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Wilson’s father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, was a Presbyterian minister who had moved to Virginia from Ohio and was the son of Scotch-Irish immigrants; his mother, Janet Woodrow, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, had been born in England of Scottish parentage. Wilson was the only president since Andrew Jackson to have a foreign-born parent.

Naturally enough, the Presbyterian church played a commanding role in the upbringing of “Tommy” Wilson. The family left Virginia before his second birthday, as his father successively held pastorates in Augusta, Georgia, and Wilmington, North Carolina, and taught at the Columbia Theological Seminary in South Carolina. His uncle, James Woodrow, was the leading light of the seminary faculty, and after college the young man dropped his first name both to emphasize the family connection and because he thought “Woodrow Wilson” sounded more dignified. His father served during the Civil War as a chaplain with the Confederate army, and his church in Augusta was turned into a military hospital. The young Wilson was deeply affected by the horrors of the war.

Apparently dyslexic from childhood, Wilson did not learn to read until after he was 10 and never became a rapid reader. Nevertheless, he developed passionate interests in politics and literature. He attended Davidson College near Charlotte, North Carolina, for a year before entering what is now Princeton University in 1875. At Princeton he blossomed intellectually, reading widely, engaging in debate, and editing the college newspaper. While still an undergraduate, he published a scholarly essay that compared the American government with the British parliamentary system, a subject that he would develop further in his first book and apply in his own political career.

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After graduation from Princeton in 1879, Wilson studied law at the University of Virginia, with the hope that law would lead to politics. Two years of humdrum legal practice in Atlanta disillusioned him, and he abandoned his law career for graduate study in government and history at Johns Hopkins University, where in 1886 he received a Ph.D.; he was the only president to have earned that degree.