Who Is Woodrow Wilson's Legacy?

Woodrow Wilson, born on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, Virginia, spent his youth in the South, as the son of a devout Presbyterian family, seeing the ravages of the Civil War and its aftermath. A dedicated scholar and enthusiastic orator, he earned multiple degrees before embarking on a university career. In a fast rise politically, he spent two years as governor of New Jersey before becoming the two-term 28th president of the United States in 1912. Wilson saw America through World War I, negotiating the Versailles Treaty and crafting a League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations. He suffered his second stroke during the last year of his presidency and died three years after leaving office, on February 3, 1924, with sweeping reforms for the middle class, voting rights for women and precepts for world peace as his legacy.

Tommy, as he was called in his youth, was the third of four children to grow up in the Wilsons ' warm, studious and devout household. The family lived all over the South, moving from Staunton, Virginia to Augusta, Georgia in Tommy’s first year, to Columbia, South Carolina, in 1870, where Reverend Wilson taught at the Columbia Theological Seminary (he began teaching in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1874).

Witnessing the ravages of the Civil War up close, Reverend Wilson, a Northern transplant, adopted the Confederate cause, and his mother nursed wounded soldiers. Tommy saw Confederate president Jefferson Davis march through Augusta in chains, and always remembered looking up into the face of the defeated General Robert E.