Woodrow Wilson
Also in this chapter …
Mrs. Woodrow Wilson
is descended from a Scotch-Irish
ancestry noted for its culture and its intensity
of religious conviction. Some of his Scot forbears
died for their faith. Immediately, he comes from
a line of ministers and editors. William Duane, democrat and friend of Jefferson, had a hand in the training of James Wilson, grandfather of Woodrow Wilson, who came from County Down, Ireland, lured as a youth of twenty-two to the land of opportunity in the New World. Landing at Philadelphia in the year 1808, he quickly found a congenial task in the work rooms of Duane's militant “Daily Aurora.” The joy of his new toil was enhanced by the fact that a fine Irish lass, who had sailed on the same ship with him, was watching him make his fortune; and within four years he was able to claim Ann Adams as his wife. The happy pair could not be disobedient to the enticing vision of the developing West, and in 1812 James Wilson founded the Western Herald at Steubenville, Ohio, and soon afterward the Pennsylvania Advocate at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and divided his time between the two newspapers.
As Providence would have it, Joseph Ruggles
Wilson, youngest of seven sons and three daughters, was marked to be the scholar of the family. Trained by his parents, and especially by his mother, who was a Presbyterian of the “straitest sect,” it was not surprising that he turned to the Gospel ministry as his calling. The stair steps in his education were the Steubenville Academy; Jefferson College, afterwards Washington and Jefferson College, where he took first honors; and a year each at Western Theological Seminary at Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and Princeton Seminary.
The Reverend Doctor Thomas Woodrow, English-descended but Scotch-born, some years before had left his church at Carlisle, England, to become a missionary in the New World, and had finally come to Chillicothe, Ohio. It came about that he sent his pretty and sprightly daughter, Janet, sometimes called Jessie, to the girls school at Steubenville at the same time that Joseph R. Wilson had returned to that place to teach for a couple of years in the male academy. Finding their tastes congenial and their ideals alike, these two were happily married on June 7, 1849, and after teaching rhetoric for a year at Jefferson College, and chemistry and the natural sciences for four years at Hampden Sidney College, Virginia, the young husband accepted a call to the pastorate of the Presbyterian church at Staunton, Virginia, in the
year 1855, and moved there with his wife and two
small daughters, Marian and Annie Josephine.
Staunton was the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson. As his father left there when he was two years old to accept a call to the important First Presbyterian church of Augusta, Georgia, he had no recollection of the home of his nativity in the beautiful valley of Virginia, but he will never for get the reception tendered him by citizens of that city upon the fifty-seventh anniversary of his birth, on December 28, 1912, when he was President-elect of the United States, and when he was quartered in the little room in the manse where he first saw the light.
Both at Augusta and at Columbia, South Carolina, where Doctor Wilson in 1870 accepted the chair of pastoral and evangelistic theology at the Southern Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Woodrow attended excellent private schools, but his real instructor was his father. Doctor Wilson was one of the brilliant leaders of the Presbyterian Church in the south. For forty years he was Stated Clerk of the Southern General Assembly. He was Moderator of the Assembly of 1879. Well-informed upon the news of the day and well-balanced and fair-minded, the father was keen to judge a new book, to analyze a political situation, to shatter a sham with irony, or to scorn a pretender. From him all the while the boy was unconsciously absorbing the ability to do the same things.