1848.

Of Jackson’s life at Fort Hamilton there is little to tell.  His friend and mentor, Colonel Taylor, was in command.  The chaplain, once an officer of dragoons, was a man of persuasive eloquence and earnest zeal; and surrounded by influences which had now become congenial, the young major of artillery pursued the religious studies he had begun in Mexico.  There was some doubt whether he had been baptised as a child.  He was anxious that no uncertainty should exist as to his adhesion to Christianity, but he was unwilling that the sacrament should bind him to any particular sect.

1849.

On the understanding that no surrender of judgment would be involved, he was baptised and received his first communion in the Episcopal Church.

Two years passed without incident, and then Jackson was transferred to Florida.  In his new quarters his stay was brief.

1851.

In March 1851 he was appointed Professor of Artillery Tactics and Natural Philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute.  His success, for such he deemed it, was due to his own merit.  One of his Mexican comrades, Major D.H.  Hill, afterwards his brother-in-law, was a professor in a neighbouring institution, Washington College, and had been consulted by the Superintendent of the Institute as to the filling of the vacant chair.

Hill remembered what had been said of Jackson at West Point:  “If the course had been one year longer he would have graduated at the head of his class.”  This voluntary testimonial of his brother cadets had not passed unheeded.  It had weight, as the best evidence of his thoroughness and application, with the Board of Visitors, and Jackson was unanimously elected.

The Military Institute, founded twelve years previously on the model of West Point, was attended by several hundred youths from Virginia and other Southern States.  At Lexington, in the county of Rockbridge, a hundred miles west of Richmond, stand the castellated buildings and the wide parade ground which formed the nursery of so many Confederate soldiers.  To the east rise the lofty masses of the Blue Ridge.  To the north successive ranges of rolling hills, green with copse and woodland, fall gently to the lower levels; and stretching far away at their feet, watered by that lovely river which the Indians in melodious syllables called Shenandoah, “bright daughter of the Stars,” the great Valley of Virginia,

Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows,

lies embosomed within its mountain walls.  Of all its pleasant market towns, Lexington is not the least attractive; and in this pastoral region, where the great forests stand round about the corn-fields, and the breezes blow untainted from the uplands, had been built the College which Washington, greatest of Virginians and greatest of American soldiers, had endowed.  Under the shadow of its towers the State had found an appropriate site for her military school.