A Childhood in the South
/
Thomas Woodrow Wilson: Family Ties and Southern Perspectives. Erick Montgomery. 2006
This February, I will be teaching a course for the Lifelong Learning Institute of James Madison University. The class will meet here in the Library & Research Center, so that will give us the chance to examine some of the historical sources from the archives in person. The topic is Woodrow Wilson’s early life during the years of Reconstruction.
Though the Wilson family moved away from Staunton while he was still a baby, Woodrow Wilson spent all of his young life in the Old South, up until he transferred to college at Princeton in 1875. In the earlier year that he first went away to study at Davidson College at sixteen, 1873, his family moved to Wilmington, so even when he left campus to visit them, Wilson remained in North Carolina.
Andrew Johnson, a senator from Tennessee born in North Carolina, who did not join in seceding, was appointed as military governor of that state by Abraham Lincoln. Johnson then became vice president and, quickly thereafter, president in 1865. After his impeachment in 1868, the Senate fell one vote short of removing him. So, really, Woodrow Wilson was the first Southerner to be elected president after the death of Zachary Taylor in 1850. America would not elect another man from the Old South until Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Though admittedly a young boy in 1861, Woodrow Wilson was also the only American elected president to have been living as a civilian in the South during the Civil War. He witnessed the devastation of his culture through fire and sword, as well as the occupation of his homeland by federal troops during Reconstruction. After returning to Virginia for law school and then a brief term as a lawyer, Wilson would go on to spend his entire academic and political career further north. In many ways, he saw himself not only as a defender of the South but also as an interpreter of southern attitudes for the rest of the nation. His views on war, race, history, and federal authority were all shaped by his experiences growing up.
