1846.

Jackson was already a man in years when he passed his final examination, and here the record of his boyhood may fitly close.  He had made no particular mark at the Academy.  His memory, in the minds of his comrades, was associated with his gravity, his silence, his kind heart, and his awkward movements.  No one suspected him of nobler qualities than dogged perseverance and a strict regard for truth.  The officers and sergeants of the cadet battalion were supplied by the cadets themselves; but Jackson was never promoted.  In the mimic warfare of the playground at Brienne Napoleon was master of the revels.  His capacity for command had already been detected; but neither comrade nor teacher saw beneath the unpromising exterior of the West Point student a trace of aught save what was commonplace.

And yet there is much in the boyhood of Stonewall Jackson that resembles the boyhood of Napoleon, of all great soldiers the most original.  Both were affectionate.  Napoleon lived on bread and water that he might educate his brothers; Jackson saved his cadet’s pay to give his sister a silk dress.  Both were indefatigable students, impressed with the conviction that the world was to be conquered by force of intellect.  Jackson, burning his lessons into his brain, is but the counterpart of the young officer who lodged with a professor of mathematics that he might attend his classes, and who would wait to explain the lectures to those who had not clearly understood them.  Both were provincial, neither was prepossessing.  If the West Point cadets laughed at Jackson’s large hands and feet, was not Napoleon, with his thin legs thrust into enormous boots, saluted by his friend’s children, on his first appearance in uniform, with the nickname of Le Chat Botte?  It is hard to say which was the more laughable:  the spare and bony figure of the cadet, sitting bolt upright like a graven image in a tight uniform, with his eyes glued to the ceiling of his barrack-room, or the young man, with gaunt features, round shoulders, and uncombed hair, who wandered alone about the streets of Paris in 1795.

They had the same love of method and of order.  The accounts of the Virginian constable was not more scrupulously kept than the ledgers of Napoleon’s household, nor could they show a greater regard for economy than the tailor’s bill, still extant, on which the future Emperor gained a reduction of four sous.  But it was not on such trivial lines alone that they run parallel.  An inflexibility of purpose, an absolute disregard of popular opinion, and an unswerving belief in their own capacity, were predominant in both.  They could say “No.”  Neither sought sympathy, and both felt that they were masters of their own fate.  “You can be whatever you resolve to be” may be well placed alongside the speech of the brigadier of five-and-twenty:  “Have patience.  I will command in Paris presently.  What should I do there now?”