The Sun.
London, England, 1863-06-11 00:00:00

THE CONFEDERATE STATES.

(Flom the Special Correspondent of the Times.)
RICHMOND, May 17.

As every incident in relation to" Stonewall" Jack-
son cannot fail at this moment to be interesting
wherever the English tongue is spoken, I will briefly
add to my former letter the following gleanings,
gathered in anticipation of a forthcoming "Life"
which the publie expects from a competent hand.

Thomas Jefferson Jackson was born in Western
Virginia in January, 1824. His great-grandfather
and great-grandmother were both English. His
father, who had been in comfortable circumstances,
became involved towards the end of his life, and
left four or five children,of whom our hero was the
eldest, in straitened circumstances. " Stonewall"
Jackson received the ph in amid limited English edu-
cation whiEh may be supposed to be within the
reach-of the sparse agricultural population of West-
tern Virginia, and which cannot have amounted to
much more than instruction in reading and writing.
The great event of his life was his appointment, at
the age of nearly 19 ;years, to the United States
Military Academy at West Point, through the in-
terest of a member of Congress representing his
district. It is customary for students to enter West
Point at the age of 16, so that Jackson was nearly
three years senior to most of his associates. He is
described to me by a classmate as having journeyed
most of the way from Western Virginia to West
Point on foot, in a suit of the coarsest homespun
cloth and in the roughest of country shoes, and as
having been simple and modest, but, at the same
time, one of the most uncouth and ungainly boys
that ever entered the academy. His restricted op-
portunities and lifelong residence in a remote coun-
try district placed him at a great disadvantage
in comparison with the sons of wealthier fathers,
forced in the hotbeds of large towns, and to whom
Jackson was at first an unfailing source of jest
and amusement. But it was not long before his pa-

tient, self-denying, and indomitable perseverance
extorted admiration from his compeers as well as
from his masters, and it was found that he would
never leave one lesson or recitation until he had
thoroughly mastered it, not even feign to possess
knowledge which he had not entirely acquired.
Again and again, when called upon to answer ques-
tions in the recitation of the day, he would reply
"1 have not as yet looked at it; I have been en-
gaged in mastering th© recitation of yesterday or
the day before." The result was that he graduated
17th in a class of 70, at 'the head of which class
graduated, I believe, General M'Clellan. There
was probably, in the whole class, not a boy to whom
Jackson at the outset was not inferior in knowledge
and attainments; at the end of the race he had only
16 before him, and had outstripped no less than 53.
It used constantly to be laughingly said by his con-
temporaries that if the course had bees for 10 years,
instead of four, Jackson would have graduated
at the head of his class. It was in speaking of a
pupil of this character that Dr. Arnold once said,
"I would stard to that boy hat in hand. It
would be difficult for Mr. Smiles to find a more
appropriate addition to the gallery which he has
thrown open to the public by his work entitled
Self-Help than the portrait of " Stonewall" Jackson.

It is not necessary that I should follow him
through the Mfxican war, of which the endless
stories and details of American soldiers fail to
inspire interest for the European. I believe that
in that war he gained as many steps as any of his
brother officers, and was favourably noticed as an
excellent artillerist. He quitted the United States'
army upon receiving the appointment of Professor
of Chemistry in the Military Academy of the State
of Virginia at Lexington. To this academy he
became ardently attached, and here he passed ten
years of his modest and unobtrusive life, taking
great interest in the pursuits of his professorship
and in the natural sciences, though never becoming,
in the European sense, a deeply read or scientific
man. His health was not strong, and, according to
the general idea, he was fanciful about himself.
After the death of his first wife he visited Europe,
running through it, apparently, in the hot haste
which is so characteristic of Americans, and de-
voting to the task of sight seeing in London the
same energy which he subsequently carried into the
field against the Federals. He told me that it was
his habit to give 16 hours a day to " doing London,"
commencing at 5 in the morning, and keeping it
up until 9at night. Eut his chief delight was in
the cathedrals of England, and notably in West-
minster Abbey and York Minster. He was never

tired of talking about them, or listening to details
about the chapels and cloisters of Oxford.

Upon the outbreak of this gigantic war he imme-
diately offered his services to the State of Virginia,
and received his first commission from his friend
and fellow-townsman, Governor Letcher. There
were many other professors and magnates of Lex-
ington Academy from whom great things were ex-
pected; few people, if any, thought that the silent,
shy, reserved Jackson would fill Europe no less
than America with his fame, and that while none
of his Lexington rivals would gain a name which
has survived for two years, his would be prominent
in song and story for two centuries. This is not
the place to review his military career, or to recapi-
tulate his brilliant campaigns in the Valley, when
he fought and worsted almost simultaneously three
Federal armies under Generals Shields, Fremont,
and Banks, each of these armies being larger and
infinitely better equipped than the Confederate force
under Jackson. Neither is this the place to dwell
upon his march into the Valley and his rapid
descent upon the bewildered M'Clellan's flank,
which initiated the battles around Richmond; his
passage through Thoroughfare Gap, and onslaught
upon General Pope's rear; and, last and most terrible
of all, his operations against the flank and rear of
General Hooker on the 2d of May. In none of
these hazardous movements was he ever thwarted
or disconcerted by his opponents ; in none did he
ever fail to realize the most unhoped-for suc-
cess. His want of communicativeness, and his
habit of trusting to no one, but gaining important
and not through the
report informationofan by e m
ihisown
sea
ry, eyes,
made
him at times unpopu-
lar
with some of his officers ; but as the war ad-
vanced he began to be their idol, as he was at all
times the idol of his rank and file. It was felt that,
if he called upon both men and officers to make un-
paralleled exertions, there was no one in the army
whom he spared so little as himself. Anything
happier than the relations between himself and
Generals Lee and Longstreet cannot be conceived.
His confidence in the admiration of General Lee
amounted almost to idolatry,
Upou that fatal Sunday which will long be me-
morable as the gloomiest day which the Confederacy
has seen since the Federal evacuation of Fort Sumter,
his chaplain left him in the morning to go and per-
form service before the men. His text was suggested
by General Jackson, and taken from Romans viii.
28, "We know that all things
work together for
rod to them that love God." It was one of the
General's favourite texts, and furnishes a key to the
character of his religious belief. An ardent predes-
tinarian, accepting with unquestioning faith the
issues of life, equal to any and every fortune, he had
at the same time an American's tolerance for the
dbetrines'aild faith‘of other-men:- No man in this