explaining why he wasn’t getting ahead with their project to reform the government of the United States: “After my winter had been hurried away by the unaccustomed, therefore arduous duties of the classroom, my summer vacation was swallowed up by work on a textbook … But Mrs. Wilson could tell you how, meanwhile, my thoughts have constantly reverted to our old compact.
“I believe, Charlie,” he wrote, “that if a band of young fellows (say ten or twelve) could get together (and by getting together I mean getting their opinions together, whether by circular correspondence or other means) upon a common platform, and, having gotten together good solid planks upon the questions of the immediate future, should raise a united voice in such periodicals, great or small, as they could gain access to, gradually working their way out, by means of a real understanding of the questions they handled, to a position of prominence and real authority in the public prints and so in the public mind, a long step would have been taken towards the formation of such new political sentiment, and party, as the country stands in such pressing need of, — and I am ambitious that we should have a hand in forming such a group.”
The “arduous duties of the classroom” occupied Woodrow Wilson’s life for the next twenty years. His academic career was notably successful The years at Bryn Mawr were the dullest. No one could have been less enthusiastic over the education of earnest young women. It was lecturing rather than teaching that interested him. He complained that if he got off a joke in class his girls copied it solemnly down in their notes.