Analyzing "Margaret," an almost-lost short story fragment by Woodrow Wilson

A work of fiction by a future United States president is a rare occurrence, so it’s strange that no one appears to have written anything about an unfinished, six-page short story entitled “Margaret” that Woodrow Wilson wrote in longhand in a notebook, probably sometime in the 1880s. It is now preserved at the Library of Congress. The story was even left out of editor Arthur S. Link’s unprecedentedly exhaustive 69-volume Papers of Woodrow Wilson. The most extensive mention I’ve found is in a brief footnote in Henry Bragdon’s biography of Wilson, which merely notes the story’s existence and quotes a few lines from it. Even Edwin A. Weinstein, who printed an extensive analysis of Wilson’s only completed short story, “The World and John Hart,” in his psychological study of Wilson, ignored “Margaret” altogether. Biographer John Mulder, surveying his early writing, does mention “Margaret” and reminds us that Wilson also once outlined a novel that he never wrote, but then wraps up by noting simply that “Wilson’s failure to get these works published was no loss to American letters.”  Of course, it’s possible I missed something, as there are allegedly more than 2,000 books on Wilson in English alone, according to the latest addition to the pile of biographies (Christopher Cox’s 2024 Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn). But the fragment’s complete omission from most of the commonly held biographies in most good libraries is unfortunate, because what it says about this much-examined man and his family is fascinating. I believe “Margaret” to have been inspired by Wilson’s future wife Ellen Axson and her father, who probably committed suicide and whom Wilson appears to see as a symbol of the devastation of the Civil War in the South and the so-called “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. 

Almost the whole of “Margaret” is reprinted in the course of this article, below.

The fact that Wilson dabbled in fiction at all is interesting. I’ve surveyed the papers of all the presidents, looking for any evidence that any other inhabitant of the West Wing had written any fiction before being elected, and have been unable to find any. Fiction is more common from ex-presidents, including 2004's The Hornet’s Nest: A Novel of the Revolutionary War by Jimmy Carter, and 2022’s The President’s Daughter, by Bill Clinton and novelist James Patterson. Wilson himself, once he gave up short story writing, came to believe that a statesman could not also be a fiction writer. He slammed British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s novels in the course of writing this position in 1890, in somewhat laborious prose:

“The true leader of men, it is plain, is equipped by lacking such sensibilities, which the literary man, when analyzed, is found to possess as a chief part of his make-up. He lacks that subtle power of sympathy which enables the men who write the great works of the imagination to put their minds under the spell of a thousand individual motives not their own but the living force in the several characters they interpret. No popular leader could write fiction. He could not conceive [Robert Browning’s verse novel ‘The] Ring and the Book’, the impersonation of a half-score points of view. … Mr. Browning could no more have been a statesman—if statesmen are to be popular leaders also—than Mr. Disraeli could write a novel. Mr. Browning could see from every individual’s point of view—no intellectual sympathy came amiss to him. Mr. Disraeli could see from no point of view but his own,—and the characters which he put into those works of his which were meant to be novels move as mere puppets to his will,--as the men he governed did. They are his mouthpieces simply, and are as little like themselves as were the Tory squires in the Commons like themselves after they became his chess-men.”

So, it’s interesting to see what Wilson wrote before he decided he (and all other statesman) lack what it takes. One might think, particularly if one is familiar with Sweden’s King Gustav III or Czech playwright-president Vaclav Havel, that fiction writing would help an aspiring statesman be better at the job. Writing characters forces one to think empathetically, in order to imagine the inner life of strangers, and to think morally, in order to decide what to emphasize, what questions to ask, and of course what lessons to draw. Therefore, one can imagine that the impulse to write fiction might indicate a thoughtful and moral leader. This is not always the way it turns out. Gustav III (1746-1792), who wrote plays and scenarios for operas, showed signs of being an enlightened monarch early in his career, but ended up quashing the freedom of the press and committing other violations of first principles. So did Wilson. During the First World War, he allowed his postmaster general to ban publications that objected to the war. Wilson did, meekly, try to prevent this, specifically when writers appealed to his sensibility as a writer himself. The editor and writers from the publication The Masses, including editor Max Eastman, who had endorsed Wilson in the 1916 presidential race, and John Reed, whom Warren Beatty played in his Oscar-winning movie Reds, wrote President Wilson in opposition to censorship, appealing to him “as friends of yours, and knowing how dear to you is the Anglo-Saxon tradition of intellectual freedom.” Wilson forwarded the letter to his postmaster with a note reading “These are very sincere men and I should like to please them.” His underling insisted on censoring the publications, and Wilson did not overrule him.

Woodrow Wilson not only dreamed of being a fiction writer, he dreamed of being a playwright. On Christmas day 1883 he wrote his wife-to-be: “You know I am deeply interested in the drama; and am thinking seriously of arising as the American Shakespeare—good plan!--don’t you think so?” Wilson saw more plays than any other president, according to Thomas A. Bogar, author of American Presidents Attend the Theatre. But he never tried his hand at playwriting. He did, however, attempt at least two short stories as well as the novel he outlined, The Life and Letters of John Briton.  

“Margaret” is about a father who was ruined by the Civil War and his daughter, a young woman who “seemed such a flower, a fair bloom hidden away in the seclusion of a far Southern forest, where nobody who was likely to appreciate her was likely to see her. Her full name was then Margaret Pierce.” Not surprisingly, the only other woman he had written about in such admiring terms is his future wife, Ellen Axson, who grew up in a sort of far Southern forest herself. Her family was from Savannah, as is the family of Margaret Pierce, and she moved to isolated Rome, Georgia, where she met Wilson. Rome, 70 miles northwest of Atlanta, had a population ofabout 2,700 in 1870, which was about a third of what it had been before the war. Margaret’s mother in the story died in childbirth, and that is also exactly how Ellen’s mother died. And finally, like Ellen, Margaret was left alone with her father. This is where the story gets particularly interesting.   

Below is the opening of the story, which quotes a famous line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The roughly 30-year-old Wilson, then a young professor, seems to tweak himself for quoting the famous couplet, implying he could have gotten it from a book of famous quotations. Because the story fragment was written in longhand, there are words that are illegible. These passages are the only ones cut in the excerpts that follow from "Margaret." 

“Whenever I hear that old couplet of Gray’s,

“‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
and waste its sweetness on the desert air.’

“I think of Margaret … Even when they come empty from the lips of someone to whom ‘Familiar Quotations’ are all of literature.

“For as I first remember Margaret she seemed such a flower, a fair bloom hidden away in the seclusion of a far Southern forest, where nobody who was likely to appreciate her was likely to see her. Her full name was then Margaret Pierce -- it is not now, for she is married.

“She lived with her father in a little cottage which stood lonely by an unfrequented road far away from towns and railroads in one of the counties near the sea in the ‘low country’ of Georgia -- a part of the country much of which cannot even be included in the ‘New South.’

“It contains for the most part driftwood from the wreck of the Old South, and Dr Pierce, Margaret’s father, was a piece of this driftwood. Much of the wreckage is full of suggestions of nobility--a wreckage of foolishness only, not of courage, honour or high purpose. Dr Pierce had neighbors on the farms about his little residence who had lost nothing but this honour and their slaves by the war; who remained men and gentlemen, as well worth knowing as before they had known what it was to follow the plow themselves, and as serve to breed a noble race of sons for the changed times of the future, But Dr Pierce himself had lost something besides the fortune into which he had been born; had lost, not Energy, for that he had never had, but character...”

Wilson writes elegiacally about the Lost Cause of the South here, though he doesn’t go so far as to endorse the point of view that begot its own genre of literature in the South after the war, that of the Lost Cause genre. Novels and plays and other works in the years after the Civil War embraced a philosophy that the Confederacy had been a noble cause, but a hopeless one. This included writers like novelist and playwright Thomas Dixon, whose play The Clansmen was turned into the movie Birth of a Nation while Wilson was president. Wilson’s words supporting the Ku Klux Klan were quoted in the movie, and he caused a stir by viewing the film in the White House. In analyzing the extent of “southern thinking” on Woodrow Wilson, Link once wrote that Wilson’s father never wrote anything “repining for the Lost Cause.” It’s debatable whether that’s true. But in “Margaret” it’s Wilson himself who writes with a nostalgia about the Confederate days. Perhaps he was even under the influence of some of the Lost Cause novelists in writing this short story. It is true that Wilson never endorsed slavery (he said slavery had been bad for the South economically and was therefore undesirable), and said he endorsed the “Federalist” point of view. But he rejected pro-African American  policies of the Southern Reconstruction era in the decades after the war, including the very right to vote for African Americans. He was also a creature of the North, attending school and ultimately teaching in New Jersey at Princeton. His father’s siblings lived in the North, though he appears to have had little contact with them. But his heart remained southern, as this passage demonstrates. 

The story’s depiction of Dr. Pierce seems to me to be based on Ellen’s father, the Presbyterian minister Samuel Edward Axson, who himself did speak of the Confederate goals as a lost cause, according to Frances Wright Saunders in her excellent biography Ellen Axson Wilson: First Lady Between Two Worlds. Edward Axson, as he was known, attributed the failure of the South in the Civil War to “corruption in the Confederate government and people. Their cause remained noble,” Saunders wrote. She says Axson called the fall of the Confederacy “the saddest of failures,” and contrasted “the bright fancies of the past with the gloomy realizations of the dark present.” 

Reverend Axson was devastated, and despite success growing a church in Rome from a post-war nadir of 40 to 50 members to 186 in 1880, he was laid low with depression. Eventually Ellen would have to place her father in a mental hospital. It’s not surprising Wilson saw in Edward Axson an emblem of the devastation of the war. Wilson’s story continues with these remarks on Margaret’s father Dr. Pierce:

“He was drift-wood from the war, but the wood had been rotted by other influences. His early life had been spent in Savannah, whereas, after a preparation made thorough by foreign study he had nominally engaged in the practice of medicine, but really in the indulgence of his literary and social tastes … By the well-known high-grounding and the coveted wealth of his family; and he had proved his knowledge of the best ways of the world by combining family traditions and the demands of natural affection by marrying lovely woman ... It had been a sincere love match, and so long as his wife lived, his companionship inspired and his love steadied him. … She lived only eight years after this marriage -- just long enough to make herself an indispensable part of his life -- when she died in bringing Margaret, in the first child of the union, into the world. The bereavement was too much for her sensitive … husband. Without her to enjoy his favorite authors and entertain his favorite friends with him, he knew not what to do with himself. He clung passionately to his child, keeping her near him for long hours every day at the dead mother’s sister’s house where the little one was being tenderly nurtured with all but motherly care; but gradually he drifted off into desperate expedients for drowning sorrow, so that this care found Margaret but two years old and her father a drunkard.”

We don’t know that Edward Axson was a drunkard; as a minister he probably was not. But by his last days in Milledgeville Hospital in 1884, hospital records show he had a chloral habit, regularly taking the once widely-used sedative and hypnotic substance. “Slight suicidal tendency,” the Milledgeville records stated, according to Saunders. “Is disposed to be violent occasionally … Has been in the habit of taking chloral at night.” This record is one of the reasons Saunders believes he took his own life in the end. Suicide was taboo at the time, so no one talked about it directly in the surviving letters and other documents. But, Saunders says, there is much more evidence to suggest he did take his life than evidence to the contrary. For example, Ellen received a letter from the Reverend Morgan Palmer, a cousin from New Orleans, that read: “The place and manner of your father’s death are inexpressibly sad … It was a dark cloud which had settled upon his reason.” Saunders adds, “During the last two months in Milledgeville, Edward was terribly depressed, and, in view of his generally sound physical health, his death was sudden.” After his death, Ellen almost broke off the engagement to Woodrow. “He came to comfort her,” Saunders writes, “and was heartbroken when Ellen, because of the doctrinal disgrace related to her father’s death, tried to break their engagement. Only Woodrow’s ardent importunities ‘overrode her scruples.’” The quote is attributed to Stockton Axson, Ellen’s brother.

Back to the story. Wilson exercises a little imagination as he describes Margaret’s father as a surgeon during the war: 

“The war scarcely stayed his dissipations. He entered the army as surgeon and displayed throughout the four fiery years of the great struggle; such courage and faithfulness as entitled him to honour along with the most courageous and faithful of his followers in arms; but his coolness and daring in the face of the hurtling and whistling dangers of the battlefield had a dash of fearlessness … Rations served out to him satisfied him so little as the liquor. For every catastrophe of the dreadful strife was plunging him into deeper desolation. It seemed to him that every [illegible] of the carnage went straight to the heart of his own family. His aged father and both of his brothers fell in battle. His sister died from the hardships of refugeeship. His fortune was … utterly out of existence for it was commercial and invested only in the South. The end found him the only representation for his family -- with no named relation within reach other than the sister-in-law -- herself now involved in the common ruins -- with whom to stand in the new struggle, against the struggle for [hunger]. He knew that he could not support his child amidst the temptation of a town; [he] fled both his old haunts and his old vision and buried himself in the country on a very small farm, who had ones bear a neglected -- almost forgotten -- part of his property but which was now all … that remained. He hoped here to eke out a support as a farmer … with the ... sparsely settled country-side where his few acres lay.”

That is where the fragment ends. Perhaps he lost interest as his story got further from its origin in Samuel Edward Axson, who for one thing left his children what today would be more than $300,000. We don’t know exactly when Wilson wrote the story.  He wrote his other short story in 1886 while he was a professor of young women at Bryn Mawr University, complaining that he wished he were teaching boys and dreaming of a literary career. 1886 is also the year he named his first daughter Margaret. It’s unclear which was named after which. If he wrote the story “Margaret” then, his story was informed by the tragic end of Edward Axson’s life. In any case, it was informed by a deep sympathy for the cause of the South. That sympathy contributed both to his racism and to his politics as president.