Wilson's letters to Mary were frequent and intimate, but it would have been political suicide to marry a divorcee by the post-Victorian standards of the time. On the afternoon of September 18, , Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States and a widower, wrote a brief note that he knew might change the rest of his life. The note, sent by messenger, was for Edith Boiling Galt, to whom he was secretly engaged.
The President asked her to cancel her plans to have dinner that evening at the White House, and to allow him the unusual liberty of coming to her home to discuss a matter of grave importance. Wilson had decided he must tell her, at whatever cost to their relationship, about a love affair with another woman. During the eight years that spanned his presidency of Princeton University, his governorship of New Jersey, and a part of his first term as President of the United States, Wilson had written more than two hundred intimate letters to this woman.
During seven of those years he was a married man. Who may have destroyed them continues to be a subject of speculation among Wilson scholars. Did Wilson himself dispose of them before his marriage to Edith Galt? The few extant Hulbert-to-Wilson letters and most of his to her are now being published for the first time in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson.
In any case, Wilson began writing to Mary Hulbert in February, , when he first met her at the end of a midwinter vacation that he spent without his wife in Bermuda. She was forty-four and he fifty years of age. In January, , resting again alone for a month in Bermuda, Wilson found Mary Hulbert Peck her legal name at that time to be a constant and delightful companion. After , the friendship deepened, becoming most intense during the period of his bitter academic controversy at Princeton University.
His wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, entered a period of marked depression lasting from to about Another brother, Stockton Axson, a professor of English at Princeton University, was incapacitated most of that academic year with a nervous breakdown, and in May, , Woodrow Wilson suffered a severe stroke.
