Woodrow Wilson 1856–1924

Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, in 1856 and grew up in Augusta, Georgia, and Columbia, South Carolina. He overcame a learning disability to become a lawyer in 1882 and earned a doctorate from Johns Hopkins in history and political science four years later. He had a distinguished academic career, becoming president of Princeton University in 1902. While leading the university, Wilson developed a reputation as a reformer. He won New Jersey’s gubernatorial election in 1910 and oversaw enactment of a number of Progressive measures. Wilson secured the Democratic presidential nomination in 1912. With the Republican Party split between the incumbent William H. Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson won the election and became the first Democratic president elected since 1892 and the first southerner in the White House since just after the Civil War. In one of his earliest addresses as president, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, Wilson sought to soften regional tensions and unite the country.