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It was like a grand holiday. Throughout North and South in
the summer of 1861, America's young men gleefully pulled on new
uniforms, shouldered "rifle-muskets" and cheerfully
left for war. They would whip the Rebels in 90 days, boasted
Northern recruits. One Southerner could lick ten Yankees, claimed
Southern boys. Never again would Americans go to war with such
an unrealistic, romantic notion. Some knew better. Brigadier
General Thomas J. Jackson, an unremarkable mathematics instructor
from the Virginia Military Institute, was a Mexican War veteran,
and he tried hard to prepare his troops - Virginia's First Brigade
- for the reality of war.
But even Jackson's troops went to war as if heading for a
holiday picnic. As they boarded a train at Virginia's Piedmont
Station - among the first troops moved to battle by rail - they
encountered a boisterous celebration. Flags were flying, troops
were waving and young women were passing out treats. A holiday
atmosphere masked a grim reality: Many of these youngsters, like
their counterparts in the North, would soon be dead or wounded
in the war's first major battle at First Manassas. There, too,
near the banks of an obscure creek called Bull Run, the unknown
VMI officer, Thomas J. Jackson, would rally the shaken Southerners,
help turn the day for the Confederacy - and emerge forever famous
as General "Stonewall" Jackson. |