You might have read about our recent visitors at the museum from Kosovo, Albania, and North Macedonia, who came to commemorate Woodrow Wilson for the anniversary of the Paris Peace Conference. They invited our CEO, Robin Von Seldeneck, and Staunton’s mayor to go to Skopje to take part later in the unveiling of a Woodrow Wilson statue. That got me thinking about what historical resources are available to tell us about the connections between President Wilson and Albanians.

The Smithsonian recently announced the release of millions of items online, making it one the largest free repositories of historical images. Access includes the ability to search for many archival records and scientific datasets as well.

While Woodrow Wilson was off in Paris, working on the peace negotiations with other world leaders, troubles brewed at home. The high cost of living became a common complaint over the course of 1919 as the economy felt the disruptions of war and then sudden peace. This is in the midst of the uproar over the mail bomb plot that was discussed in an earlier post.

In 1870, the following notice appeared in the Augusta Constitutionalist in Georgia. Reverend Joseph R. Wilson was finally not just teaching and preaching, but teaching theology at the Columbia Theological Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, one of the preeminent Presbyterian schools in the country. The Wilsons moved into a house provided by the school, and he did continue to preach some, at a church in town named, like all his others, First Presbyterian Church. After two years, the family built their own home, which has now been restored as the Museum of Reconstruction at the Woodrow Wilson Family Home.

In his marginal notes on a book by James E. Therold Rogers, Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1880, in shorthand:

To me the Civil War and its terrible scenes are but a memory of a short day. I have reached maturity at a time when the passions it stirred have cooled and when it is possible even for those who were actual participants in its transactions to judge its issues without heat and almost without prejudice. In this calmer period I can clearly see that the suffering of the Confederacy was an inestimable [?] blessing, that the doctrine of states rights was a danger settled, and that the abolition of slavery was, even for us, a lasting benefit.

Wilson’s own feelings might have cooled, but he still was quick to defend the South against criticism about its culture and politics before the Civil War.

n 1860, the population of Augusta County reached 27,750 people with roughly twenty percent of that population enslaved people of all ages. This is a rise from 24,600 people in 1850. Over the course of the decade, the percentage of the population enslaved remained generally the same. From the Valley of the Shadow archive, we know that just before the Civil War, 21 of the 93 households that could be identified within Staunton owned slaves. This is actually a slightly lower rate than the rest of the county, but in Staunton, the pattern was for a few families to own more people than necessary for domestic work in a typical household, as opposed to the county as a whole, where well over half of more than eight hundred slave-owning households possessed less than six people.

Here in the archives of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, we have several collections that have come to us because of their connection to other donations. The archivists took them on because of their value to research the history of the Wilson era. However, in a few cases, the collections also contain items that would be interesting to researchers working on different periods. An excellent example of this can be found in the George L. Harrison Collection.