The early life of Cummins Jackson's nephew was well known to speaker and bystanders. Left an orphan at seven years of age, he, with his brother, older than himself, and their little sister, were thrown upon the charity of uncles and aunts. "Tom" was accounted steady and industrious, yet there was a serious break in his record. The brothers had run away to seek their fortunes in company when Warren was fourteen, Tom but twelve years old, going down the Ohio to the Mississippi and maintaining themselves by cutting wood for passing steamboats until disabled by malarial fever. Thomas took the lead in the juvenile prodigals' return to relatives and respectability, and was kindly received by his bachelor uncle. Since then he had worked in Cummins Jackson's mill and upon his farm as diligently as he sought to "get an education" in the "old field school" nearest to his home. His imagination took fire at his uncle's report of the blacksmith's suggestion. Armed with a letter of introduction signed by leading citizens of the county, to the Congressman from the district, he went in person to Washington and through the kindness of the representative obtained an interview with the Secretary of War. "Gruff and heroic with the grit of Old Hickory himself" was the cabinet-officer's opinion of the country lad. He commended him to the West Point Board of Examiners in terms that secured him admission to the Military Academy in spite of certain grave deficiencies in his early education. The story of the wrestle with these and other disabilities during the next four years is interesting and instructive. Three extracts from a list of rules for his personal conduct, set down at this time in a private note-book, sound the keynote of his subsequent career: "_Sacrifice your life rather than your word._ "_Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve._ "_You may be whatever you resolve to be._" He was respected by all his classmates, known and liked by a few. He was too reserved by nature, too busy in practice, to be a general favorite. His labors were unremitting, his recreations few and simple. With no prevision of the destinies awaiting them, Jackson, McClellan, A. T. Hill, Reno, Picket, Foster, and Maury, as beardless boys, studied and were drilled side by side for four terms and were graduated upon the same day. There were seventy in this remarkable class, and the name of Thomas Jonathan Jackson stood seventeenth upon the roll of merit. "If we had to stay here one year more, old Jack would be at the head," the witnesses of the fierce ordeal of his West Point training used to say.