Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/563

 540 FAMOUS LIVING AMEBICANS says that Thomas Woodrow Wilson 's ancestors were men and women who had displayed to a conspicuous degree the qual- ities of a sturdy race: they were people of imagination, of hope, venturesome ; they were stubborn, shrewd, industrious ; they were inclined to learning, strongly tinctured with piety, yet practical and thrifty. We are less inclined today than formerly to account for everything in a man's life by referring to his ancestry, but a line of editors and clergymen, pioneers who were not afraid to fare forth into untried fields or fight for strongly held con- victions is a fact that cannot by any means be neglected in trying to understand a man's life. And these antecedents of Woodrow Wilson are a part of the explanation of his force- fulness, effectiveness, and persistence. Woodrow Wilson was bom December 28, 1856, in the par- sonage of the Presbyterian chnrch at Stannton, Virginia. Two years and a half after, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia, where the father became pastor of the Presbyterian church, occupying a prominent position among the clergy of tiie South. It was here that the boyhood of young Woodrow was spent. Augusta was out of the line of greatest hard- ships during the war and so the boy escaped many of the more unpleasant experiences that came to the Southern youth of his day. His education first received serious attention from his father at home, and later he attended a private school taught by a retired Confederate soldier. When the family moved, in 1870, to Columbia, where the father became a professor in the Theological Seminary, he was put into another private school. In 1873, at seventeen years of age, he was sent to Davidson College, a small old-fashioned Presbyterian school. But be- fore the year was out he was taken ill and went home to Wil- mington, North Carolina, whither the family had moved. Here he remained for a year, gaining some physical strength and beginning his social training in the cultured group of people that gathered about the parsonage. In the fall of