Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson was born 200 years ago on this day in history, January 21, 1824, in Clarksburg, Virginia (now West Virginia). Fatherless at the age of two, and an orphan by the age of seven, Tom Jackson went on attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and then served with distinction in the Mexican-American War. It was in 1849 that Jackson was baptized by an Episcopal minister. In 1851, he was appointed to the position of Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, or Physics, and Instructor of Artillery at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. He also joined the Lexington Presbyterian Church that same year, and would later serve the church as a deacon. He also led a Sabbath school class for African-Americans in Lexington, both free and enslaved, in defiance of a state law which opposed literacy for slaves. He married his first wife, Elinor (“Ellie”) Junkin, daughter of George Junkin, in 1853, but she died shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child the following year. He married Mary Anna Morrison, daughter of Robert Hall Morrison, in 1857. The couple had one child who survived infancy, Julia Jackson, born in 1862.
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