Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/711

 Rh and was given charge of the department of Alabama, Mississippi and east Louisiana, where he frustrated Sherman's Mississippi expedition. With his troops, the army of Mississippi, he united with the army of Tennessee at Resaca in the spring of 1864, and on May 12 assumed command in the field, and co-operated with Johnston in the campaign against Sherman, until he was killed on Pine Mountain, near Marietta, Ga., June 14, 1864. "General Polk," writes his son, "walked to the crest of the hill, and, entirely exposed, turned himself around, as if to take a farewell view. Folding his arms across his breast, he stood intently gazing on the scene below. While he thus stood a cannon shot crashed through his breast, and opening a wide door, let free that indomitable spirit."

Lieutenant-General Thomas Jonathan Jackson was one of those rare historical characters who are claimed by all people a man of his race, almost as much as of the Confederacy. No war has produced a military celebrity more remarkable, nor one whose fame will be more enduring. He was born January 21, 1824, in Clarksburg, Va., and his parents, who were of patriotic Revolutionary stock, dying while he was but a child, he was reared and educated by his kindred in the pure and simple habits of rural life, taught in good English schools, and is described as a "diligent, plodding scholar, having a strong mind, though it was slow in development. But he was in boyhood a leader among his fellow-students in the athletic sports of the times, in which he generally managed his side of the contest so as to win the victory. By this country training he became a bold and expert rider and cultivated that spirit of daring which being held sometimes in abeyance displayed itself in his Mexican service, and then suddenly again in the Confederate war. In June, 1842, at the age of eighteen, he was appointed to a cadetship in the military academy at West Point, where,