Nor did his comrades fail to remember that when he was unjustly blamed he chose to bear the imputation silently rather than expose those who were really at fault.  And so, even in that lighthearted battalion, his sterling worth compelled respect.  All honoured his efforts and wished him God-speed.  “While there were many,” says Colonel Turnley, “who seemed to surpass him in intellect, in geniality, and in good-fellowship, there was no one of our class who more absolutely possessed the respect and confidence of all; and in the end Old Jack, as he was always called, with his desperate earnestness, his unflinching straightforwardness, and his high sense of honour, came to be regarded by his comrades with something very like affection.”

One peculiarity cannot be passed by.

When at study he always sat bolt upright at his table with his book open before him, and when he was not using pencil and paper to solve a problem, he would often keep his eyes fixed on the wall or ceiling in the most profound abstraction.  “No one I have ever known,” says a cadet who shared his barrack-room, “could so perfectly withdraw his mind from surrounding objects or influences, and so thoroughly involve his whole being in the subject under consideration.  His lessons were uppermost in his mind, and to thoroughly understand them was always his determined effort.  To make the author’s knowledge his own was ever the point at which he aimed.  This intense application of mind was naturally strengthened by constant exercise, and month by month, and year by year, his faculties of perception developed rapidly, until he grasped with unerring quickness the inceptive points of all ethical and mathematical problems.”

This power of abstraction and of application is well worth noting, for not only was it remarkable in a boy, but, as we shall see hereafter, it had much to do with the making of the soldier.

At West Point Jackson was troubled with the return of the obscure complaint which had already threatened him, and he there began that rigid observance of the laws of health which afterwards developed to almost an eccentricity.  His peculiar attitude when studying was due to the fear that if he bent over his work the compression of his internal organs might increase their tendency to disease.

And not only did he lay down rules for his physical regimen.  A book of maxims which he drew up at West Point has been preserved, and we learn that his scrupulous exactness, his punctilious courtesy, and his choice of companions were the outcome of much deliberation.

Nothing in this curious volume occurs to show that his thoughts had yet been turned to religion.  It is as free from all reference to the teachings of Christianity as the maxims of Marcus Aurelius.

Every line there written shows that at this period of Jackson’s life devotion to duty was his guiding rule; and, notwithstanding his remarkable freedom from egotism, the traces of an engrossing ambition and of absolute self-dependence are everywhere apparent.  Many of the sentiments he would have repudiated in after-life as inconsistent with humility; but there can be no question that it was a strong and fearless hand that penned on a conspicuous page the sentence:  “You can be what you resolve to be.”