The President Woodrow Wilson
...to Reverend Dr. Joseph Wilson and Janet Woodrow. His ancestry was Scots-Irish and Scottish. His grandparents immigrated to the United States from Strabane, County Tyrone, in modern-day Northern Ireland while his mother born in London to Scottish parents. Wilson's father was originally from Steubenville, Ohio where his grandfather had been an abolitionist newspaper publisher and his uncles were Republicans. But his parents moved South in 1851 and found the Confederacy. His father defended slavery, owned slaves and set up a Sunday school for the salves. They cared for wounded soldiers at their church. The father also served as a chaplain to the Confederate army. Wilson's father was one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church, after it split from the northern Presbyterians in 1861. Joseph R. Wilson served as the first permanent clerk of the southern church's General Assembly, was Stated Clerk from 1865-1898 and was Moderator of the PCUS General Assembly in 1879. Wilson spent the majority of his childhood, to age 14, in Augusta, Georgia, where his father was minister of the First Presbyterian Church. During Reconstruction he lived in Columbia, South Carolina, from 1870-1874, where his father was professor at the Columbia Theological Seminary. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson%2C_Woodrow#Early_life)
Wilson did not learn to read until he was about 12 years old. His difficulty reading may have indicated dyslexia , but as a teenager he taught himself shorthand to compensate and was able to achieve academically through self-discipline. He studied at home under his father's guidance and took classes in a small school in Augusta. In 1873 he spent a year at Davidson College in North Carolina, then transferred to Princeton as a freshman, graduating in 1879. Beginning in his second year, he read widely in political philosophy and history. He was active in the...
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