Woodrow Wilson was once a citizen of the Confederacy
Woodrow Wilson's earliest memory was hearing a passer-by in Georgia complain that Abraham Lincoln had won and war was coming. The son of a Confederate-supporting minister, he is one of only two presidents who were citizens of the Confederacy. He later led the United States through the First World War and designed the League of Nations.
Wilson was born in 1856 in Staunton, Virginia, in the house belonging to the Presbyterian church where his father served as pastor. His ancestors came from Northern Ireland and Scotland; one grandfather published an anti-slavery newspaper in Ohio. The family moved to Augusta, Georgia, before he turned two, and his father helped found the Southern Presbyterian church after it split from the North in 1861. The only other president who held Confederate citizenship was John Tyler.
He earned a doctorate in history and political science at Johns Hopkins, and an 1887 article on public administration made him a founder of that field. As president of Princeton he became a leading voice for progressive education, and as governor of New Jersey from 1911 he defied party bosses to pass reforms. In 1912 he beat both President Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, becoming the first Southerner elected since 1848.
His first term created the modern income tax and the Federal Reserve. It also brought widespread racial segregation into the federal civil service, and his opposition to women's suffrage provoked protests. He kept the country neutral when war broke out in 1914, won narrowly in 1916, then asked Congress in April 1917 to declare war on Germany over submarine attacks on American ships. His Fourteen Points became the basis for peace talks, and at Paris he won the League of Nations a place in the Treaty of Versailles.
At home he refused a Republican compromise, so the Senate never ratified the treaty and America never joined the League. A stroke in October 1919 left him incapacitated, with his wife and doctor controlling access and few decisions made. He died in 1924. Historians still rate his achievements above average while condemning his support for segregation.
Source: Woodrow Wilson
