A miraculous coincidence: Providence, politics, and the little-remembered first engagement of Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson’s second engagement, to Edith Galt, has been written about extensively, largely because she is considered by many to have acted effectively as America’s first female president. While Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke late in his second term, she guarded him zealously, kept his condition a secret, and insisted nothing was to happen without his approval. This put her in charge, the argument goes. That’s a good story, and strangely enough it’s been told in two plays of exactly the same title, The Second Mrs. Wilson, which is even stranger when one considers the titles are a reference to an obscure play, Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. But much less often retold is the amazing story of Wilson’s engagement to his first wife, a tale of dramatic coincidence without which perhaps neither he nor his wife would have been married. Ellen Axson, after all, had sworn off men, and had plotted out a life of independence and reliance on female friendship. The story of the coincidence that led to their engagement, for all its drama, has never been made into a play. Not only that, but it didn’t even make the lengthy biopic Wilson in 1944. And it is often omitted from biographies. The story underscores something interesting about Wilson, the role of the doctrine of Providence in both his politics and his theology. That philosophy has been both lauded as one of his good characteristics and derided as emblematic of his flaws as a political thinker. Above all, the tale of his first engagement is a good yarn, maybe even for the ever-growing numbers of people, who for good reasons and for reasons on all sides of the political spectrum, can’t stand Woodrow Wilson.

“The peculiar sequence of events that culminated in Woodrow Wilson’s engagement to Ellen Axson tempts one to believe that they were later right in ascribing the result to a kind of Providence,” wrote editor Arthur Link in his Papers of Woodrow Wilson. To appreciate how unlikely the engagement meeting of Woodrow and Ellen Wilson was, one must contemplate 1883, a time before not only cell phones but also phones, a time when one wanted to write a letter to someone who was traveling, one had to send the letter without an address and hope that the letter found its recipient. Both Woodrow and Ellen were traveling for the summer in August 1883, moving from one southern town to another, hoping to meet up somewhere in the South. Their letters to each other were forwarded from town to town as they moved.

In the end, they ended up by sheer coincidence in the same town, Asheville, North Carolina, neither one knowing the other was there. In fact, Woodrow only discovered she was in town because he recognized the shape of her hair in the window of a hotel as he passed by. He must have thought he was just seeing his loved one everywhere, as people do when they are under love’s influence. But it turned out really to be her. We know this happened from a letter Wilson wrote later, in which he lamented that his wait for Ellen’s letters made him emotionally “susceptible to circumstances”:

“I need not be ashamed of being dominated by circumstances, tho’, for they are big things. Consider the arrangement of a lady’s hair, for instance: her habit in the matter is a trivial enough circumstance in itself; but if a certain little woman who is very dear to me had departed once from her usual way of coiling her hair about the back of her shapely head, it is more than probable that I should not have recognized a certain vanishing figure at the window of a certain hotel in Asheville—and what then? I couldn’t have been very happy...”

The pair, who were cousins, had met in Rome, Georgia, at the church where Ellen’s father was a pastor. Woodrow saw her and decided on the spot that she was the girl for him. Ellen, however, took longer to fall in love. In fact, when Woodrow arrived in town she was known as “Ellie the Man Hater” by her friends and family. She got that reputation because she told a friend that if she ever loved a man it would be against her will, as Frances Wright Saunders reports in her biography Ellen Axson Wilson: First Lady Between Two Worlds. Ellen had turned down at least five different young men who had proposed to her. She intended to go to art school in New York City, which she did after she became engaged to Wilson, to study painting. She had extremely close relationships with other women, including one Beth Adams, to whom she wrote the following, as reprinted in Saunders’s book:

“Now I will tell you [of two instances] when I oftenest think of you: that evening, or afternoon rather, spent in the Parlour with my head on your lap, with my eyes looking straight up in your face, seeing nothing there to lead to distrust, only all that was loving and sincere. If anyone were to tell me that the love you then expressed for me was not sincere love they could never convince me of it. I know that you enjoyed just as much as I did that sweet confidential talk. I can understand easily, dear, how I could have fallen so idiotically in love with you, but why did you fancy me?.. You are the only girl I have ever seen who I think understands me.... The next picture [of you] is one evening lying down in Carrie's room [at the Rome Female College] resting. Do you remember Mamie's disgust at our ‘sickening ways’ because we exchanged one single kiss. Then I remember looking so straight into your eyes as I kissed you goodbye and your steadfast earnest gaze in return.”

Later, after their engagement, Woodrow would tease her and call her “The Girl Who Had Never Loved.” In a love letter in Link’s Wilson papers, Wilson grilled Ellen on when she had turned from her prior attitude and fallen in love with him, and revealed that she had really only realized she loved him after leaving the site of their engagement, in Asheville:

“You knew that I loved you before I told you; didn’t you, love? Why, I had told you often enough by plain enough signs, and even by pretty plain words. …  In one of your letters you say that you did not know how much you loved me until you found how wretched it made you to have me go away (from Asheville). Then you had known before that that you loved me some? How long had you known it? Tell me all about it, if you don’t mind telling. And tell me something else: tell me what were those thoughts and opinions of the dear little stranger, your former self, (‘the girl who had never loved’) which now so amuse you and fill you with wonder? Am I asking too many questions? You need not feel bound to answer any of them, my darling.”

But their chance encounter in Asheville did lead Ellen to fall in love. Having seen her hair in the window of the Eagle Hotel in Asheville in September 1883, Wilson ran into the hotel and convinced her to stay a few days longer. He himself was only in town because he was switching trains on the way from his family vacation with his mother and brother to the first days of his PhD program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. After two days of walking around Asheville and talking, they had their first kiss. Impulsive Woodrow proposed just before he boarded the train to Baltimore. She accepted. Then he realized he did not know her ring size and ran back to the Eagle Hotel to borrow one of her rings. With it in hand, he boarded the train an unexpectedly engaged man.

Perhaps this seeming miracle in Asheville helped cement what had already been a major tenet in Wilson’s philosophy, that of Providence. After Wilson had been president, his top secretary Joe Tumulty wrote in a memoir that Wilson had confessed on the way to the Paris peace talks that resolved World War One the importance of this belief to his politics:

 "Well, Tumulty, this trip will either be the greatest success or the supremest tragedy in all history; but I believe in a Divine Providence. If I did not have faith, I should go crazy. If I thought that the direction of the affairs of this disordered world depended upon our finite intelligence, I should not know how to reason my way to sanity; but it is my faith that no body of men however they concert their power or their influence can defeat this great world enterprise, which after all is the enterprise of Divine mercy, peace and good will."

This point of view has riled observers on multiple sides of the political spectrum. Sigmund Freud, who co-wrote a psychological biography of Wilson with William C. Bullitt, quoted the above line from Tumulty’s book. He maintained Wilson was “close to psychosis” at the Paris peace talks. Freud believed Wilson had a Christ complex and that his religious views were a way of working out his relationship with his father, who had been a Presbyterian minister, as was Ellen’s father. “We have seen that submission to God and unconscious identification with Christ were the only two large conduits for his passivity to his father through which his libido was still able to run freely,” Freud and Bullitt wrote.

More recently, the conservative political science scholar Ronald J. Pestritto criticized the earliest of Wilson’s writings on providence. In his 2005 book Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, Pestritto said Wilson’s belief in the predestined nature of historical progress was Hegelian, though the writings he cited had been written when the future president was a teenager, well before he read Hegel:

“In keeping with a primary tenet of historicism, Wilson saw God’s divine plan coming to fruition on earth. … The culmination of Wilson’s battle in the final earthly victory of good over evil coincides with Hegel’s argument that the process of historical progress represents the gradual actualization of God’s divine plan on earth. … Since progress for Wilson is divinely ordained, one's participation in progress takes on the form of an obligation to God. This also means that those opposed to progressive ideas are also opposing God's plan for the earth. Wilson made clear that there can be no compromise on these matters: one is either for God or against Him, either for progress or against it. Certainly this attitude is familiar to those who study Wilson as a public figure, where Wilson was often inexplicably intransigent on issues where compromise would seem to have been the only means to at least partial success.”

Others see Wilson’s belief in Providence as a reason to embrace him, and this resulting “intransigence” as heroic resolve. The adulatory movie Wilson even ended with a laudatory reference to Providence. As the president says goodbye to his cabinet in the film, Wilson valorously utters that “I’ll even make this concession to Providence: [The League of Nations] may come about in an even better way than I proposed.” But Freud thought Wilson’s belief in Providence was a sign that he still hankered for his father’s opinion. The psychoanalyst cited this quote: “I trust,” Wilson said in 1908 while president of Princeton University, “that a kind of Providence will presently send me some sign of guidance which I shall have sight enough to perceive and interpret.”

When he spoke then of this Providence, perhaps Wilson thought of Ellen and that September day they got engaged.