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Essay / The Story of First Lieutenant Thomas Jonathan Jackson Robert E. Lee. Jackson was born on January 21, 1824, in Clarksburg, West Virginia. His father was a lawyer and his name was Jonathan Jackson, and his mother Julia Beckwith Neale, who had four children, Jonathan was the third child born. When he was 2 years old, his father and older sister were killed by typhoid fever. Her mother struggled to make ends meet as she was a single mother. In 1830, his mother married Blake Woodson, who did not care for her new stepchildren. Their mother died of poor health and so they went to live with their half-uncle Cummins Jackson, a flour mill owner. There, his older brother Warren took a different path and went to live with relatives on his mother's side, but he later died of tuberculosis.Say no to plagiarism. Get Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get Original Essay Cummins Jackson was strict with Thomas, Jackson admired Cummins as a school teacher. Jackson was a great help on the farm, tending sheep with the help of a sheepdog, driving herds of oxen, and helping to harvest wheat and corn. Formal education was not easy to obtain, but he attended school whenever and wherever he could. Most of Jackson's education was self-taught. One day he made a deal with one of his uncle's slaves to give him pine knots so he could take reading lessons. Thomas would stay up at night and read borrowed books using the pine knots for lighting. In Virginia, there was a law prohibiting the education of slaves. Even though it was against the law, Jackson secretly taught the slave, as he had promised. Once literate, the slave fled to Canada via the Underground Railroad. During his final years at Jackson's Mill, Thomas was a school teacher. Then he was appointed, in 1842, to the American Military Academy at West Point. After a slow start, he obtained 17th rank in his promotion and was assigned to the artillery as a second lieutenant. He joins his regiment in Mexico, where the United States is at war. He first met General Robert E. Lee during the Mexican War, who later became the commanding general of the Confederate armies, and it was there that Jackson first revealed the qualities he possessed that made him later made famous. His ability to keep a cool head and his courage in the face of enemy fire were ingenious. At the end of the fighting in Mexico, he was promoted to first lieutenant and brevet major, then assigned to the occupying forces in Mexico. Finding serving in the peacetime army tedious, he resigned his commission and became professor of artillery tactics and natural philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute in 1851. Although he worked hard in his new position , he never became a very popular or successful teacher. . A severe and shy man, he developed a reputation for eccentricity which followed him until the end of his career. His strong sense of duty and moral uprightness, as well as his great dedication to the education of cadets, earned him the mocking title "Deacon Jackson" and he was compared to Oliver Cromwell. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he had volunteered his services to the State of Virginia and was ordered to bring his VMI cadets from Lexington to Richmond. Very soon afterward he received a colonel's commission in the Virginia state forces and was subsequently charged with organizing unpaid laborers.
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