Reconstruction in Columbia, South Carolina

The Woodrow Wilson Family Home, Columbia, South Carolina

The Daily Phoenix, May 28, 1970, “Chronicling America,” Library of Congress

In 1870, the following notice appeared in the Augusta Constitutionalist in Georgia. Reverend Joseph R. Wilson was finally not just teaching and preaching, but teaching theology at the Columbia Theological Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, one of the preeminent Presbyterian schools in the country. The Wilsons moved into a house provided by the school, and he did continue to preach some, at a church in town named, like all his others, First Presbyterian Church. After two years, the family built their own home, which has now been restored as the Museum of Reconstruction at the Woodrow Wilson Family Home.

Tommy Woodrow Wilson spent his childhood in Augusta, but his teenage years before college in Columbia. At the time, the town had almost 9,500 residents, one-third of them African American. Columbia was the place where the first secession convention had been held in 1860, since it was the capital of South Carolina, where the move to leave the Union had been the fiercest. In 1870, the town still struggled to recover from the devastation of the Civil War. Downtown had been destroyed by fire during General Sherman’s March to the Sea in 1865.

A Young Woodrow Wilson, c. 1872, Historic Augusta

Scene of Ruins, Columbia, South Carolina, National Archives

We do not have a lot of records of Wilson’s time in Columbia. He seems to have had an active fantasy life, as indicated by the records he maintained an imaginary army for a time. However, he also seems to have had many friends, judging from the names recorded in his letter book.

[Jan. 5, 1873]

General Orders—No. 1,000. Sergeant Thomas T. Williams, Sergeant Major, Royal Lance Guards, having retired from the service on account of illhealth, resulting from old age, I hereby, by right of Parliament granted me on the 1st of January 1872, promote Alexander T. J. Evans to the rank of Sergeant-Major, Royal Lance Guards. January 5th 1873.

(Signed) Thomas W. Wilson, Lieutenant-General, Duke of Eagleton, Commander-in-chief Royal Lance Guards.

WW entry in notebook described at Jan. 5, 1873. Representative of the many “Orders” which WW drew up for his “Guards.”

Woodrow Wilson Papers, Vol. 1, p. 22

At the time, the South was still dealing with the wrenching effects of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. Not only had the enslaved been set free, but huge numbers of Southern soldiers had been killed, and the industrial capabilities of towns like Columbia had been destroyed. President Grant, the former Union general, seemed to have eased conflicts between the presidency and the Congress, as well as between North and South, but people still remained uncertain whether the military occupation would enforce further changes to their society. Over these years, planters worked out ways to keep African Americans bound to their work as agricultural laborers. The Democratic Party brought their interests in North and South back together, preparing a comeback for the elections of 1874 and 1876. And groups like the Ku Klux Klan began using violence and terror to prevent black men from voting. Over thirty years later, Woodrow Wilson would write in  A History of the American People:

Men whom experience had chastened saw that only the slow processes of opinion could mend the unutterable errors of a time like that. But there were men to whom counsels of prudence seemed as ineffectual as they were unpalatable, men who could not sit still and suffer what was now put upon them. It was folly for them to give rein to their impulses; it was impossible for them to do nothing.

Having witnessed what South Carolina had gone through, Wilson was willing to be very forgiving, more so than many other historians of the time.