President Woodrow Wilson ranks up with Washington, Lincoln, Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt as one of the top five most important presidents in the history of the United States, a highly educated man with strong character, moral and religious values that lead this country on his own terms.
To understand how Woodrow Wilson’s character affected his actions as a politician, we have to understand how his life and the people in his life developed his character. In researching this paper I came across a story from Wilson’s childhood that could possibly give us an insight into his character. In Reverend Wilson’s hayloft, young Tommy Wilson was conducting a Lightfoot Club meeting, when the question of “weather the pen is mightier than the sword” was put up for debate. Tommy, all excited about arguing how the written word was more powerful then any army, was told that he had to argue for the other side. Upset, in protest Tommy said “I can’t argue for something I don’t believe in”.
The son of Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Janet Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born on December 28, 1856 in Staunton, a small southern town in Virginia and within a year later, the Wilson family would move to Augusta, Georgia. Thomas’s father though raised in Ohio had very strong southern values and expressed sympathy for south during the civil war. He was also the leader and helped organize the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America, served as a pastor in several Presbyterian churches and taught theology at Columbia Theological Seminary and, at Southwestern Presbyterian Theological University. Thomas’s mother (an English immigrant raised in America) was a loving and companionate woman devoted to her family and worked hard in a local hospital tending to wounds of confederate soldiers. As a young boy, Thomas (eventually dropping his first name to go by Woodrow) remembered seeing General Robert E. Lee (under guard) with Union solders marching through town...