Stonewall Jackson entered West Point at the bottom and left it 17th
Thomas Jackson arrived at West Point in 1842 so poorly schooled he scraped through the entrance exams and started last in his class. Four years of relentless work lifted him to 17th of 59. Classmates reckoned one more year would have put him first. Two decades later he was the Confederacy's most celebrated tactician.
His ancestry began in a London courtroom. His great-grandfather John Jackson, an Ulster-Scots Protestant, and Elizabeth Cummins, a Londoner nearly six feet tall, were each convicted of theft and sentenced to transportation; they met aboard the convict ship Litchfield, which left London in May 1749, and fell in love before reaching Maryland. The family later pushed west into what is now West Virginia, acquiring large tracts of land, and John fought at Kings Mountain in 1780.
Thomas was born on January 21, 1824, in Clarksburg, though a marker in Parkersburg claims the honour. Childhood was bleak. Typhoid killed his sister in 1826 and his father, a lawyer with gambling debts, soon after. His widowed mother supported the children by sewing and teaching in a one-room house, remarried a harsh man, and died when Thomas was young. He grew up largely with a half-uncle, Cummins Jackson, at a grist mill, tending sheep, driving oxen and educating himself. He traded reading lessons to one of his uncle's slaves in exchange for pine knots to read by, breaking Virginia law; once literate, the young man escaped to Canada on the Underground Railroad.
Commissioned into the 1st U.S. Artillery, Jackson fought in Mexico at Veracruz, Contreras and Chapultepec, won two brevet promotions and first met Robert E. Lee there. He then spent the decade from 1851 on the faculty of the Virginia Military Institute. Once Virginia left the Union he joined the Confederate army, and at First Bull Run in July 1861 his brigade held against a Union assault, prompting Barnard Bee's stone wall comparison.
Military historians rank him among the most gifted tactical commanders the United States has produced. On May 2, 1863, his own pickets shot him by mistake; his left arm was amputated and he died of pneumonia on May 10, a heavy blow to the South. His reputation then took on a legendary glow within the pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology. The war split his own family: his once-close sister Laura, a firm Unionist, said she would prefer him dead than leading rebels.
Source: Stonewall Jackson
