Orgins of a Confederate Hero

The house in which Thomas J. Jackson was born on January 21, 1824, stood across the street and halfway down the block to your right. (marked with a bronze plaque). His father struggled to make ends meet and poverty marred Jackson’s childhood. Both parents died by the time Jackson was seven. He and his sister, Laura, lived with an uncle, Cummins Jackson, at Jackson’s Mill about fifteen miles south of here.

Congressman Samuel L. Hays, a kinsman and Lewis County resident, appointed Thomas Jackson to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1842; Jackson graduated in the celebrated class of 1846. He served as an artillery officer in the Mexican War and later taught at the Virginia Military Institute. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Jackson joined the Confederate army, commanding a brigade at Harpers Ferry. On July 21, 1861, Jackson led his unit at the First Battle of Manassas, where he received his famous nickname, “Stonewall.”

Jackson’s stunning tactical victories in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862 made him the Confederate’s foremost military hero. He subsequently became the most aggressive and dependable corps commander in Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. On the night of May 2, 1863, after a brilliant flank attack at Chancellorsville, Jackson reconnoitered the Union lines by moon-light and was accidentally shot by his own men. His left arm was amputated, and he died of complications eight days later. Stonewall Jackson, among the most revered of Confederate military leaders, is buried in Lexington, Virginia.

"My mother and father died when I was very young, and I had to work for my living and education both." - Thomas J. Jackson

"He has lost his left arm; but I have lost my right arm." - Gen. Robert E. Lee, on learning of Jackson's wound.

Marker is at the intersection of West Main Street and South 5th Street, on the right when traveling east on West Main Street.

Courtesy hmdb.org

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