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Measures in Congress, Reconstruction Measures in Congress and The Rise and Fall of the Slave-Power in America. Consult Nason's Life. Wilson, James Harrison, American soldier (major-general United States volunteers), was born near Shawneetown, Ill., Sept. 2, 1837, and was educated at McKendree College there and at West Point, where he graduated in 1860. He was assigned to the corps of topographical engineers, serving in the department of Oregon. He was distinguished as an officer of engineers in the Civil War, notably in the Richmond raid and in the operations near Petersburg; in 1864 he commanded the 3d division of Sherman's cavalry and the cavalry corps in the military division of the Mississippi; participated in the capture of Fort Pulaski, took part in the campaigns of Antietam, Vicksburg, Chattanooga and the Wilderness; commanded in the assault and capture of Selma and Montgomery, Ala., Columbus and Macon, Ga., and finally in the capture of Jeff Davis. After the war he was engaged in railroad and engineering operations; and in the war with Spain he commanded the 1st division of the 1st army corps in the campaign in Porto Rico. He is the author of China; Andrew J. Alexander; and (with the late Chas. A. Dana) a Life of General Grant. Wilson, James H., U. S. Secretary of Agriculture since March 5th, 1897, was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, Aug. 16th, 1835. He came to the United States in 1852, and settled in Norwich, Conn., with his parents. In 1855 he moved to Tama County, Iowa, where in 1861 he engaged in farming. He was a member of the 12th, 13th and 14th assemblies of Iowa, of the last of which he was speaker. He was the state's railway commissioner and a member of Congress during 1873-7 and 1883-5. Prom 1870 until 1874 he was regent of the University of Iowa. From 1890 until 1897 he was director of the Iowa Agricultural Experiment-Station, and for a time he was professor of agriculture at Iowa Agricultural College. He was awarded the degree of LL. D. by the University of Wisconsin in 1904. In 1894 he was appointed Secretary of Agriculture by President McKinley, and was retained by President Roosevelt. Wilson, John, famous as the “Christopher North” of Blackwood's Magazine, was born May 18, 1785, at Paisley, Scotland, where his father was a rich manufacturer. Sir Daniel Wilson (q. v.) of Canada was his brother. After being privately tutored, he spent four years at Glasgow University and then four more at Oxford, where he led both in scholarship and in athletics. On leaving Oxford he settled in the beautiful lake-country of Cumberland, where he soon became a close friend of Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge

and De Quincey, and amused himself by measuring his strength against that of the far-famed Cumberland wrestlers, the very sturdiest of whom said that he was “a vera bad un to lick.” After writing his first two poems, Isle of Palms and The City of the Plague, most of his fortune was lost through the rascality of a relation, and Wilson went to Edinburgh and became a lawyer. In 1817 Blackwood's Magazine was founded, for which, during its earlier years, Wilson and Lockhart, his friend, were the writers who gave it its success. In 1820 Wilson was made professor of moral philosophy in Edinburgh University. Here he had almost unexampled power of rousing the enthusiasm of his students. He, however, cared little for dignity, and on more than one occasion the professor of moral philosophy took off his coat in the public market-place to punish some ruffian. The amount of his writings in Blackwood's was enormous; from this mass he selected and published The Recreations of Christopher North (1842). The power of his genius is best seen, perhaps, in the series of table-talks called Noctes Ambrosianæ. As a writer and a man the Scotch idolized him almost as much as they did Burns and Scott. He died at Edinburgh, April 3, 1854. Consult the Memoir by Mrs. Gordon, his daughter. Wilson, William Lyne, LL.D., American statesman and late president of Washington and Lee University, was born in Jefferson County, Va., May 3, 1843, and died at Lexington, Va., Oct. 17, 1900. After an education at Columbian College (D. C.), and at the University of Virginia, he served for a time in the Confederate army, subsequently becoming a professor of Latin in Columbian College and president of West Virginia University. He also studied and practiced law, and from 1883 to 1895 was a member of Congress, regent of Smithsonian Institution and president of the national Democratic convention of 1892. Between 1895 and 1897 he was postmaster-general of the United States, and in the latter year he accepted the presidency of Washington and Lee University. While in Congress, he drafted the bill for the revision and reduction of tariff-duties, known as the Wilson tariff-bill. See Tariff. Wilson, Woodrow, twenty-seventh President of the United States, was born in Staunton, Va., Dec. 28, 1856. Graduating from Princeton in 1879, he studied law at Virginia University and practiced in Atlanta, Ga. Before entering the service of his alma mater, first as professor of jurisprudence and politics, and, later, as president, he had held professorships at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan. His college career was distinguished not only by rare scholarship and capacity as a teacher, but for unusual executive ability and his