Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) served as the ninth President of the C.S.A from 1910-1916, and led the Confederacy at the beginning of the Great War.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia in 1856 to Reverend Dr. Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Janet Woodrow. His ancestry was Scots-Irish, his grandparents emigrating to the US from near Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland. Wilson spent the majority of his childhood in Augusta, Georgia. He always claimed that his earliest memory was of hearing that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war was coming. Wilson's father and mother were originally from Ohio, but sympathized with the South in the War of Secession. They cared for wounded Confederate soldiers at their church.

Wilson travelled to Rome, Georgia in 1883. There he was reunited with Ellen Louise Axson, whom he had originally met in 1863 when he was six and she was three. The two were instantly attracted to each other but did not marry until 1885 as Ellen was reluctant to leave her father behind. They were married for just nine years before Ellen's death in 1894, though in that time the couple had three children. As of the beginning of the Great War, twenty years later, Wilson had never remarried.