Ellen Wilson

First Lady

• Born: May 15, 1860
• Birthplace: Savannah, Georgia
• Died: August 6, 1914
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

President:Woodrow Wilson 1913-1921

Overview

Ellen Wilson is among the lesser known of the First Ladies. Woodrow and Ellen Wilson were very much in love, and she was an important partner and adviser to Wilson throughout his career in public service. As First Lady, Ellen Wilson lent her name to the cause of improving slums in the District of Columbia. Shortly before her death, Congress passed legislation, which Ellen strongly supported, to aid in the improvement of the slums. She was a poised and gracious hostess and enjoyed her public role.

Early Life

Ellen’s ancestors settled in New England and New Jersey. John Hoyt had come to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1629 from Curry Rivel, Somersetshire, England. John’s great-great-grandson Winthrop Hoyt (Ellen’s great-great-grandfather) was born in 1739. Winthrop served in the French and Indian War. He was with Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys when Fort Ticonderoga was captured in 1775. Ellen’s grandfather Nathan Hoyt was born in 1793 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Nathan was self-educated and studied privately for his ordination into the Presbyterian ministry. In 1826, Nathan married Margaret Bliss from Springfield, Massachusetts. The young couple moved to Beech Island, South Carolina, so Nathan could pastor the Presbyterian Church of Beech Island. In 1830, Nathan went to the First Presbyterian Church in Athens, Georgia, where he stayed the rest of his life.

Margaret Jane “Janie” Hoyt was born on September 8, 1838, in Athens, Georgia. Janie was Nathan and Margaret’s sixth and last child. At the age of fifteen, Janie began to attend the Greensboro Female College in Greensboro, Georgia. Her father, Nathan, was on the part-time faculty there, and Ellen’s paternal grandfather, the Reverend Isaac Axson, was president of the college.

Isaac completed his studies at Columbia Theological Seminary in May, 1834, and married Rebecca Longstreet Randolph in October. In 1836, Isaac and Rebecca moved to Liberty County, Georgia, so Isaac could copastor the Midway Presbyterian Church. The couple had a son on December 23, 1836, named Samuel Edward, called Edward.

Edward became engaged to Janie Hoyt in the summer of 1856 after his first year at the Columbia Theological Seminary. Janie and Edward were married in Athens, Georgia, on November 23, 1858. He was ordained into the ministry on May 23, 1859, at the same Presbyterian Church in Beech Island, South Carolina, Janie’s father had pastored. Ellen Louise Axson was born on May 15, 1860, in a second-floor bedroom of the Presbyterian manse in Savannah, the home of her Axson grandparents. Ellen was named after her aunts Ellen Axson and Louisa Hoyt.

Almost one year after Ellen’s birth, Georgia seceded from the Union. Edward Axson joined the Confederate Army and became the chaplain for the First Regiment of the Georgia Infantry. In letters to Edward, Janie described their new daughter as spirited and merry. Edward left the Confederate Army because of illness in 1863 and resumed pastoring the Madison Presbyterian Church in Madison, Georgia. He also taught at the Madison Male and Female Academy, held in the Axson home, where Ellen was first educated.

The Axson family moved to Rome, Georgia, in 1866 so Edward could pastor the First Presbyterian Church there. Ellen enrolled in the Presbyterian Church’s Rome Female College when she was eleven years old. She studied philosophy, logic, natural history, botany, and algebra. She performed well in composition, English literature, and French as well as studying geometry and teaching herself trigonometry during one summer, according to a Hoyt cousin.

Ellen graduated from the Rome Female College in 1876, in the same class as her friend and childhood playmate Rosalie Anderson. Helen F. Fairchild, who had studied at the New York National Academy of Design, tutored Ellen in art. Fairchild submitted a drawing of a “school scene” by Ellen Axson to the Paris International Exposition. Ellen won the bronze medal for excellence in freehand drawing. She took graduate courses at the Rome Female College in art, German, and advanced French and was selling small crayon sketches done from still photographs at the age of eighteen. She made so much money from her drawings that she considered going with Rosalie to study art in New York. At this time, her father described Ellen as obstreperous, saying she was “entirely too much inclined to have her own opinions.”

In the fall of 1881, Ellen went to visit Rosalie in Sewanee, Tennessee. While she was gone, her mother gave birth to Margaret Randolph on October 10. Ellen returned to Rome to find her mother in a puerperal fever, called childbed fever. Janie Axson died on November 4, 1881, leaving Ellen to raise her two young brothers and serve as hostess for her father. Ellen was heartbroken at the loss of her mother and said that she would never again touch a paintbrush. However, Ellen provided a still-life crayon exhibit to benefit the Young Men’s Christian Association in Atlanta.

Marriage and Family

Ellen had several male suitors, nearly all of whom expressed their desire to marry her. While spending time in Darien, Georgia, when she was eighteen, Joe Walker fell in love with her. She turned down a proposal from Walker, but he continued to pursue her for four years thereafter. She was disgusted by the attention from a Mr. Williams and also turned down James Wright and Charles Thornwell from Rome. She also refused marriage to a missionary who offered to take her to China. She told a friend that if she ever fell in love with a man, it would be against her will, and was thus known in Rome as Ellie the Man Hater.

On April 8, 1883, she attended a service led by her father at the First Presbyterian Church in Rome. A young lawyer, Woodrow Wilson from Atlanta, was in the congregation that day and was distracted from the sacrament of Communion when he saw her. Woodrow’s father, the Reverend Joseph Wilson, was a friend of Ellen’s father. Woodrow was staying with his uncle James Bones, who was an elder at the church. At the time that Woodrow first saw Ellen, she had bronze-blond hair and dark brown, deep-set eyes and was five feet, three inches tall.

Woodrow visited the Axson home that afternoon and asked Edward about his daughter’s “health.” Edward called Ellen downstairs, and Woodrow was again distracted, this time from conversation with Edward, at the sight of her. When legal business brought Woodrow back to Rome a month later, he asked her to go riding with him one evening, and she agreed. In June, 1883, he told his mother that he loved Ellen and would ask her to marry him.

He spent two weeks in Rome in June, and his cousin arranged a picnic between Ellen and Woodrow. That September, Ellen was vacationing in North Carolina. Woodrow, by now a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, was also visiting North Carolina and had planned to meet with Ellen in Morganton. However, Ellen had to rush back to Rome when her father fell ill. She arrived in Asheville on Friday, September 14, to make a train connection to Rome. By chance, Woodrow had gone to Asheville that day. As he was walking down the street, he recognized Ellen from her room window on the second floor of the Eagle Hotel. He was able to encourage Ellen to stay until Sunday, the day he would head back to Baltimore.

Woodrow took Ellen to meet his brother, mother, and sister that Saturday. On Sunday, before he left, in a hallway at the Eagle Hotel, Woodrow asked Ellen to marry him. They hugged and kissed right there in the open, and Ellen agreed to marry him.

Ellen’s father passed away on March 6, 1884. He bequeathed enough money to Ellen for her to finally study at the Art Students League in New York City. Woodrow dropped Ellen off in New York, and she started classes on October 6. Ellen and Woodrow, who returned to Baltimore, kept in touch through letters and holiday visits. Their letters during this period of separation show that they missed each other and that one did not feel complete without the other.

Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania offered Woodrow the position of associate professor of history. He accepted and was set to begin in the fall of 1885. Now that he had a job to support Ellen, they set a wedding date and were married on June 24, 1885, in the Presbyterian manse in Savannah. The ceremony, which included no music or flowers, was conducted by Ellen’s grandfather Axson and Woodrow’s father. The Wilsons would have three daughters: Margaret Woodrow Wilson, born on April 16, 1886; Jessie Woodrow, born on April 28, 1887; and Eleanor Randolph Wilson, born on October 10, 1889. An Axson family friend said of the marriage, “What a pity for such a beautiful girl to throw herself away on an unknown lawyer from Atlanta.”

Presidency and First Ladyship

Woodrow accepted the position of chairman of Political Economics and Jurisprudence at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1890. By 1902 he was president of Princeton, and he was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910. Ellen enjoyed public life and gave political advice to her husband. Joseph Tumulty, Woodrow’s private secretary, said that Ellen was a better politician than her husband. When Woodrow became a Democratic candidate for president of the United States in 1912, Ellen went with him on a campaign train trip through Georgia that spring. Wilson was nominated on the forty-sixth ballot at the Democratic National Convention on July 2. He delivered his acceptance speech from the porch of the Sea Girt, the governor’s summer home, on August 7. Ellen and all three of their daughters were with him.

Woodrow faced Republican incumbent President William Howard Taft and Progressive Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt in the general election. Roosevelt’s candidacy had split the Republican Party, and Wilson won the election on November 5, 1912. Taft sent Ellen a letter with the plans of the White House second floor, the family residence, enclosed. He suggested that Ellen ask Congress for funds to renovate bedrooms on the third floor. On March 3, 1913, Helen Taft led Ellen on an inspection tour of the White House. Inauguration Day was March 4, 1913. Ellen’s attire for the day was a smoke-brown suit with black velvet trim and a black hat decorated with brown ostrich feathers.

As president, Woodrow’s annual salary was seventy-five thousand dollars, in addition to a twenty-five-thousand-dollar travel allowance. Transportation, servants, flowers, and the Marine Band, which performed at all social events, were provided for the first family at government expense.

Ellen saw to it that the second-floor residence was cleaned and decorated to her liking. She also took Taft’s advice and added five furnished bedrooms and bathrooms to the third floor. She set up an art studio in a White House attic; as the honorary president of the Southern Industrial Association, she allowed the group to display items for sale at the White House. Mountain crafts, such as rugs and quilts, were sold to benefit rural women. The First Lady invited cabinet and congressional wives to the White House to see and purchase the artwork.

Ellen performed her role as White House hostess with grace and poise. A White House usher said that Ellen would stay and greet guests until the very end of each event. She was a close political adviser to her husband, and she took an interest in the issues of sanitary working conditions for federal government employees, child labor, adult education, and care of the mentally ill. The First Lady always looked over the president’s speeches and did not hesitate to offer her input. Wilson did not mind and said, “No president but myself ever had exactly the right sort of wife!”

Charlotte Hopkins, chairwoman of the Washington, D.C., branch of the National Civic Federation, came to the White House for tea with Ellen on March 22, 1913. Hopkins’s organization sought better living conditions for the poor, regardless of race or creed. She told the First Lady that there were areas in Washington in which blacks were living in alleys, in shacks that contained no electricity, plumbing, or running water. Model homes, said Hopkins, that contained electricity and running water could replace the shacks. Three days later she took Ellen on a tour of the slums and to a community of model homes; the First Lady greeted and talked with the black citizens without revealing her identity. Ellen then became a shareholder in the Sanitary Housing Company, which built the model homes.

A group of leaders from civic and charitable organizations, called the Committee of Fifty, was set up to draft legislation to clean up slum conditions. A White House tea was given in honor of the committee in June, and Ellen invited members of Congress to hear about the living conditions of the poor. The Alley Bill, which funded model homes to replace the shacks, was presented to Congress in February, 1914.

On March 1, Ellen fell at the White House. Medical examinations revealed that she was suffering from Bright’s disease, a kidney condition for which no cure was known. By August 6, it was clear that she did not have much longer to live. That day she told her husband, “I would go away more peacefully if my Alley Bill was passed by Congress.” Tumulty, Woodrow’s secretary, delivered the news to Capitol Hill, and the Senate immediately passed the legislation. The House assured Tumulty that it would pass the Alley Bill the next day. He brought this news back to the White House; an hour later, Ellen died. President Wilson burst into tears and cried out, “Oh my God, what am I going to do?”

Legacy

Ellen Axson Wilson is not as well-known as some First Ladies; during her tenure she did not wish to make any fashion statements. She once said, “A person would be a fool who lets his head to be turned by externals; they simply go with position.” Instead Ellen worked behind the scenes to read and revise her husband’s speeches, improve Washington slums, and encourage cabinet members to improve the working conditions in their jurisdictions. Ellen Wilson showed that the First Lady could be an advocate for social change, a model that future wives of presidents followed.

Bibliography

Anthony, Carl Sferrazza. First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives and Their Power. Vol. 1. New York: William Morrow, 1990. A collection of articles about the First Ladies from Martha Washington to Mamie Eisenhower.

Dubovoy, Sina. Ellen A. Wilson: The Woman Who Made a President. New York: Nova History, 2003. A solid biography that details Ellen’s influence on Woodrow Wilson’s career.

Link, Arthur S. Woodrow Wilson: A Brief Biography. New York: World Publishing, 1963. A brief biography of Woodrow Wilson, written by the editor of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson.

McAdoo, Eleanor Wilson, ed. The Priceless Gift: The Love Letters of Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Axson Wilson. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962. The love letters since the beginning of Woodrow and Ellen’s courtship, up to the time Ellen died.

Saunders, Frances Wright. First Lady Between Two Worlds: Ellen Axson Wilson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. A complete biography of Ellen Axson Wilson.

Truman, Margaret. First Ladies. New York: Random House, 1995. This book contains a critique of the role of the First Lady and brief biographies of First Ladies from Martha Washington to Hillary Rodham Clinton.