they fought; and while the opposition of such kindred natures adds to the dramatic interest of the Civil War, the career of the great soldier, although a theme perhaps less generally attractive, may be followed as profitably as that of the great statesmen.  Providence dealt with them very differently.  The one was struck down by a mortal wound before his task was well begun; his life, to all human seeming, was given in vain, and his name will ever be associated with the mournful memories of a lost cause and a vanished army.  The other, ere he fell beneath the assassin’s stroke, had seen the abundant fruits of his mighty labours; his sun set in a cloudless sky.  And yet the resemblance between them is very close.  Both dared: 

For that sweet mother-land which gave them birth
Nobly to do, nobly to die.  Their names,
Graven on memorial columns, are a song
Heard in the future;...more than wall
And rampart, their examples reach a hand
Far thro’ all years, and everywhere they meet
And kindle generous purpose, and the strength
To mould it into action pure as theirs.

Jackson, in one respect, was more fortunate than Lincoln.  Although born to poverty, he came of a Virginia family which was neither unknown nor undistinguished, and as showing the influences which went to form his character, its history and traditions may be briefly related.

It is an article of popular belief that the State of Virginia, the Old Dominion of the British Crown, owes her fame to the blood of the English Cavaliers.  The idea, however, has small foundation in fact.  Not a few of her great names are derived from a less romantic source, and the Confederate general, like many of his neighbours in the western portion of the State, traced his origin to the Lowlands of Scotland.  An ingenious author of the last century, himself born on Tweed-side, declares that those Scotch families whose patronymics end in “son,” although numerous and respectable, and descended, as the distinctive syllable denotes, from the Vikings, have seldom been pre-eminent either in peace or war.  And certainly, as regards the Jacksons of bygone centuries, the assertion seems justified.  The name is almost unknown to Border history.  In neither lay nor legend has it been preserved; and even in the “black lists” of the wardens, where the more enterprising of the community were continually proclaimed as thieves and malefactors, it is seldom honoured with notice.  The omission might be held as evidence that the family was of peculiar honesty, but, in reality, it is only a proof that it was insignificant.  It is not improbable that the Jacksons were one of the landless clans, whose only heritages were their rude “peel” towers, and who, with no acknowledged chief of their own race, followed, as much for protection as for plunder, the banner of some more powerful house.  In course of time, when the Marches grew peaceful and morals improved, when cattle-lifting, no longer profitable,