Woodrow Wilson_ A Biography Part 1

Woodrow Wilson_ a biography.

by John Milton Cooper.

PROLOGUE.

"THIS MAN'S MIND AND SPIRIT"Each year, in the morning on December 28, a military honor guard carrying the American flag presents a wreath that bears the words "The President." Accompanying the honor guard are members of the clergy, who carry a cross and say a prayer. The clergy are present because the wreath-laying ceremony takes place in front of a tomb in the Washington National Cathedral. Since the day is only a week after the winter solstice, the low angle of the morning sun causes bright colors from the stained gla.s.s windows to play across the floor of the alcove where the tomb is located, over the stone sarcophagus, and on the words carved on the walls. The alcove contains two flags, the Stars and Stripes and the orange and blackshielded ensign of Princeton University. The wreath laying takes place on the birthday, and at the final resting place, of the thirteenth president of Princeton and twenty-eighth president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.The ceremony and the tomb capture much about this man. The military presence is fitting because Wilson led the nation through World War I. The religious setting is equally fitting because no president impressed people more strongly as a man of faith than Wilson did. His resting place makes him the only president buried inside a church and the only one buried in Washington. The university flag attests to his career in higher education before he entered public life. Wilson remains the only professional academic and the only holder of the Ph.D. degree to become president. The inscriptions on the alcove walls come from his speeches as president and afterward. Wilson made words central to all that he did as a scholar, teacher, educational administrator, and political leader; he was the next to last president to write his own speeches. No other president has combined such varied and divergent elements of learning, eloquence, religion, and war.In 1927, three years after Wilson's death, Winston Churchill declared, "Writing with every sense of respect, it seems no exaggeration to p.r.o.nounce that the action of the United States with its repercussions on the history of the world depended, during the awful period of Armageddon, on the workings of this man's mind and spirit to the exclusion of every other factor; and that he played a part in the fate of nations incomparably more direct and personal than any other man." Churchill was referring to the part that Wilson played in World War I and above all, his decision in 1917 to intervene on the side of the Allies. That was the biggest decision Wilson ever made, and much of what has happened in the world since then has flowed from that decision. Unlike the other American wars of the last century, this one came neither in response to a direct attack on the nation's soil, as with World War II and Pearl Harbor and the attacks of September 11, nor as a war of choice, as with the Gulf War and the Iraq War, nor as a smaller episode in a grand global struggle, as with the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Many have argued that the United States joined the Allies in 1917 because great underlying forces and interests involving money, ties of blood and culture, and threats to security and cherished values were "really" at work. Perhaps so, perhaps not, but one incontrovertible fact remains: the United States entered World War I because Woodrow Wilson decided to take the country in.1Despite his deep religious faith, he did not go to war in 1917 because he thought G.o.d was telling him to do it. When someone telegraphed him to demand, "In the name of G.o.d and humanity, declare war on Germany," Wilson's stenographer wrote in his diary that the president scoffed, "War isn't declared in the name of G.o.d; it is a human affair entirely." To Wilson, as an educated, orthodox Christian, the notion that any person could presume to know G.o.d's will was blasphemy. Likewise, as someone born and raised in the least evangelical and most G.o.d-centered of Protestant denominations, the Presbyterian, the notion of a personal relationship with the Almighty was foreign to him. Three months after the outbreak of World War I in Europe and at a time when he was enduring agonies of grief after the death of his first wife, he told a YMCA gathering, "For one, I am not fond of thinking about Christianity as a means of saving individual souls."2Wilson practiced a severe separation not only between church and state but also between religion and society. Unlike his greatest rival, Theodore Roosevelt, he never compared politics with preaching. Unlike the other great leader of his Democratic Party, William Jennings Bryan, he never supported the greatest moral reform crusade of their time-prohibition. Also unlike Bryan, he saw no conflict between modern science and the Bible, and he despised early manifestations of what came to be called Fundamentalism. By the same token, however, he had little truck with the major liberal religious reform movement, the Social Gospel. Wilson remained a strong Presbyterian, but his second wife was an Episcopalian who continued to worship in her own church. He was the first president to visit the pope in the Vatican. He counted Catholics and Jews among his closest political a.s.sociates, and he appointed and fought to confirm the first Jew to the Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis.A person with that kind of religious background and outlook could never be either of the two things that many people would charge him with being-a secular messiah or a naive, woolly-headed idealist. Wilson was bold, extremely sure of himself, and often stubborn, and he did think of himself as an instrument of G.o.d's will. But according to his beliefs, every person was an instrument of G.o.d's will, and even his own defeats and disappointments were manifestations of the purposes of the Almighty. Such an outlook left no room for messianic delusions. It did leave room for idealism, but that did not distinguish him from the other leading politicians of his time. Except for a few cra.s.s machine types and hard-bitten conservatives, all the major figures in public life during the first two decades of the twentieth century proclaimed themselves idealists. Roosevelt and Bryan did so proudly, and nothing infuriated Roosevelt more than to hear Wilson called an idealist. Moreover, this was, as Richard Hofstadter characterized it, "the age of reform." Prohibition, woman suffrage, anti-vice campaigns, social settlement houses, educational uplift, and an embracing set of political movements loosely gathered under the umbrella of "progressivism" were the order of the day. In that context, Wilson came off as one of the most careful, hardheaded, and sophisticated idealists of his time.His circ.u.mspection extended to foreign as well as domestic affairs. By his own admission, he did not enter the White House with much of what he called "preparation" in foreign affairs. As a scholar, he had studied and written almost exclusively about domestic politics, and the only office he had held before coming to Washington was a state governorship. Even before the outbreak of World War I, two years into his presidency, he began to deal with problems abroad, particularly fallout from the violent revolution next door in Mexico. Wilson had to learn diplomacy on the job, and he made mistakes, particularly in Mexico, where he originally did harbor some facile notions about promoting democracy. He learned hard lessons there, which he applied later in dealing with both the world war and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.Like others at the time, Wilson invested American intervention in the world war with larger ideological significance and purpose. But he had no illusions about leading a worldwide crusade to impose democracy. The most famous phrase from his speech to Congress in 1917 asking for war read, "The world must be made safe for democracy"-perhaps the most significant choice of the pa.s.sive voice by any president. A year later, speaking to foreign journalists, he declared, "There isn't any one kind of government which we have the right to impose upon any nation. So that I am not fighting for democracy except for those peoples that want democracy." Wilson did not coin the term self-determination self-determination-that came from the British prime minister David Lloyd George, who also coined the phrase "war to end all wars," words Wilson probably never uttered. Later, he did sparingly adopt "self-determination," but always as something to be applied carefully and contingently, never as a general principle for all times and places.3Wilson's most renowned policy statement, the Fourteen Points, addressed specific problems of the time as much as larger conditions. Half of the points addressed general matters-such as open covenants of peace, freedom of the seas, and an international organization to maintain peace, all carefully couched as aims to be pursued over time. The other half dealt with specific issues of the war-such as the restoration of Belgium, an independent Poland, the integrity of Russia, and the matter of autonomy-but not necessarily in specific terms-so, for example, there is no mention of independence for subject peoples of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Wilson's moral authority and America's lesser taint of imperialism made the soberly stated Fourteen Points a rallying ground for liberals and progressives throughout the world, but if he could have heard the ways later generations would use "Wilsonian" as an epithet to scorn naive efforts to spread democracy in the world, he might have echoed Marx's disclaimer that he was no Marxist, just Karl Marx: he was no Wilsonian, just Woodrow Wilson.In World War I, he fought a limited war, though not in the usual sense of a war fought with limited means and in a limited geographic area. He fought with all the means at his disposal for limited aims-something less than total, crushing victory. This was a delicate task, but he succeeded to a remarkable extent. In just over a year and a half, the United States raised an army of more than 4 million men and armed and sent 2 million of them to fight on the Western Front. This miracle of mobilization foiled the hopes of the Germans and allayed the fears of the Allies that the war would be over before the Yanks could arrive. Feats of industrial, agricultural, and logistic transportation organization speeded the arrival of those "doughboys." Those accomplishments dovetailed with the president's liberal program to persuade the Germans to sue for peace in November 1918 rather than fight on to the bitter end, as they would do a quarter century later. This was Wilson's greatest triumph. He shortened World War I, and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people owed their lives to him.Tragically, his greatest triumph sowed the seeds of his greatest defeat. For the men and women who wanted to build a new, just, peaceful world order, World War I ended in the worst possible way-neither as a compromise accepted by equals nor as an edict imposed upon the defeated foe. One of those alternatives might have offered Wilson a chance to make his ideas of peace work. Instead, he tried to thrash out the best settlement he could through arduous negotiations at the peace conference in Paris in 1919. Those negotiations wore him out physically and emotionally and produced the Treaty of Versailles, which left sore winners and unrepentant losers. This peace settlement might have had a chance to work if the victors had stuck by it in years to come, but they soon showed they would not. The first of the victors to renege was the United States, which never ratified the Treaty of Versailles and never joined the organization that Wilson helped establish to maintain the peace, the League of Nations.The decisions he made in waging war and making peace have stirred almost as much argument as his decision to enter the war. The Fourteen Points drew fire as obstacles to total victory, and such attacks would sp.a.w.n the next generation's misguided consensus that World War II must end only with "unconditional surrender." Wilson's part in the peace negotiations at Paris has drawn fire as a quixotic quest after the mirage of collective security through the League of Nations, an allegedly utopian, or "Wilsonian," endeavor that traded vague dreams for harsh realities and derailed a more realistic settlement, which might have lasted. Worst of all, arguments about the political fight at home over the treaty and membership in the League have cast him as a stubborn, self-righteous spoiler who blocked reasonable compromises. That view of him has often overlooked or minimized one glaring fact: in the middle of this fight, he suffered a stroke that left him an invalid for his last year and a half in office. Wilson's stroke caused the worst crisis of presidential disability in American history, and it had a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde effect on him. Out of a dynamic, resourceful leader emerged an emotionally unstable, delusional creature.At the time of his death, four years after suffering his stroke, many eulogies compared Wilson to the figure from cla.s.sical Greek mythology, Icarus, who perished because he flew too close to the sun. The comparison was apt up to a point. In 1914, he told his Princeton cla.s.smates at their thirty-fifth reunion, "There is nothing that succeeds in life like boldness, provided you believe you are on the right side." Boldness and thinking big marked Wilson all his life, and those qualities helped make him the only president who rose to the top in two professions entirely removed from public affairs. As a scholar, he became the leading American political scientist of his time and one of a tiny cohort of truly great students of politics of any era. As an academic administrator, he began to transform Princeton from a socially select but intellectually somnolent men's college into one of the world's leading universities. In later years, a joke would go around Princeton that the proverbial visitor from another planet might think that only two people had ever gone there-Woodrow Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The joke made an unintended point: those men were the two leading alumni whose fame and accomplishments were bound up with the college itself and who stood for opposite but persistent sides of its character and reputation-the place of serious intellectual endeavor and the sn.o.bbish, glamorous "country club."4In politics, Wilson became a dynamic reformer as governor of New Jersey and an instant front-runner for his party's presidential nomination. As a domestic president, he emerged as one of the greatest legislative leaders ever to occupy the White House. His legislative accomplishments included the Federal Reserve, the income tax, the Federal Trade Commission, the first child labor law, the first federal aid to farmers, and the first law mandating an eight-hour workday for industrial workers, as well as the appointment of Brandeis to the Supreme Court. As a foreign policy president, he intervened in the world war, led the country through the war, pushed his peace program, and wrote his plans for a new world order into the peace treaty. Yet Wilson never saw himself as someone who did what doomed Icarus-he never saw himself as overreaching. His greatest inspiration as a student of politics came from Edmund Burke, and he steeped himself in Burke's anti-theoretical, organic conception of politics. He could admire lonely crusaders and inspired visionaries, but only from afar. He was a man of this world, who practiced the art of the possible and went in for practical, down-to-earth ideas. When his big schemes failed, as with the League of Nations and earlier at Princeton, he came close to winning, and he lost more through bad luck than through attempting too much.No president ever made such a swift transition from private life to politics. Two years before he entered the White House, Wilson had never held or run for any public office, and he had rarely taken any active part in politics. Moreover, his background was one that many have found particularly unsuitable for partic.i.p.ation in public affairs or business-the "ivory tower" of academia. When Wilson first entered politics, reporters often asked him how his background had prepared him for politics and opponents sometimes sneered at him as a "professor" or "schoolmaster." He had ready responses to those questions and charges. After academic politics, he joked, the "real thing" was so much easier to deal with. As for being a teacher, he embraced the t.i.tle, and he made educating the public the central tenet in his concept of leadership.Wilson's academic background shaped his performance as president in major ways. Writing and lecturing were excellent preparation for public persuasion. Dealing with individuals and small groups as a college president readied him for wheeling and dealing with politicians and interest groups. In the White House, he practiced the "collegial" leadership that he brought from the university, a style that flew in the face of the twentieth century's later images of the strong president, derived mainly from Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, with a touch of Theodore Roosevelt thrown in-that is, a hyperactive, meddlesome, manipulative bully. Wilson treated his cabinet members and agency heads like responsible adults who knew their departments better than he did, and he gladly delegated authority to them. He set overall policy directions, but usually after freewheeling discussion in cabinet meetings, which he did not try to dominate. His practice of delegation proved its worth after his stroke, when the government functioned reasonably well with little or no guidance from the top. The practice also had bad effects, as when Wilson condoned ill-conceived initiatives by subordinates and allowed untoward actions without his knowledge.Most of his subordinates liked the lat.i.tude he gave them, but they and other politicians often found him a strange sort. Wilson enjoyed being with people and got along well with individuals and small groups. He was no "effete" intellectual. In 1914, he told an audience of journalists that he disliked notions "that I am a cold and removed person who has a thinking machine inside. ... You may not believe it, but I sometimes feel like a fire from a far from extinct volcano, and if the lava does not boil over it is because you are not high enough to see into the basin and see the cauldron boil."5 Wilson certainly pa.s.sed most of the tests expected of a "regular guy." In his youth, he played baseball, and he remained an avid fan throughout his life. As a professor, he helped coach football, and as a college president, he helped save the game from being banned. He never smoked, but he liked to take an occasional drink of Scotch whisky. He was a s.e.xually ardent lover to the two women whom he married and, possibly, to another during his first marriage. Yet Wilson was not naturally gregarious the way politicians usually are. He probably spent more time alone than any other president. When he made big decisions, he would listen to advice and discuss matters with the cabinet, but he would also seclude himself and think the matter through strictly on his own. Wilson certainly pa.s.sed most of the tests expected of a "regular guy." In his youth, he played baseball, and he remained an avid fan throughout his life. As a professor, he helped coach football, and as a college president, he helped save the game from being banned. He never smoked, but he liked to take an occasional drink of Scotch whisky. He was a s.e.xually ardent lover to the two women whom he married and, possibly, to another during his first marriage. Yet Wilson was not naturally gregarious the way politicians usually are. He probably spent more time alone than any other president. When he made big decisions, he would listen to advice and discuss matters with the cabinet, but he would also seclude himself and think the matter through strictly on his own.In the White House, Wilson retained the working habits of a professor. He liked to study questions, read memoranda and papers, and write notes to himself and drafts of ideas that might or might not find their way into his speeches. Some of the people close to him griped about Wilson's solitary habits and claimed that they weakened him politically. Plausible as such complaints might sound, they were nearly always wrong. With only a few exceptions, Wilson profited from his penchant for sequestering himself and thinking things through. The proof of this pudding was in his spectacular legislative accomplishments and his reelection despite the relative weakness of his party.Besides luck and a natural talent for leadership, Wilson owed much of his success as president to something else that he brought with him from academic life. His study of politics always revolved around a central question and its corollary: how does power really work, and how, in a democratic system, can power be made to work more efficiently, with more accountability to the people? He compared the American separation of powers with parliamentary governments, which he found more efficient and more accountable, and he advocated adopting parliamentary practices in the United States. As part of that advocacy, he became the champion of a normally unloved inst.i.tution-the political party-and he called for government through parties that acted "responsibly"-that is, efficiently and accountably-as the remedy for many of the nation's troubles. When he entered politics, he enjoyed the opportunity to put his ideas and approaches to work; in particular, he acted like a prime minister and functioned as a party leader. Other circ.u.mstances helped him rack up his legislative achievements and win reelection, but he owed much of his success to his practice of party government.Wilson was not a president for all seasons. Peculiar political circ.u.mstances-particularly divisions in both parties between progressives and conservatives-allowed this outsider to leap into the front ranks in a way that would not have happened in ordinary times. The superheated reform sentiment of the times aided him enormously in compiling his legislative record and winning a second term. The earth-shaking events of the world war and revolutionary upheavals opened incredible opportunities for international leadership. Nor was Wilson a perfect president. Two things will always mar his place in history: race and civil liberties. He turned a stone face and deaf ear to the struggles and tribulations of African Americans. Though a southerner by birth and upbringing, he was not an obsessed white supremacist like most whites from his native region in that era. Yet in keeping with his practice of delegating authority, he allowed some of his cabinet secretaries to try to introduce segregation into the federal workplace, and he permitted them to reduce the number of African Americans employed by the government. When vicious racial violence broke out during and after the war, he said nothing, except once, when he belatedly but eloquently denounced lynching. Wilson essentially resembled the great majority of white northerners of his time in ignoring racial problems and wishing they would go away.During the war, Wilson presided over an administration that committed egregious violations of civil liberties. He pushed for pa.s.sage of the Espionage Act, which punished dissident opinions, and he refused to rein in his postmaster general, who indiscriminately denied use of the mails to dissenting publications, particularly left-wing ones. He likewise acquiesced in his attorney general's crackdown on radical labor unions. Wilson did not order those actions himself, but he was aware of them. The worst violations of civil liberties came after the war, with the "Red scare." By then, Wilson had suffered his stroke, and he knew nothing about the central role that another of his attorneys general was playing in those events. Still, it remains a mystery why such a fa.r.s.eeing, thoughtful person as Wilson would let any of that occur. Likewise, it remains puzzling why someone so sensitive to economic, religious, and ethnic injustices could be so indifferent, often willfully so, to the toxic state of race relations in his country.In the end, much about Wilson remains troubling. He shared his shortcomings with Abraham Lincoln, who likewise approved ma.s.sive violations of freedom of speech and the press, and Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner who fathered children by a slave mistress, and Franklin Roosevelt, who approved an even worse violation of civil liberties, the internment of j.a.panese Americans during World War II. A consideration of Wilson poses the same ultimate question as does that of those other towering figures in the presidential pantheon: do his sins of omission and commission outweigh the good he did, or do his great words and deeds overshadow his transgressions? Likewise, as with Jefferson, who similarly left office under the cloud of a foreign policy failure, the fiasco of the embargo, does a final failure offset earlier eloquence and accomplishment? Behind Woodrow Wilson's distinctive and often caricatured features-his long nose, big jaw, and pince-nez eyegla.s.ses-lay one of the deepest and most daring souls ever to inhabit the White House. His was also a flawed soul rendered worse by the failing of his body, which consigned his presidency to an inglorious ending. His tomb in the National Cathedral speaks to the Christian faith that helped to form this man's mind and spirit and would forgive him his trespa.s.ses.

1.

TOMMY.

In December 1912, Woodrow Wilson's name, picture, and story were all over the newspapers and magazines. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to meet the man who had been elected president of the United States the month before. Office seekers and advice givers figuratively, sometimes literally, banged on his door. Each mail delivery brought invitations to attend ceremonies in his honor around the country. The president-elect evaded the callers for a while by sailing away with his family for an island vacation. He declined invitations to events-except one. He could not resist making a sentimental journey to Staunton, Virginia, the town of his birth, for a celebration of his fifty-sixth birthday.

The trip lived up to all expectations for warmth and festivity. The whole town turned out for a parade, and the guest of honor spoke at two events. For him, the highlight of the occasion came when he spent the night of his birthday sleeping in the same bed, in the same room, in the same house where he had been born. Also during the visit, he went to see the only member of his family who still lived in the town, an elderly aunt on his mother's side of the family who was slightly deaf. She remembered him from his childhood, but she had not followed his life and career since then, and she did not even call him by the name he had been using since his early twenties. "Well, Tommy, what are you doing now?" she asked. "I've been elected President, Aunt Janie," he shouted into her ear trumpet. "Well, well," she answered. "President of what?"1 When Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born, on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, his birth was big news in this town of just under 4,000 people.2 He was the third child and first son of the Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson, minister of Staunton's leading church, the First Presbyterian Church. He was born in the house that the church provided for the minister, which Presbyterians call a manse, and this manse stood among the newest and finest houses in the town. Staunton is in the Shenandoah Valley, then a diversified agricultural area with a focus on wheat growing and comparatively few plantations and slaves. It drew its population largely from the Scotch-Irish who had migrated southward from Pennsylvania and Maryland. They had made the valley strongly Presbyterian. He was the third child and first son of the Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson, minister of Staunton's leading church, the First Presbyterian Church. He was born in the house that the church provided for the minister, which Presbyterians call a manse, and this manse stood among the newest and finest houses in the town. Staunton is in the Shenandoah Valley, then a diversified agricultural area with a focus on wheat growing and comparatively few plantations and slaves. It drew its population largely from the Scotch-Irish who had migrated southward from Pennsylvania and Maryland. They had made the valley strongly Presbyterian.

The boy's father, thirty-four-year-old Joseph Wilson, was himself the son of Scotch-Irish immigrants, and he had been born and raised in Ohio. In his youth, he had worked as a printer on the newspaper edited by his father, who had also served as a representative in the Ohio legislature and as a state judge. He had sent Joseph, his youngest son, to Jefferson (now Washington and Jefferson) College in Pennsylvania, where he graduated as valedictorian of his cla.s.s in 1844. Joseph Wilson had taught school for a year before going to seminary, first in Ohio and then in New Jersey, at Princeton. He had taken his first pulpit in Pennsylvania while teaching rhetoric part-time at Jefferson College. Teaching had drawn him to Virginia in 1851, when he became professor of chemistry and natural sciences at Hampden-Sydney College. Preaching, however, was his heart's desire, and he served as a temporary, or supply, minister while at Hampden-Sydney. In December 1854, two years before his son's birth, Joseph Wilson had received the call to Staunton, and the following June he had moved there with his family to fill the pulpit of its large, prosperous Presbyterian church.3 The new minister did not fit the prevalent stereotype of the stern pastor. He was outgoing and witty, much given to puns. He smoked cigars and a pipe heavily, played billiards incessantly, dressed well, and took an occasional drink of Scotch whisky. He was tall and handsome, with warm brown eyes, and he endeared himself particularly to his female parishioners. According to one relative, Joseph Wilson's first son believed "that if he just had his father's face and figure, it wouldn't make any difference what he said said." Yet Joseph Wilson did care about what he said and how he said it. Having taught rhetoric, he was well versed in secular as well as religious speaking, and he followed the contemporary oratorical stars of American politics, especially Daniel Webster. Perhaps not surprisingly, Joseph Wilson remained fascinated with worldly success and would try to push his first son toward that goal.4 In those days, a truly successful Presbyterian minister needed intellect and an intellectual pedigree. With their intricate Calvinist theology, the Presbyterians laid great stress on learning and a.n.a.lysis, but Joseph Wilson had little taste or patience for the intricacies of that theology. Likewise, as the son of a self-made man and Scotch-Irish immigrant, he enjoyed no particular standing in Presbyterian circles. But he did have one advantage: he had married well.

Joseph Wilson's wife was Janet Woodrow, the English-born daughter of a Scottish-born and -educated Presbyterian minister. Janet, or Jessie, as her family called her, was eight years younger than her husband, whom she had married in 1849 at the age of nineteen. Her father, Thomas Woodrow, had graduated from the University of Glasgow and its seminary and counted among his ancestors eminent seventeenth-century Scottish divines. When Jessie was five, her family immigrated to the United States from England, enduring a rough ocean crossing, which her mother did not long survive. They eventually settled in Ohio as well, where Jessie and her four older siblings were raised by their mother's sister; their father had remarried when Jessie was thirteen and had gradually distanced himself from his first family. Those experiences had left Jessie Woodrow a shy, timid, sometimes self-pitying young woman. She also lacked her future husband's good looks. The few surviving photographs of her suggest that it was from her that her son got his long jaw and angular features. He also inherited her blue-gray eyes, which reportedly changed color according to his mood, as had hers.5 In Presbyterian circles, everyone regarded the Woodrows as enjoying a higher status than the Wilsons. This sense of superiority was not just a matter of background. Jessie's older brother, James, or Jimmy, Woodrow was a rising star in their little Presbyterian firmament. A friend of Joseph Wilson's at Jefferson College, Jimmy Woodrow had studied first at Harvard, with the leading American scientist Louis Aga.s.siz, and then in Germany, at Heidelberg. In 1861, at the age of thirty-three, he would become a professor at the South's leading Presbyterian seminary, the Columbia Theological Seminary, then located in South Carolina. The Woodrow connection was something that Joseph Wilson cherished.

The young couple had two daughters before their son was born: Marion Williamson Wilson, born in Pennsylvania in 1851, and Anne, or Annie, Josephine Wilson, born at Hampden-Sydney in 1853. As happy as the Wilsons were with the births of their daughters, they made a great deal more of the birth of their first son. In the first surviving description of him, when he was four months old, Jessie Wilson told her father that he was "a fine healthy fellow ... and just as fat as he can be. Every one tells us, he is a beautiful beautiful boy. What is best of all, he is just as boy. What is best of all, he is just as good good as he can be-as little trouble as it is possible for a baby to be. You may be sure Joseph is very proud of his fine little son. ... Our boy is named 'Thomas Woodrow.' " as he can be-as little trouble as it is possible for a baby to be. You may be sure Joseph is very proud of his fine little son. ... Our boy is named 'Thomas Woodrow.' "6

The Woodrow connection played an indispensable part in Joseph Wilson's rise in his denominational world. In August 1857, he preached at James Woodrow's wedding, at the First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia. His sermon evidently went over well, because the church issued a call to him the following December. Joseph Wilson was moving up in his world. With more than 12,000 residents, Augusta counted for much in its region's economy, particularly the lucrative cotton trade. The church there had more members and bigger buildings than Staunton's First Presbyterian, and its manse was larger and grander and provided more slaves to serve the minister and his wife and children.7 Joseph Wilson also parlayed his professional advancement still further with a shrewd political move. In May 1858, he invited the president of Oglethorpe University, where James Woodrow was then teaching, to take part in his installation service. A few months later, possibly with some prompting from James Woodrow, the president repaid the compliment by conferring an honorary doctorate of divinity on Joseph Wilson. No t.i.tle sounded sweeter or more august to Presbyterian ears than Reverend Doctor, and for the rest of his life he would go by the t.i.tle Dr. Wilson. Joseph Wilson also parlayed his professional advancement still further with a shrewd political move. In May 1858, he invited the president of Oglethorpe University, where James Woodrow was then teaching, to take part in his installation service. A few months later, possibly with some prompting from James Woodrow, the president repaid the compliment by conferring an honorary doctorate of divinity on Joseph Wilson. No t.i.tle sounded sweeter or more august to Presbyterian ears than Reverend Doctor, and for the rest of his life he would go by the t.i.tle Dr. Wilson.

The family's move to Georgia made their son truly a child of the South. Located across the Savannah River from South Carolina, Augusta was the unofficial capital of the region known as the black belt, at first because of the color of its soil. The richness of the soil had made this part of South Carolina and Georgia, together with the lands stretching westward to the Mississippi River, a singularly attractive place for producing the most profitable commodity in the world at that time, cotton, which had fueled a half-century-long economic boom. But this form of economic development exacted a high price from the labor force, which planters paid by using large numbers of slaves to work the plantations, thereby giving an ironic racial twist to the name of the region. At the time of the Wilson family's move to Augusta, slaves made up just under a third of the city's residents, but in the surrounding county they const.i.tuted half the population.8 The Wilson family soon felt a huge consequence of their move to Augusta. According to his own account, their son's first lasting memory from childhood went back to November 1860, just before his fourth birthday, "hearing some one pa.s.s and say that Mr. Lincoln was elected and there was to be war. Catching the intense tones of his excited voice, I remember running in to ask my father what it meant." Lincoln's victory at the polls set off a chain of cataclysmic events. Six weeks later, South Carolina moved to secede from the Union, and the rest of the black belt, or Deep South, states quickly followed suit, including Georgia, on January 19, 1861. Though not a politician, Joseph Wilson was in the thick of the events that led to secession and the ensuing four years of civil war.9 The southern wings of all the major Protestant denominations except the Episcopalians likewise seceded from their national organizations. Despite his Ohio birth and upbringing, Joseph Wilson fervently embraced the cause of the South. When the southern presbyteries withdrew from the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America during the summer of 1861, he offered his church as the meeting place for the newly formed General a.s.sembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, which convened there the following December. That body elected him to its third-ranking office, permanent clerk, and in 1865 he moved up to the second-ranking spot, stated clerk, managing the organization's finances and serving as its parliamentarian and record keeper. At the war's end, the southern Presbyterians dropped the reference to the Confederacy from their denominational name but did not rejoin their northern brethren. Joseph Wilson would remain stated clerk of this denomination for thirty-three years. He also saw active service in the Confederate cause. He joined a group of influential citizens of Augusta in a home defense unit and made at least one trip to the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia, to inspect hospitals and confer with high-ranking officials, and he also served briefly as an army chaplain.10 The war and the denominational split caused a family rift as well. The break was worse with the Wilsons than with the Woodrows. Joseph Wilson's father had earlier taken anti-slavery stands, and two of his brothers became Union generals. Joseph Wilson did not resume relations with his extended family after the war, and his son would not get to know his Wilson relatives until he was a grown man. On the Woodrow side, things were different. James Woodrow's move to the Columbia Seminary in 1861 had placed him in the citadel of secession. During the war he put his scientific training to use as chief chemist of the Confederacy, which meant that he oversaw munitions manufacturing for the Confederate armies. His and Jessie's father, Thomas Woodrow, remained in Ohio and sided with the northern Presbyterians, but after the war Joseph Wilson invited his father-in-law to preach in Augusta, and his son grew up knowing his Woodrow relatives from the North.11 The war came home to the Wilson family in Augusta when wounded Confederate soldiers began to arrive. In 1863, the government took over the church to use as a military hospital and its grounds to use as a temporary detention camp for captured Union soldiers on their way to the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville. Fortunately for Augusta, the enemy bypa.s.sed the city the next year when William Tec.u.mseh Sherman's army made its March to the Sea, but Union forces did occupy Augusta at the end of the war.

The early 1860s were an often exciting, sometimes frightening, time to be a young boy there, but what effect this Civil War childhood had on the Wilsons' son is hard to judge. He almost certainly saw and heard wounded and dying soldiers in the town and in his father's church and prisoners of war in the churchyard. At the end of the war, he watched a conquering army occupy his hometown, and he saw the captured former Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, being transported to prison. Yet those sights and sounds do not seem to have affected him deeply. "To me me the Civil War and its terrible scenes are but a memory of a short day," he wrote in a note to himself when he was in his early twenties. Nor did his boyhood experiences fill him with repugnance toward fighting or war. He may or may not have gotten into fights as a boy, but he certainly liked the idea of fighting, and like many other boys he would dream about adventure in arms. Later, when he was about to become president, he remarked that he "thought there was no more glorious way to die than in battle." If the Civil War left a psychological imprint on the boy or the man, it was buried so deep as to be imponderable. the Civil War and its terrible scenes are but a memory of a short day," he wrote in a note to himself when he was in his early twenties. Nor did his boyhood experiences fill him with repugnance toward fighting or war. He may or may not have gotten into fights as a boy, but he certainly liked the idea of fighting, and like many other boys he would dream about adventure in arms. Later, when he was about to become president, he remarked that he "thought there was no more glorious way to die than in battle." If the Civil War left a psychological imprint on the boy or the man, it was buried so deep as to be imponderable.12 Except for the war, he seems to have had a happy, healthy childhood. His mother later confessed to him, "I always wanted to call you Woodrow from the first." But they called him Tommy, and that was the name he would use until his early twenties. His older sisters reportedly adored their little brother, and his mother unquestionably played the biggest role in his early life, while his father was often away. Her son wrote to his wife, "I remember how I clung to her (a laughed-at 'mamma's boy') till I was a great big fellow; but love of the best womanhood came to me and entered my heart through those ap.r.o.n-strings." As an urban minister's son, he had a more sheltered upbringing than did the mischief-filled, rough-and-tumble southern white boys depicted in Mark Twain's stories. One of his friends in Augusta later recalled him as "a dignified boy" who on horseback was "a conservative rider ... very careful and very orderly." He and his friends organized a baseball club after the war, and the same friend remembered him as "not active or especially strong, although his figure was well knit and he was what you would call a 'stocky' boy." Yet like Tom Sawyer, Tommy Wilson had a rich, elaborate fantasy life and enjoyed a certain amount of mischief; he once recalled that he had liked c.o.c.kfighting, evidently using the family rooster.13 Tommy's closeness to his mother did not spring from any need for shelter from boyhood's knocks and sc.r.a.pes. Rather, what was most important was that his "love of the best womanhood" had come from her. The next sentence in his letter to his wife read: "If I had not lived with such a mother I could not have won and seemed to deserve-in part, perhaps, deserved, through transmitted virtues-such a wife-the strength, the support, the human source of my life." Throughout his life, Wilson would spend more time with women and enjoy female companionship more than most men of his era. He would value women not only as wives and lovers but also as friends and confidants with whom he could share his deepest thoughts and emotions.14 In those early years, his mother did help to shelter him from one significant childhood travail. Tommy Wilson did not appear at first to be very bright. He was slow in learning to read. His presidential physician, Cary T. Grayson, later claimed that Wilson told him that he had not learned his letters until he was nine, and one of his daughters said that he did not read comfortably until he was twelve. It is not clear just what Tommy's problem was. He told Dr. Grayson that his mother and his sisters would read to him by the hour, "and he would listen as long as anyone chose to read." The story smacks of rationalization, although it hints at how protective Jessie Wilson was of Tommy. He was her favorite of all her children, and he enjoyed his primacy even after the birth of a second son, in 1867. Born when Tommy was ten, Joseph (Josie) Ruggles Wilson, Jr., was the last of the family's children. People later described Josie Wilson as a smaller, brown-eyed, less sparkling version of his older brother. Josie would never enjoy the attention and solicitude that Tommy received from both his parents.15 Tommy's difficulty with reading most likely stemmed from some physical cause. His vision may have contributed to the problem. As an adult, Wilson would wear gla.s.ses to correct astigmatism and farsightedness, but he did not begin to wear them until after college. A better explanation may be that he suffered from some kind of developmental disorder. At the age of thirty-nine, when he suffered from semiparalysis in his right hand, Wilson easily shifted to writing with his left hand, producing the same neat script with almost no practice. Such ambidexterity, which can manifest itself in childhood as a lack of preference for either hand, often accompanies slowness in speaking and reading.16 Young Tommy Wilson may also have suffered from a form of dyslexia, a condition that would not begin to be identified for another thirty years. Several known facts support this explanation. He never became a rapid or voracious reader, and he developed ways to compensate for that shortcoming. As a freshman in college, he wrote in his diary, "I sometimes wish that I could read a little faster but I do not know that it would be an advantage." His brother-in-law Stockton Axson later remembered Wilson saying in his thirties, "I wonder if I am the slowest reader in the world." As an adolescent, Tommy eased the burden of writing by teaching himself shorthand. When he was sixteen, he began a two-year correspondence course in the Graham method. As a writer, Wilson would later confess that he composed entire paragraphs and even longer pa.s.sages in his mind before putting them down on paper. As a speaker, he would deliver long, well-organized addresses from the sketchiest of notes-usually just a few shorthand jottings-or no notes at all. Other known facts, however, work against the notion that he suffered from dyslexia. He soon did learn to read, and he never made the grammar and spelling mistakes that often plague dyslexics. Foreign languages also pose problems for dyslexics, but in college he earned good grades in Latin and Greek and French, and he used German in his scholarly work, although he never became fluent in any foreign language.17 In any case, this experience left the boy with no discernible psychological scars, much of the credit for which belonged to his parents. His mother took the lead at first, giving her son more than comfort and protection. The letters she wrote to him after he went away to college show how fervently she believed in his gifts. In one, she told him, "I hope you will lay aside all timidity timidity-and make the most of all your powers, my darling." One of the few people who appreciated the deep imprint Jessie Wilson left on her son was David Bryant, one of the family's African American servants in Wilmington, North Carolina, who would tell one of Wilson's biographers, "Outside Mr. Tommy was his father's boy. But inside he was his mother all over."18 Almost everyone recognized his father's influence. After the Civil War ended, Joseph Wilson began to play a bigger role in his son's life. From the time Tommy was eight or nine until he went off to college, he spent a lot of time in his father's company. "He was good fun," Wilson recalled in his fifties; "he was a good comrade; ... and by constant a.s.sociation with him, I saw the world and the tasks of the world through his eyes." Even after Tommy started school, he spent Mondays, which was a minister's day off, with his father, who took him to see sights he thought "might interest or educate a boy." Afterward, his father would have Tommy write an essay about what he had seen. After his son had read the essay aloud, Dr. Wilson would say, "Now put down your paper and tell me in your own words what you saw." Tommy would then give a shorter, more direct account, and his father would respond, "Now write it down that way."19 After he mastered his letters, Tommy helped Dr. Wilson with his duties as stated clerk of the southern Presbyterians. He would attend the meetings and help keep the minutes and review parliamentary procedure. Those experiences may have given Tommy a taste for debate and organization, but the type of politics that he witnessed in those denominational gatherings was more like what he would later find in college faculties-usually self-righteous and self-important, frequently petty, often grudge-ridden. As for his interest in "real-world" politics, it seems to have grown out of his father's having him study speeches by celebrated orators with an eye to improving them and out of the surrounding environment. Later, Tommy remarked to a college friend, "As usual politics is the all-engrossing topic of conversation. Southerners seem born with an interest in public affairs though it is too often of late a very ignorant interest."20 As those Monday jaunts and the essay writing suggest, Joseph Wilson gave Tommy more than companionship. His son later called him the "best teacher I ever had," and his father did spend much of their time together teaching the boy, particularly about the use of words. The core of his teaching consisted, in his son's recollection, of an a.n.a.logy to firearms: "When you frame a sentence don't do it as if you were loading a shotgun, but as if you were loading a rifle. ... [S]hoot with a single bullet and hit that one thing alone." The son remembered his parental instruction as nothing but joyful and loving. The elder Wilson began his letters with "My darling son" or "My darling boy" when Tommy was in college and even afterward, the letters themselves reading like elaborations of Polonius's advice to Laertes in Hamlet Hamlet. In one, he admonished, "Let the esteem you have won be only as a stimulant to fresh exertion." In other letters, he exhorted, "Study manner manner, dearest Tommy, as much as matter. Both Both are essential." His father also bucked Tommy up when he encountered setbacks. "You are manly. You are true. You are most lovable in every way and deserving of confidence." Plainly, Joseph and Tommy Wilson regarded each other with warmth and happiness and love. One of his nieces supposedly declared, "Uncle Joseph never loved anyone except Cousin Woodrow." are essential." His father also bucked Tommy up when he encountered setbacks. "You are manly. You are true. You are most lovable in every way and deserving of confidence." Plainly, Joseph and Tommy Wilson regarded each other with warmth and happiness and love. One of his nieces supposedly declared, "Uncle Joseph never loved anyone except Cousin Woodrow."21 From Tommy's late teens on, Joseph Wilson's circ.u.mstances conspired to make his older son the main object of his hopes and dreams. In 1870, the ambitious clergyman took another step upward in his southern Presbyterian world. The family left Augusta for Columbia, South Carolina, where Dr. Wilson became a professor at the Columbia Theological Seminary. With just over 9,000 residents, Columbia was smaller than Augusta, but it was the capital of the state and the home of the state university, as well as the seat of the Presbyterians' most prestigious seminary in the South, where James Woodrow was on the faculty. This was a plum a.s.signment for Joseph Wilson. The idyll lasted less than four years. Joseph Wilson was a popular teacher, but he entangled himself in the kind of political snare that often afflicts churches and faculties. Students balked when he tried to require them to attend his chapel services rather than the services at other churches in town.22 Wilson consequently resigned from the seminary faculty and moved to a well-paid pulpit in Wilmington, North Carolina. He would spend the rest of his working life on a gradual downhill slide in professional esteem. Wilson consequently resigned from the seminary faculty and moved to a well-paid pulpit in Wilmington, North Carolina. He would spend the rest of his working life on a gradual downhill slide in professional esteem.

Not surprisingly, Joseph Wilson would yearn for Tommy to redeem his own thwarted ambitions. Indeed, the boy was beginning to show promise as a vehicle for his father's hopes. Columbia had broadened Tommy's horizons. From the time he was thirteen until he first left for college three years later, Tommy lived in an environment that was as much academic as it was clerical. Moreover, thanks mainly to having on its faculty James Woodrow and George Howe, a New Englandborn andeducated theologian whose son married Tommy's sister Annie, this environment was sophisticated in intellectual matters and liberal in religious thinking.

The schools Tommy attended did not challenge his mind, but his imaginative life continued to flourish, with his fantasies now turning to armed exploits at sea. He fantasized about organizing his friends into such units as the "Royal Lance Guards," a.s.signing them ranks, and giving them knighthoods, and he fancied himself "Lord Thomas W. Wilson, duke of Eagleton, Admiral of the blue."23 He continued to play baseball, and music offered another diversion. He also became an accomplished singer, a tenor, and music, both sacred and secular, would remain his main artistic interest outside literature for the rest of his life. He continued to play baseball, and music offered another diversion. He also became an accomplished singer, a tenor, and music, both sacred and secular, would remain his main artistic interest outside literature for the rest of his life.

Tommy Wilson also grew fascinated with the subject that would become his life's work. A cousin recounted that he showed her a picture in his room of the British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone and "remarked that when he was a man he intended to be a statesman such as this hero of his." A friend in Columbia chided him, "Never mind Tom you just wait till you and me get to be members of the US Senate." It might seem surprising that as the son, grandson, and nephew of Presbyterian ministers, he did not want to become one too. Some evidence suggests that his father wanted him to follow in his footsteps, perhaps to a.s.suage his own disappointments over his career setbacks. But it is more likely that Joseph Wilson never pushed Tommy toward the ministry and viewed his son's nascent interest in politics with relish, not regret.24 Not choosing the ministry as his vocation implied no want of religious commitment on Tommy's part. He took the serious step of joining the church when he was fifteen, which evidently required a personal decision to accept Christ as his savior, as young Presbyterians were expected to do. Tommy resembled his father more than he did James Woodrow and others on the seminary faculty in having little taste for Calvinist theology or metaphysical speculation. Religious books would rarely figure in his reading. When he was twenty-four, he confessed to a friend that his reading had been "very unusual in kind. I've been looking into some Biblical discussion, thus coming at least to the outskirts of theology." He added, "As an antidote to Biblical criticism I've been reading aloud to my sister and cousin a novel by Thomas Hardy." Eight years later, on his thirty-third birthday, he would record in a private journal, "I used to wonder vaguely that I did not have the same deep-reaching spiritual difficulties that I read of other young men having. I saw saw the intellectual difficulties, but I was not the intellectual difficulties, but I was not troubled troubled by them: they seemed to have no connection with my faith in the essentials of the religion I had been taught." by them: they seemed to have no connection with my faith in the essentials of the religion I had been taught."25 Still, Tommy Wilson's upbringing in one of the most liberal and sophisticated religious and intellectual environments in America at that time gave him familiarity with the basic concepts of Protestant thought, Lutheran as well as Calvinist. He believed that Christians were instruments of G.o.d's will and must fulfill their predestined part, but his upbringing among learned Presbyterians stood in stark opposition to evangelicals who stressed emotional commitment and personal salvation. Att.i.tudes and approaches borrowed from evangelical Protestantism had sp.a.w.ned the preCivil War moral reform movements, such as the temperance and anti-slavery crusades. Those att.i.tudes would flourish again in such varied incarnations as the Protestant Social Gospel, anti-liquor and anti-vice crusades, and an overall evangelical style of political reform. Yet despite a deep religious faith and a look and manner that would later strike some observers as preacherish, the man Tommy Wilson grew up to be would not adopt those approaches. It was not this preacher's-son-turned-president but rather his greatest rival, himself a religious skeptic, who would call their office a "bully pulpit." Wilson did not call the presidency by that name, nor did he think about it and politics that way, largely because his religious upbringing had inoculated him against such notions.

Tommy Wilson's upbringing also inoculated him to a degree against the influence of the larger environment around him-the South. With an Ohio-born father, an English-born mother, and foreign-born grandparents, he did not have deep roots in the South or any place in the United States, and he raised the question of his southern ident.i.ty whenever he opened his mouth. By the time he went north to college, at the age of eighteen, he lacked the distinguishing characteristic of his native region-a southern accent. The close-knit nature of the Wilson family may have insulated him somewhat from his surroundings, but Tommy had plenty of exposure to southern-accented playmates and schoolmates, together with the family's African American servants and the general populace of Augusta and Columbia. In adolescence, he seems to have consciously rid himself of a southern accent, training himself to speak with a broad a a, which he considered more pleasing and more refined. He would also try, without success, to get his Georgia-born and -raised fiancee, Ellen Axson, to rid herself of her southern accent.26 Yet Tommy Wilson was still a southerner. A friend during his freshman year in college remembered him as "very full of the South and quite secessionist. One night we sat up until dawn talking about [the Civil War], he taking the southern side and getting quite bitter about it." As an adult, he would avow that "a boy never gets over his boyhood, and never can change those subtle influences which have become a part of him, ... [so] that the only place in the country, the only place in the world, where nothing has to be explained to me is the South."27 Being a southerner made him identify with a defeated, impoverished, disadvantaged region. As the son of a well-regarded and well-paid minister, he never knew poverty or social inferiority firsthand, but his local advantages paled in comparison with the wealth and status that he encountered when he went north to college. His southern allegiance also fixed his choice of party identification. Wilson would remain a Democrat throughout many years of residence in the North, but unlike many northern Democrats, he would never carry disaffection with the party's later turn toward agrarian reform and evangelical-style politics to the point of switching parties or turning into a disgruntled conservative. Identification with his underdog native region would help to keep him on the side of reform. Being a southerner made him identify with a defeated, impoverished, disadvantaged region. As the son of a well-regarded and well-paid minister, he never knew poverty or social inferiority firsthand, but his local advantages paled in comparison with the wealth and status that he encountered when he went north to college. His southern allegiance also fixed his choice of party identification. Wilson would remain a Democrat throughout many years of residence in the North, but unlike many northern Democrats, he would never carry disaffection with the party's later turn toward agrarian reform and evangelical-style politics to the point of switching parties or turning into a disgruntled conservative. Identification with his underdog native region would help to keep him on the side of reform.

Tommy Wilson could not have been a young white southerner without encountering race. He grew up surrounded by African Americans. His family had not owned slaves because the common practice was for Presbyterian churches to lease slaves, usually from parishioners, for their ministers' use. Tommy and those slaves and, later, servants had known each other well. In moving to Columbia, the Wilson family moved to a city and a state where a majority of the population was African American, and while they lived there, African Americans served in Congress, held statewide offices, and made up a majority in the state legislature, as they would for nearly all the years of Reconstruction. Yet African Americans remained invisible to Wilson. References to people of color almost never appear in any of the doc.u.ments or recollections of Tommy's early years. Later, he told a friend of how some blacks had seemed awestruck when he practiced oratory in the pulpit of his father's church in Wilmington. "I'm Southern," he commented, "but I have very little ease with coloured people or they with me. Why is it? For I care enormously about them." Wilson's later dealings with matters of race suggest otherwise.28 Tommy Wilson's youth in the South ended after his first foray into college education. In the fall of 1873, at the age of sixteen, he entered Davidson College in North Carolina. Small and struggling, like other southern colleges, Davidson was a spartan place, with each student having to draw his own water, cut his own wood, and light the fire in his room. The student body numbered only between 100 and 150. Tommy got good grades, except in mathematics, and did a lot of reading on his own. He made friends, took a leading part in the literary and debating society, and played on the baseball team. He spent just one year at Davidson. Why he left is not clear, but contrary to some later reports, ill health does not seem to have been the reason for his withdrawal. He spent the next year at his family's new home in Wilmington, where he read, helped around the house, practiced oratory, and improved his shorthand skills. He wrote to his shorthand school, "I am studying for entering Princeton College, where I expect to be next session." The "diffident youth" evidently planned to expand his horizons beyond the bounds of his native South.29 The official name of the inst.i.tution that eighteen-year-old Tommy Wilson wanted to enter was the College of New Jersey, but from early on it had gone by the name of the town in west-central New Jersey where it was located, Princeton, which by the 1870s boasted a population of about 3,500 people. It was one of nine American colleges founded before the American Revolution, and its main building, Na.s.sau Hall, dating from 1756, was the second-oldest college building in the United States. During the Revolution, Na.s.sau Hall came under fire before and after the battle of Princeton, and it later served briefly as the meeting place of the Continental Congress.30 Princeton's history was as ill.u.s.trious as it was long. The college's early presidents included the theologian Jonathan Edwards and the Scottish-born and -educated divine John Witherspoon, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Its early alumni included three other signers of the Declaration; nine delegates to the Const.i.tutional Convention; the nation's notorious third vice president, Aaron Burr; and most notable of all, the co-author of The Federalist Papers The Federalist Papers, co-framer of the Bill of Rights, and fourth president, James Madison. Equally important to the members of a Presbyterian minister's family, Princeton wa