November 11, 1839—The first state-supported military school in America, Virginia Military Institute (VMI), opened its doors in the small mountain town of Lexington to 25 matriculating cadets, replacing the bored, rowdy militia who had been guarding the state’s arsenal on the site.
Within a generation, after a period of institutional turmoil and sectional unrest, the school became famous as the training ground for some of America’s greatest soldiers—including the Confederate general who passed a decade of unprepossessing preparation as an instructor there, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
Visiting the five-story, quadrangular barracks at the southern tip of the Shenandoah Valley a decade ago, I found VMI much different from the fledgling institution encountered by 27-year-old West Point graduate and Mexican War veteran Thomas Jackson in 1851. It’s not just that the school had to be rebuilt after being torched by Union troops during the Civil War, or even that the formerly all-male campus accommodated itself to female cadets in 1997. The principal difference lay more in atmosphere than in looks.
Much of the esprit d’corps of today’s cadets springs from their recognition that they will become part of a tradition that has included such American military legends as the great oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, polar explorer Richard E. Byrd, the charismatic General Lewis “Chesty” Puller, and George C. Marshall, General of the Army in World War II and Secretary of State in the early postwar period.
Through Jackson Arch, one of three entrances to the barracks, pass one of the few kinds of people that made life uncomfortable for Jackson in this quiet town—cadets. If the phlegmatic instructor thought a second time about his general unpopularity with his charges, he could have consoled himself with the thought that young military men had been angering the religiously oriented people of Lexington for a long time.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this in 1816, when, in the wake of Indian unrest in the War of 1812, the Virginia General Assembly authorized three arsenals to be built in the state, including one in Lexington. But, as the specter of Indian attacks decreased, opportunities for general mayhem on the part of off-duty officers increased.
It came to pass that by December 1834, several Lexington residents, tiring of what they called “a very undesirable element,” called for dismantling the arsenal and creating a military school.
The guiding spirit of the new school was the 27-year-old superintendent, Francis H. Smith, an 1833 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. When I saw the dates of his term in office at the school, I thought it was a misprint, but it wasn’t—he stayed for 50 years, leaving only a few months before his death. Few men have had either the opportunity to leave such a large imprint on a school of higher learning, or the capacity to do so.
Within a generation, after a period of institutional turmoil and sectional unrest, the school became famous as the training ground for some of America’s greatest soldiers—including the Confederate general who passed a decade of unprepossessing preparation as an instructor there, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
Visiting the five-story, quadrangular barracks at the southern tip of the Shenandoah Valley a decade ago, I found VMI much different from the fledgling institution encountered by 27-year-old West Point graduate and Mexican War veteran Thomas Jackson in 1851. It’s not just that the school had to be rebuilt after being torched by Union troops during the Civil War, or even that the formerly all-male campus accommodated itself to female cadets in 1997. The principal difference lay more in atmosphere than in looks.
Much of the esprit d’corps of today’s cadets springs from their recognition that they will become part of a tradition that has included such American military legends as the great oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, polar explorer Richard E. Byrd, the charismatic General Lewis “Chesty” Puller, and George C. Marshall, General of the Army in World War II and Secretary of State in the early postwar period.
Through Jackson Arch, one of three entrances to the barracks, pass one of the few kinds of people that made life uncomfortable for Jackson in this quiet town—cadets. If the phlegmatic instructor thought a second time about his general unpopularity with his charges, he could have consoled himself with the thought that young military men had been angering the religiously oriented people of Lexington for a long time.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this in 1816, when, in the wake of Indian unrest in the War of 1812, the Virginia General Assembly authorized three arsenals to be built in the state, including one in Lexington. But, as the specter of Indian attacks decreased, opportunities for general mayhem on the part of off-duty officers increased.
It came to pass that by December 1834, several Lexington residents, tiring of what they called “a very undesirable element,” called for dismantling the arsenal and creating a military school.
The guiding spirit of the new school was the 27-year-old superintendent, Francis H. Smith, an 1833 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. When I saw the dates of his term in office at the school, I thought it was a misprint, but it wasn’t—he stayed for 50 years, leaving only a few months before his death. Few men have had either the opportunity to leave such a large imprint on a school of higher learning, or the capacity to do so.
What was Smith like? With his cadets, to judge by a letter sent by a member of that first class, Valentine Cook Saunders, friendly but not familiar—he made sure he knew each of the cadets but also kept the distance necessary for someone in authority.
Smith made sure that he personally measured what you were learning—and he made sure you were tested in front of your classmates. “At a particular hour,” Saunders wrote his parents at the end of that first month, “we are marched in squads at the beat of the drum to the recitation room where we are examined individually by Major Smith in the presence of the whole corps to see what progress we have made in our studies. If he finds us deficient in the least we get a mark of demerit besides requiring us to recite the same lesson next morning.”
At first glance in reading Saunders’ letter home, I thought he might be trying to allay his parents’ fears about student hellraisers and the administration. But evidently other cadets felt as he had, that Smith displayed “superior guidance and management.” The number of new cadets doubled after that first year. By the end of the first decade, the school required an expansion to handle all the new students and facilities required to service them.
The great achievement of Smith was to increase educational opportunity for non-elite southern men—men like Jackson, who had actually graduated from West Point but had been invited by Smith to join the VMI faculty in 1851.
Jackson’s preferred instructional method—memorization and recitation—did little to engage cadets. It didn’t help that Jackson only knew enough about one of his subjects--natural and experimental philosophy (now known as physics)--to stay a lecture or two away ahead of his class.
Then there was his classroom manner: the humorless, inflexible stare; the slow monotone that reflected his mountain origins; the clumsiness in handling lab materials—none of it likely to fascinate cadets who dreaded the subject as one of the most challenging in the VMI curriculum.
Before long, his restless students had bestowed on Jackson a variety of nicknames, including “Old Jack,” “Tom Fool” and, perhaps most memorably, “Square Box” (a taunting reference to his oversize boots). Even Smith found it difficult to defend his classroom manner, recalling after the general’s death: “He was a brave man, a conscientious man, and a good man, but he was no professor.”
A stickler for discipline and the chain of command, Jackson had six cadets court-martialed for disrespect in his first five years. It foretold an oft-overlooked aspect of his wartime service: his refusal to brook even the slightest challenge to his authority. At one point during the Civil War, over 100 court-martials of men under his command were pending.
The Jackson statue by Moses Ezekiel (VMI 1866, a corporal who guarded his corpse before its burial) stands sentinel before Jackson Arch. It captures the general just before his death at the Battle of Chancellorsville—no longer a “Tom Fool” plagued by impish cadets, but a quietly confident master of war about to announce words that still echo proudly down the generations in the school where he taught: “The Institute will be heard from today."
Don’t be surprised if you sense ghosts in the 1,500-seat auditorium at VMI’s Jackson Memorial Hall. The past is likely to appear even more startling in the VMI Museum downstairs in the hall. Several of the items relate to Jackson, including a microscope he used at VMI; a uniform coat worn at the school and at the battle that earned him his nickname, First Manassas; his gray kepi; his war horse, “Little Sorrel,” now stuffed and on display behind glass; and, most famously, the raincoat he wore at Chancellorsville—black, rumpled on the left arm, pierced by bullet holes.
After lying in state in Richmond after his tragic death at the Battle of Chancellorsville, Jackson’s casket was brought by canal back to Lexington. There, the professor once nicknamed “Tom Fool” was laid out overnight in his old VMI lecture room.
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