Thomas Jonathan Jackson was a major Confederate general who played much of the American Civil War, and was one of the best-known Confederate commanders after top general 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. His mother struggled to make ends meet as she was an only mother. In 1830 her 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-brother Cummins Jackson who owned a mill. There the older brother Warren took a different path and went to live with relatives on his mother's side, but later died of tuberculosis. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay Cummins Jackson was strict with Thomas, Jackson admired Cummins as a school teacher. Jackson was a good helper on the farm, tending sheep with the assistance of a sheep dog, driving herds of oxen, and helping harvest wheat and corn. Formal education was not easy to obtain, but he attended school when and where he could. Most of the education Jackson had was self-taught. He once made a deal with one of his uncle's slaves: he would give him pine knots so he could take reading lessons. Thomas would stay up at night and read borrowed books using pine knots for lighting. In Virginia there was a slave education law. Even though it was against the law, Jackson secretly taught the slave, as he had promised. When he became literate, the slave escaped to Canada using the Underground Railroad. In his final years at Jackson's Mill, Thomas was a school instructor. Then he was commissioned, in 1842, to the United States Military Academy at West Point. After a slow start, he graduated 17th in his class and was a second lieutenant assigned to the artillery. He joined his regiment in Mexico, where the United States was at war. He first met General Robert E. Lee during the Mexican War, who later became the overall commander of the Confederate armies, and it was there that Jackson first revealed the qualities he possessed that later made him famous. The ability to maintain calm and courage in the face of enemy fire were resourceful. At the end of the fighting in Mexico, he was promoted to lieutenant and major, then assigned to the occupation forces in Mexico City. Finding peacetime Army service boring, he resigned his commission and became professor of artillery tactics and natural philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute in 1851. Although he worked hard at his new duties, he never became a very good teacher. popular or very successful. . Being a stern and shy man, he earned a reputation for eccentricity which followed him until the end of his career. His strong sense of duty and moral rectitude, along with great devotion to cadet education, earned him the derisive title “Deacon Jackson” and was compared to Oliver Cromwell. At the outbreak of the Civil War he had offered his services to the state of Virginia and was ordered to take his VMI cadets from Lexington to Richmond. Soon after, he was given a commission as a colonel in the Virginia State Forces and was then tasked with organizing the unpaid laborers into an effective Confederate Army brigade, this quickly earned him fame and.