The Courtship Of Woodrow Wilson (October 1962 | Volume: 13, Issue: 6)

The Courtship Of Woodrow Wilson

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October 1962 | Volume 13, Issue 6

Among the many treasures left behind by the highly literate Chief Executive, Woodrow Wilson, is a storehouse of 1,400 letters between him and his first wife. Ellen Axson Wilson, whom he married in 1885 and who died in the White House in 1914, during his first term.

It is something of a historical event that a representative selection from these letters is now to be published, skillfully edited in a book entitled The Priceless Gift , by Mrs. Eleanor Wilson McAdoo, youngest daughter of Woodrow and Ellen Wilson. It offers a macthless and sometimes surprising insight into the character of one of our most famous Presidents. In the letters to the girl he loved, Wilson exposed his deepest feelings without concealment or restraint. Many of his well-known traits—idealism, intensity, uncompromising integrity, persistence—are run amply seen; but unfamiliar fucets are also revealed—drollery, self-mockery, even jealousy.

The Priceless Gift will be published later this month by the McGraw-Book Company, and A MERICAN H ERITAGE here presents a condensation from the first part of it, covering the courtship of Ellen Axson and Woodrow Wilson, from their meeting in 1853 until their marriage in 1885. Not only do these letters tell us very much about the remarkable couple who wrote them, but they also bring back nostalgically an era when courtship was more decorous, more formal, almost comically elaborate, and yet in some sense more passionate than it is in our times.

There is a city in Georgia called Rome because it is built on seven bills. In 18815 it was a very small city. Gardens enclosed its stately old bouses, tall trees sheltered the streets, and no one was ever in a hurry.

On an April Sunday the bills were bright with new grass, and the apple orchards in the valleys were in full bloom. It was a warm day, made for picnics or for la/.y talk on cool verandas, but it never occurred to young Thomas Woodrow Wilson to do anything of the sort. All his life, wherever he was, or whatever the weather, he went to church on Sunday.

Wilson was—rather unsuccessfully—practicing law in Atlanta in 1883 and had gone to Rome to consult his uncle, James Bones, about a legal mailer. He was twenty-six—a tall, thin young man with large gray eyes, brown hair, side whiskers, and a stubborn chin; a determined young man, with a goal in life. He intended to have a distinguished career. In politics? In the literary world? That remained to be seen. In the meantime, he had discarded his first name. Short, allerative, and unusual, Woodrow Wilson would be a naiMjiot easily forgotten.

Mr. and Mrs. James Bones and their married daughter, Jessie Brewer, took Woodrow to their own church, the First Presbyterian, that morning, and his usual Sunday mood of contentment was increased by the