Woodrow & Edith…Love in the White House
Excerpts from 250 Letters between Woodrow Wilson and Edith Galt
In the spring of 1915 when the United States was moving toward involvement in a world war, President Woodrow Wilson was caught up in an all-consuming love affair with Edith Bolling Galt, a widow and owner of Galt Bros., a prestigious jewelry store in Washington, DC.
Early in his first term as President, Wilson’s first wife died on August 6, 1914, just as the war was beginning. They had been married for 29 years, and even though he loved her dearly and depended on her more than any other person, Ellen Axson Wilson knew after her death that her Woodrow could not live without love. The day before she died, she made her doctor promise to tell Woodrow to marry again. Ellen knew him well. In 1899 he had written Ellen of the “riotous element in my blood” and to “my intensely passionate nature.” Woodrow wrote in a letter dated February 14, 1899, “I am particularly susceptible to feminine beauty and to all feminine attractions.”
After Ellen’s death, Wilson seemed inconsolable. He wrote of his “intolerable loneliness and isolation.” It was March when he met Edith, sixteen years his junior. She is described as a woman of beauty and charm. She was a “fine figure of a woman” - 5 feet 9 inches tall with blue/grey eyes and luxurious dark hair. Wilson was smitten immediately. Edith was first invited to the White House to dinner on March 23, 1915, and accepted many more invitations to the White House. The President and Mrs. Galt had an instant rapport. On May 4th, Woodrow asked Edith to marry him. Their love story is one for the ages from the first letter written on April 28, 1915, until they were married on December 18, 1915. Their love letters show the progression of their romantic relationship.
President Woodrow Wilson Love Letter to Edith Bolling Galt dated May 5, 2015
God has indeed been good to me to bring such a creature as you into my life. Every glimpse I am permitted to get of the secret depths of you I find them deeper and purer and more beautiful than I knew or had dreamed of. If you cannot give me all that I want – what my heart finds it hard to breathe without- it is because I am not worthy. I know instinctively you could give it if I were- and if you understood, - understood the boy’s heart that is in me and simplicity of my need, which you could fill so that all my days could be radiant.” …What you have given me is inestimable, precious to me beyond words, beautiful and a very fountain of happiness.” I wish you would come to me without reserve and make my strength complete.
Whatever happens, you will have the companionship, the gratitude, the loyalty and the devoted, romantic love of
Your devoted Friend
Woodrow Wilson
Edith’s Letter to Woodrow May 6, 2015
My Precious One,
Remember when you are sitting silent and with Presidential Presbyterian air in church tomorrow that just a few squares away, there is someone who loves you, who says a fervent prayer for “all in authority” and who longs to have you with her where she can turn to find, in your dear eyes, the answer to so much that is in her heart….
Always,
Edith
The beginning of the Presidential Love Affair...
April 28, 1915 President
My dear Mrs. Galt,
I ordered a copy of Hamerton’s Round my House through the bookseller, but while we are waiting for it I take the liberty of sending you a copy from the Congressional Library. I hope it will give you pleasure – you have given me so much.
If it rains this evening, would it be any pleasure for you to come around a have a little reading.
Your sincere and grateful friend,
Woodrow Wilson
Edith
My dear Mr. President,
How good of you to remember my desire to read Round My House and take the trouble to send to the Congressional Library to gratify me.
I am very tired tonight and can think of nothing more restful than to come and have you read to us- but I have promised my dear mother to spend this evening with her. So I must not yield to the impulse to come.
Just a word more to tell you how deeply I value the assurance with which you sent your note and makes April 28th a red letter day on my calendar.
Faithfully and proudly, your friend,
Edith Bolling Galt
May 4th after dinner at the White House, The President asked Mrs. Galt to marry him.
Edith was surprised and told him they did not know each other well enough. She felt she needed time to know her own mind.
In a letter later that evening…
May 4 Edith
It is past midnight, I have been looking out into the night sky ever since you went away. My whole being is awake and vibrant.
I wish you were here so I could talk to you – for then I know you would understand. But I will try to tell you. How I want to help! What an unspeakable pleasure and privilege I deem it to be allowed to share these tense, terrible days of responsibility, how I thrill to my very fingertips when I remember the tremendous thing you said to me tonight, and how pitifully poor I am to have nothing to offer you in return. Nothing in proportion to your own great gift.
I am a woman and the thought that you have need of me is sweet.
You have been honest with me and perhaps I was too frank with you, but if so, please forgive me.
Dear kindred spirit, I send my spirit to seek yours. Make it a welcome guest.
EBG
May 5 The President
God has indeed been good to me to bring such a creature as you into my life. Every glimpse I am permitted to get of the secret depths of you I find them deeper and purer and more beautiful than I knew or had dreamed of. If you cannot give me all that I want – what my heart finds it hard to breathe without- it is because I am not worthy. I know instinctively you could give it if I were- and if you understood, - understood the boy’s heart that is in me and simplicity of my need, which you could fill so that all my days could be radiant. …What you have given me is inestimable, precious to me beyond words, beautiful and a very fountain of happiness. I wish you would come to me without reserve and make my strength complete.
Whatever happens, you will have the companionship, the gratitude, the loyalty and the devoted, romantic love of
Your devoted Friend
Woodrow Wilson
May 6 Edith
My Precious One,
Remember when you are sitting silent and with Presidential Presbyterian air in church tomorrow that just a few squares away, there is someone who loves you, who says a fervent prayer for “all in authority” and who longs to have you with her where she can turn to find, in your dear eyes, the answer to so much that is in her heart.
Always,
Edith
Although Edith and Woodrow were seeing each other almost daily, her uncertainty about their relationship is quite evident based on his letter.
May 9 President
You must take as long a time as you need to accept in your heart the fact of my love, “holding it in tender hands,” as you so sweetly phrase it, but you must accept it as a fact. Why would the fact of my deep love for you be even for a moment strange or incredible to you? You are altogether lovely…And why should you thank me for speaking to you the other day of the great problems I am facing these terrible days. If I could but have you at my side to pour my thoughts out to about them, I would thank God and take courage and bless you that you cared and comprehended and gave me leave to make you my confidante! You must be conscious that your mind and spirit are the perfect mates of mine, that our thoughts and instincts and affection for one another suit and complete one another as the light and the flame. I need you. I need you as a boy needs his sweetheart and a strong man his helpmate and heart’s comrade. I love you, with a love as pure as it is irresistible, which exists for your sake. I love you, not myself.
May 10 Edith
In ten minutes I am leaving my house to come and have a minute alone with you, I am going to try hard to make you understand and not be disheartened or hurt. I must tell you the truth and together, we will trust the future.
We both deserve the right to try, and if you, with your wonderful love can quicken that which has lain dead for so long within me, I promise not to shut it out of my heart, but to bid it welcome and come to you with the joy of it in my eyes.
On the other hand, if I am dead, which I believe I am, you will not blame me if my pulse refuses to be in unison with yours.
May 11 President
It has been a week of self-revelation for both of us, since I poured my love out to you in the half-light there where we sat in the still evening and I found the sweet lady I spoke to a prisoner in her own thoughts, and now you are awake and free! My heart echoes every syllable of what you have written and knows what was unspoken.
I have looked in your eyes, dear, while the veil was over them, until I was fairly faint with thirst. The veil is not over them now, for you are awake and I love you beyond measure, God bless you! We shall help each other henceforth, whether we can touch hands or not.
May 20th Edith After returning from being on the Mayflower for a week with the President’s party
Oh! To be with you tonight, my precious one, to put my arms around you and hold you close and tell you how long the day has been without you. You have been so vitally before me that I lose the sense of being alone and I find myself turning to welcome your coming if there is a noise or motion in the house.
I meant to begin my letter to you tonight by telling you how wonderful the exquisite orchids are. I have never had an entire box of these lovely things, I indeed feel like a Princess in such loveliness.
June 4 President
My Dear Sweetheart,
No indeed, it is no dream. It was a dream, my dream, but it came true—and how completely and gloriously! It is a calendar month today since I told you of my love for you, and told you because it had taken possession of me and I could not hold back. And now! It is almost incredible that such a wonderful and ideal thing could happen in a single month, but it was a lovers’ month, the happy month of May, when many wonders come to pass and everything is recreated. Now you love me and are all the world to me. I lack nothing but to be with you always.
Edith
I am so happy that I cannot go to sleep until I tell you- What a sort of dream evening this has been—so radiant were the hours and how completely you filled them.
These first days of June have been so crowded with joy that my heart can have no more- I must talk to you and make you feel how splendidly I love you. Each time we are together, Dearest, you seem more completely to fill my need and to simulate and awaken every emotion.
June 20 President
You are my ideal companion, the close and delightful chum of my mind. You are my perfect playmate, with whom everything that is gay and mirthful and imaginative in me is at its best. You are the sweetest lover in the world, full of delicacy and charm and tenderness and all the wonders of self revelation which only makes you the more lovely the more complete it is. You match and satisfy every part of me, grave or gay, of the mind or of the heart, - the man of letters, the man of affairs, the boy, the poet, the lover. When you are mine for every day, I shall be complete and strong and happy indeed.
With the horror of the war pressing in on the United States, Congress enacted an increased armament program. The fighting in Europe is continuing and more American lives are lost. The President decided that the country should embark on a military preparedness program.
July President
This morning I have a very solemn sense of the momentous decision I have made and of all the consequences which may be involved for this great country we love and for the millions of people in it who so generously trust me and so confidently depend on me to keep them out of the horror of this war. Cannot my Darling pray for me that I may be guided, and all things overruled for the good of the world. I will be willing to sacrifice myself at any time, but how can any man think with even tolerable composure about sacrificing millions of his fellow men to his own individual, almost unaided judgment. In the midst of all these anxieties and perplexities, my precious Darling, one light burns steadily for me, and that is the light of your dear love. I never needed you more than I do at this moment.
Edith
Dearest One,
Bless your precious heart! How I wish I could really be the help you say I am. Never before did I long for the wisdom of a well-informed mind for then I could be a staff for you to lean on-but if a keen sympathy and comprehension can lift the burden even a little bit, then I am a help to the wisest and dearest person in the world.
July was the month for all of Washington to take a vacation. Woodrow vacationed at the President’s Cottage in Cornish, New Hampshire. Edith with Helen Bones visited on weekends.
July 20 President
My adorable Sweetheart,
It was cruelly hard to drive away from the house on Sunday and leave you standing there in the doorway as if you were not part of me and I were not leaving my inspiration and real life behind me. You are everything to me. Without you I am imperfect. You are my ideal companion. You match every part of me, of the mind and of the heart- the man of letters, the man of affairs, the boy, the poet, the lover. When you are mine every day, I shall be complete and strong and happy indeed.
These days of heartbreaking responsibility, on which each twenty-four hours seem to count more than a decade of an ordinary lifetime, are binding us so closely together by every kind of tie that someday we shall be grateful for them and look back to them as the days when we really read on another’s souls and knew that love and sympathy and comprehension had grown perfect between us. It is my strength that you love me. I cannot for a moment be wholly happy while separate from you.
Edith
My Precious Sweetheart,
There are so many things I want to say first that I can’t decide where to begin, but as a preliminary I will ease my heart by saying that which is dearest in the world- I love you and am utterly lonely without you, Oh, how hard it was so let you get in the car and drive off this afternoon. All the love in me cried out that you needed me, and I wanted to go- to stay with you-and say to the world how proud I am that that is my place.
By September gossip in Washington is rampant about their relationship and Wilson was being criticized for neglecting his duties and devoting too much time to Mrs. Galt. In September Woodrow and Edith decide to announce their engagement. He is eager to make their happiness known while she is much more hesitant because she dreads the publicity.
After an evening when The President is discussing the announcement with Helen Bones, seemingly ignoring Edith, she lets him know how she feels.
September 30 Edith
I was cross and half sick last night, because you and Helen decided when to put the announcement in the paper “without even a word to me-and frankly, it hurt my feelings and made me feel I was treated as a child. I am so tired of having to ask people things and now we have to ask for permission to announce our engagement. I have never had to ask permission to do things in my whole life. I have just done them and that ended it. And I have seldom even discussed what I was going to do. If I did not love you, I would be off with the bit in my teeth and showing a clean pair of heels to anyone who tried to catch me.” Play golf this afternoon and know that I still love you enough to walk up to the harness and put it on though I may kick it all to pieces if you don’t know the trick of handling the ribbons so as to guide without my knowing it…
Always your own,
Edith
October 4th Two days before the announcement of their engagement in the newspaper….
President
It is five months today, my Sweetheart since I told you of the great love for you that had come into my heart and asked you to be my wife-only five months and yet I seem to have known and loved you always. …We have not lived lightly, my Darling. With a great price we have bought this supreme happiness. It has been tested by fire, and has come out refined and purged. We know ourselves and we know one another better than it would have been possible to learn them by the experience of any ordinary five years or any commonplace lifetime. I loved you, my Edith, that May evening when I first opened my heart to you; but now I know that that was but the beginning of my love. It has grown like a great tide of life and joy until now I know that my whole destiny is centered in you my sweet, sweet love, my incomparable Darling.
December 9 One of the last letters Edith wrote to the President who was making a speech in Columbus, Ohio
Edith
My Own Precious One-
I am sending this little message of inexpressible love to greet you tomorrow morning when you are so many miles away. I will miss you these next two days. But don’t be blue, We are not really apart. And Saturday will soon be here. And then, NO MORE JOURNEYS.
With all my love
Your Own, Edith
Edith and Woodrow were married on December 18, 1915, in her house on Twentieth Street in Washington, DC, with 50 friends and relatives attending. Woodrow and Edith spent two glorious weeks at the Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, before returning to Washington and the arduous tasks that awaited them.
Excerpts from 250 Letters between Woodrow Wilson and Edith Galt
In the spring of 1915 when the United States was moving toward involvement in a world war, President Woodrow Wilson was caught up in an all-consuming love affair with Edith Bolling Galt, a widow and owner of Galt Bros., a prestigious jewelry store in Washington, DC.
Early in his first term as President, Wilson’s first wife died on August 6, 1914, just as the war was beginning. They had been married for 29 years, and even though he loved her dearly and depended on her more than any other person, Ellen Axson Wilson knew after her death that her Woodrow could not live without love. The day before she died, she made her doctor promise to tell Woodrow to marry again. Ellen knew him well. In 1899 he had written Ellen of the “riotous element in my blood” and to “my intensely passionate nature.” Woodrow wrote in a letter dated February 14, 1899, “I am particularly susceptible to feminine beauty and to all feminine attractions.”
After Ellen’s death, Wilson seemed inconsolable. He wrote of his “intolerable loneliness and isolation.” It was March when he met Edith, sixteen years his junior. She is described as a woman of beauty and charm. She was a “fine figure of a woman” - 5 feet 9 inches tall with blue/grey eyes and luxurious dark hair. Wilson was smitten immediately. Edith was first invited to the White House to dinner on March 23, 1915, and accepted many more invitations to the White House. The President and Mrs. Galt had an instant rapport. On May 4th, Woodrow asked Edith to marry him. Their love story is one for the ages from the first letter written on April 28, 1915, until they were married on December 18, 1915. Their love letters show the progression of their romantic relationship.
President Woodrow Wilson Love Letter to Edith Bolling Galt dated May 5, 2015
God has indeed been good to me to bring such a creature as you into my life. Every glimpse I am permitted to get of the secret depths of you I find them deeper and purer and more beautiful than I knew or had dreamed of. If you cannot give me all that I want – what my heart finds it hard to breathe without- it is because I am not worthy. I know instinctively you could give it if I were- and if you understood, - understood the boy’s heart that is in me and simplicity of my need, which you could fill so that all my days could be radiant.” …What you have given me is inestimable, precious to me beyond words, beautiful and a very fountain of happiness.” I wish you would come to me without reserve and make my strength complete.
Whatever happens, you will have the companionship, the gratitude, the loyalty and the devoted, romantic love of
Your devoted Friend
Woodrow Wilson
Edith’s Letter to Woodrow May 6, 2015
My Precious One,
Remember when you are sitting silent and with Presidential Presbyterian air in church tomorrow that just a few squares away, there is someone who loves you, who says a fervent prayer for “all in authority” and who longs to have you with her where she can turn to find, in your dear eyes, the answer to so much that is in her heart….
Always,
Edith
The beginning of the Presidential Love Affair...
April 28, 1915 President
My dear Mrs. Galt,
I ordered a copy of Hamerton’s Round my House through the bookseller, but while we are waiting for it I take the liberty of sending you a copy from the Congressional Library. I hope it will give you pleasure – you have given me so much.
If it rains this evening, would it be any pleasure for you to come around a have a little reading.
Your sincere and grateful friend,
Woodrow Wilson
Edith
My dear Mr. President,
How good of you to remember my desire to read Round My House and take the trouble to send to the Congressional Library to gratify me.
I am very tired tonight and can think of nothing more restful than to come and have you read to us- but I have promised my dear mother to spend this evening with her. So I must not yield to the impulse to come.
Just a word more to tell you how deeply I value the assurance with which you sent your note and makes April 28th a red letter day on my calendar.
Faithfully and proudly, your friend,
Edith Bolling Galt
May 4th after dinner at the White House, The President asked Mrs. Galt to marry him.
Edith was surprised and told him they did not know each other well enough. She felt she needed time to know her own mind.
In a letter later that evening…
May 4 Edith
It is past midnight, I have been looking out into the night sky ever since you went away. My whole being is awake and vibrant.
I wish you were here so I could talk to you – for then I know you would understand. But I will try to tell you. How I want to help! What an unspeakable pleasure and privilege I deem it to be allowed to share these tense, terrible days of responsibility, how I thrill to my very fingertips when I remember the tremendous thing you said to me tonight, and how pitifully poor I am to have nothing to offer you in return. Nothing in proportion to your own great gift.
I am a woman and the thought that you have need of me is sweet.
You have been honest with me and perhaps I was too frank with you, but if so, please forgive me.
Dear kindred spirit, I send my spirit to seek yours. Make it a welcome guest.
EBG
May 5 The President
God has indeed been good to me to bring such a creature as you into my life. Every glimpse I am permitted to get of the secret depths of you I find them deeper and purer and more beautiful than I knew or had dreamed of. If you cannot give me all that I want – what my heart finds it hard to breathe without- it is because I am not worthy. I know instinctively you could give it if I were- and if you understood, - understood the boy’s heart that is in me and simplicity of my need, which you could fill so that all my days could be radiant. …What you have given me is inestimable, precious to me beyond words, beautiful and a very fountain of happiness. I wish you would come to me without reserve and make my strength complete.
Whatever happens, you will have the companionship, the gratitude, the loyalty and the devoted, romantic love of
Your devoted Friend
Woodrow Wilson
May 6 Edith
My Precious One,
Remember when you are sitting silent and with Presidential Presbyterian air in church tomorrow that just a few squares away, there is someone who loves you, who says a fervent prayer for “all in authority” and who longs to have you with her where she can turn to find, in your dear eyes, the answer to so much that is in her heart.
Always,
Edith
Although Edith and Woodrow were seeing each other almost daily, her uncertainty about their relationship is quite evident based on his letter.
May 9 President
You must take as long a time as you need to accept in your heart the fact of my love, “holding it in tender hands,” as you so sweetly phrase it, but you must accept it as a fact. Why would the fact of my deep love for you be even for a moment strange or incredible to you? You are altogether lovely…And why should you thank me for speaking to you the other day of the great problems I am facing these terrible days. If I could but have you at my side to pour my thoughts out to about them, I would thank God and take courage and bless you that you cared and comprehended and gave me leave to make you my confidante! You must be conscious that your mind and spirit are the perfect mates of mine, that our thoughts and instincts and affection for one another suit and complete one another as the light and the flame. I need you. I need you as a boy needs his sweetheart and a strong man his helpmate and heart’s comrade. I love you, with a love as pure as it is irresistible, which exists for your sake. I love you, not myself.
May 10 Edith
In ten minutes I am leaving my house to come and have a minute alone with you, I am going to try hard to make you understand and not be disheartened or hurt. I must tell you the truth and together, we will trust the future.
We both deserve the right to try, and if you, with your wonderful love can quicken that which has lain dead for so long within me, I promise not to shut it out of my heart, but to bid it welcome and come to you with the joy of it in my eyes.
On the other hand, if I am dead, which I believe I am, you will not blame me if my pulse refuses to be in unison with yours.
May 11 President
It has been a week of self-revelation for both of us, since I poured my love out to you in the half-light there where we sat in the still evening and I found the sweet lady I spoke to a prisoner in her own thoughts, and now you are awake and free! My heart echoes every syllable of what you have written and knows what was unspoken.
I have looked in your eyes, dear, while the veil was over them, until I was fairly faint with thirst. The veil is not over them now, for you are awake and I love you beyond measure, God bless you! We shall help each other henceforth, whether we can touch hands or not.
May 20th Edith After returning from being on the Mayflower for a week with the President’s party
Oh! To be with you tonight, my precious one, to put my arms around you and hold you close and tell you how long the day has been without you. You have been so vitally before me that I lose the sense of being alone and I find myself turning to welcome your coming if there is a noise or motion in the house.
I meant to begin my letter to you tonight by telling you how wonderful the exquisite orchids are. I have never had an entire box of these lovely things, I indeed feel like a Princess in such loveliness.
June 4 President
My Dear Sweetheart,
No indeed, it is no dream. It was a dream, my dream, but it came true—and how completely and gloriously! It is a calendar month today since I told you of my love for you, and told you because it had taken possession of me and I could not hold back. And now! It is almost incredible that such a wonderful and ideal thing could happen in a single month, but it was a lovers’ month, the happy month of May, when many wonders come to pass and everything is recreated. Now you love me and are all the world to me. I lack nothing but to be with you always.
Edith
I am so happy that I cannot go to sleep until I tell you- What a sort of dream evening this has been—so radiant were the hours and how completely you filled them.
These first days of June have been so crowded with joy that my heart can have no more- I must talk to you and make you feel how splendidly I love you. Each time we are together, Dearest, you seem more completely to fill my need and to simulate and awaken every emotion.
June 20 President
You are my ideal companion, the close and delightful chum of my mind. You are my perfect playmate, with whom everything that is gay and mirthful and imaginative in me is at its best. You are the sweetest lover in the world, full of delicacy and charm and tenderness and all the wonders of self revelation which only makes you the more lovely the more complete it is. You match and satisfy every part of me, grave or gay, of the mind or of the heart, - the man of letters, the man of affairs, the boy, the poet, the lover. When you are mine for every day, I shall be complete and strong and happy indeed.
With the horror of the war pressing in on the United States, Congress enacted an increased armament program. The fighting in Europe is continuing and more American lives are lost. The President decided that the country should embark on a military preparedness program.
July President
This morning I have a very solemn sense of the momentous decision I have made and of all the consequences which may be involved for this great country we love and for the millions of people in it who so generously trust me and so confidently depend on me to keep them out of the horror of this war. Cannot my Darling pray for me that I may be guided, and all things overruled for the good of the world. I will be willing to sacrifice myself at any time, but how can any man think with even tolerable composure about sacrificing millions of his fellow men to his own individual, almost unaided judgment. In the midst of all these anxieties and perplexities, my precious Darling, one light burns steadily for me, and that is the light of your dear love. I never needed you more than I do at this moment.
Edith
Dearest One,
Bless your precious heart! How I wish I could really be the help you say I am. Never before did I long for the wisdom of a well-informed mind for then I could be a staff for you to lean on-but if a keen sympathy and comprehension can lift the burden even a little bit, then I am a help to the wisest and dearest person in the world.
July was the month for all of Washington to take a vacation. Woodrow vacationed at the President’s Cottage in Cornish, New Hampshire. Edith with Helen Bones visited on weekends.
July 20 President
My adorable Sweetheart,
It was cruelly hard to drive away from the house on Sunday and leave you standing there in the doorway as if you were not part of me and I were not leaving my inspiration and real life behind me. You are everything to me. Without you I am imperfect. You are my ideal companion. You match every part of me, of the mind and of the heart- the man of letters, the man of affairs, the boy, the poet, the lover. When you are mine every day, I shall be complete and strong and happy indeed.
These days of heartbreaking responsibility, on which each twenty-four hours seem to count more than a decade of an ordinary lifetime, are binding us so closely together by every kind of tie that someday we shall be grateful for them and look back to them as the days when we really read on another’s souls and knew that love and sympathy and comprehension had grown perfect between us. It is my strength that you love me. I cannot for a moment be wholly happy while separate from you.
Edith
My Precious Sweetheart,
There are so many things I want to say first that I can’t decide where to begin, but as a preliminary I will ease my heart by saying that which is dearest in the world- I love you and am utterly lonely without you, Oh, how hard it was so let you get in the car and drive off this afternoon. All the love in me cried out that you needed me, and I wanted to go- to stay with you-and say to the world how proud I am that that is my place.
By September gossip in Washington is rampant about their relationship and Wilson was being criticized for neglecting his duties and devoting too much time to Mrs. Galt. In September Woodrow and Edith decide to announce their engagement. He is eager to make their happiness known while she is much more hesitant because she dreads the publicity.
After an evening when The President is discussing the announcement with Helen Bones, seemingly ignoring Edith, she lets him know how she feels.
September 30 Edith
I was cross and half sick last night, because you and Helen decided when to put the announcement in the paper “without even a word to me-and frankly, it hurt my feelings and made me feel I was treated as a child. I am so tired of having to ask people things and now we have to ask for permission to announce our engagement. I have never had to ask permission to do things in my whole life. I have just done them and that ended it. And I have seldom even discussed what I was going to do. If I did not love you, I would be off with the bit in my teeth and showing a clean pair of heels to anyone who tried to catch me.” Play golf this afternoon and know that I still love you enough to walk up to the harness and put it on though I may kick it all to pieces if you don’t know the trick of handling the ribbons so as to guide without my knowing it…
Always your own,
Edith
October 4th Two days before the announcement of their engagement in the newspaper….
President
It is five months today, my Sweetheart since I told you of the great love for you that had come into my heart and asked you to be my wife-only five months and yet I seem to have known and loved you always. …We have not lived lightly, my Darling. With a great price we have bought this supreme happiness. It has been tested by fire, and has come out refined and purged. We know ourselves and we know one another better than it would have been possible to learn them by the experience of any ordinary five years or any commonplace lifetime. I loved you, my Edith, that May evening when I first opened my heart to you; but now I know that that was but the beginning of my love. It has grown like a great tide of life and joy until now I know that my whole destiny is centered in you my sweet, sweet love, my incomparable Darling.
December 9 One of the last letters Edith wrote to the President who was making a speech in Columbus, Ohio
Edith
My Own Precious One-
I am sending this little message of inexpressible love to greet you tomorrow morning when you are so many miles away. I will miss you these next two days. But don’t be blue, We are not really apart. And Saturday will soon be here. And then, NO MORE JOURNEYS.
With all my love
Your Own, Edith
Edith and Woodrow were married on December 18, 1915, in her house on Twentieth Street in Washington, DC, with 50 friends and relatives attending. Woodrow and Edith spent two glorious weeks at the Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, before returning to Washington and the arduous tasks that awaited them.
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Museum Hours
Tuesday - Saturday 10:00 am - 4:00 pm If you would like to schedule a pre-arranged tour, please email or call at least one week prior to your date to visit. Email: [email protected] Call: (276) 223-3484 |
Location
145 E. Main St., Wytheville, VA 24382 The museum is located in the heart of historic downtown Wytheville. |
Admission
There is no admission fee for individuals to visit the museum or tour the birthplace home; however, donations are greatly appreciated! Groups of 10 or more, please call ahead for information and arrangements. |
Edith bolling wilson birthplace museum
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