8/6/2023 0 Comments Cpusim instruction memoryA history major in college, he read extensively on his own in British history, wrote and debated frequently, and contributed essays to the Nassau Literary Magazine and the International Review. Wilson found his undergraduate courses undemanding and often spent more time on extracurricular activities than on his academic work. Greatly bored with life as an attorney, he abandoned the practice of law and enrolled in Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore as a graduate student in history and political science. Wilson practiced law for less than a year, however. In 1882, he moved to Atlanta, where he set up a legal practice with a friend from the University of Virginia and passed the Georgia bar examination. Returning home to Wilmington, North Carolina, Wilson continued to study law on his own. That same year, he entered the law school at the University of Virginia but dropped out in his second year after being spurned by his first cousin Hattie Woodrow, with whom he fancied himself in love. He graduated thirty-eighth out of 167 students in 1879. In 1875, Wilson enrolled at the College of New Jersey, which later changed its name to Princeton University. Unfortunately, his poor health-probably homesickness and concern about his father, who had resigned under pressure from the faculty of the Columbia seminary-forced him to drop out of school after one year. In 1873, although only sixteen and poorly prepared in most academic subjects, Wilson enrolled at Davidson College near Charlotte, North Carolina, where he excelled in logic, rhetoric, Latin, English, and composition while doing reasonably well in math and Greek. Public schools scarcely existed in the South of his youth, and while he received some tutoring from former Confederate soldiers who set up primitive schools after the war, most of his early education came from his father, who emphasized religion and British history and literature. Passion for Education and ScholarshipĪlthough troubled by weak eyesight and possible dyslexia that delayed his learning to read, Wilson was otherwise a normal boy, playing baseball and energetically exploring Augusta and Columbia with friends and cousins. Later in life, Wilson described himself as a “mama's boy” who had clung to his mother's apron strings. She was a warm and loving companion to Wilson's father and a devoted mother to her four children-Woodrow, his two older sisters, and a younger brother. Wilson's mother, Janet Woodrow Wilson, known as Jessie, was born in Carlisle, England, but raised in America. In this environment, Wilson’s father taught his son the justification of the South's secession from the Union, a belief in Providence (God as the caring guide of human destiny), predestination (that all events have been willed by God), and the importance of daily prayer. The church leased, rather than owned slaves, as was its custom, and Wilson grew up around a majority African American community in Columbia. He helped organize the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America, in which he became a leader. The Reverend Wilson served as pastor of several Southern Presbyterian congregations and taught theology at Columbia Theological Seminary and, much later in life, at Southwestern Presbyterian Theological University. As an adult, Wilson would later remark “the only place in the world where nothing has to be explained to me is the South.”Īlthough Wilson's father, the Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson, had been reared in Ohio before moving to Virginia in 1849, he became “unreconstructedly Southern” in values and politics after moving to the South. In 1870, his family moved to Columbia, South Carolina, and then to Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1874. He also saw the poverty and devastation of Augusta during the early years of Reconstruction. Young Wilson's earliest memories were of the Civil War, seeing Union soldiers march into town and watching his mother tend wounded Confederate soldiers in a local hospital. Less than a year later, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia. His father was a minister of the First Presbyterian Church, and Tommy was born at home. Thomas Woodrow Wilson-he would later drop his first name-was born on December 28, 1856, in the small Southern town of Staunton, Virginia.
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