Wilson session biography

Thomas Woodrow Wilson—he would later drop his first name—was born on December 28, 1856, in the small Southern town of Staunton, Virginia.

His father was a minister of the First Presbyterian Church, and Tommy was born at home. Less than a year later, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia.

Wilson session biography pdf

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. He also saw the poverty and devastation of Augusta during the early years of Reconstruction.

In 1870, his family moved to Columbia, South Carolina, and then to Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1874. As an adult, Wilson would later remark “the only place in the world where nothing has to be explained to me is the South.”

Although Wilson's father, the Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson, had been reared in Ohio before moving to Virginia in 1849, he became “unreconstructedly Southern” in value