Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. IV.djvu/239

WOODROW WILSON 199 year 1855, and moved there with his wife and two small daughters, Marian and Annie Josephine. Staunton was the birthplace of Woodrow Wil son. As his father left there when he was two years old to accept a call to the important First Presbyterian church of Augusta, Georgia, he had no recollection of the home of his nativity in the beautiful valley of Virginia, but he will never for get the reception tendered him by citizens of that city upon the fifty-seventh anniversary of his birth, on December 28, 1912, when he was President-elect of the United States, and when he was quartered in the little room in the manse where he first saw the light. Both at Augusta and at Columbia, South Caro lina, where Doctor Wilson in 1870 accepted the chair of pastoral and evangelistic theology at the Southern Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Woodrow attended excellent private schools, but his real instructor was his father. Doctor Wilson was one of the brilliant leaders of the Presbyterian Church in the south. For forty years he was Stated Clerk of the Southern General Assembly. He was Moderator of the Assembly of 1879. Well-informed upon the news of the day and well- balanced and fair-minded, the father was keen to judge a new book, to analyze a political situation, to shatter a sham with irony, or to scorn a pre tender. From him all the while the boy was un-