John Jackson, the great-grandfather of our hero, landed in America in 1748, and it was not long before he set his face towards the wilderness.  The emigrants from Ulster appear as a rule to have moved westward.  The States along the coast were already colonised, and, despite its fertility, the country was little to their taste.  But beyond the border, in the broad Appalachian valley which runs from the St. Lawrence to Alabama, on the banks of the great rivers, the Susquehanna, the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee, they found a land after their own heart, a soil with whose properties they were familiar, the sweet grasses and soft contours of their native hills.  Here, too, there was ample room for their communities, for the West was as yet but sparsely tenanted.  No inconsiderable number, penetrating far into the interior, settled eventually about the headwaters of the Potomac and the James.  This highland region was the debatable ground of the United States.  So late as 1756 the State of Virginia extended no further than the crests of the Blue Ridge.  Two hundred miles westward forts flying French colours dominated the valley of the Ohio, and the wild and inhospitable tract, a very labyrinth of mountains, which lay between, was held by the fierce tribes of the “Six Nations” and the Leni-Lenape.  Two years later the French had been driven back to Canada; but it was not till near the close of the century that the savage was finally dispossessed of his spacious hunting grounds.

It was on these green uplands, where fight and foray were as frequent as once on the Scottish border, that John Jackson and his wife, a fellow passenger to America, by name Elizabeth Cummins, first pitched their camp, and here is still the home of their descendants.

January 21, 1824.

In the little town of Clarksburg, now the county-seat of Harrison, but then no more than a village in the Virginia backwoods, Thomas Jonathan Jackson was born on January 21, 1824.  His father was a lawyer, clever and popular, who had inherited a comfortable patrimony.  The New World had been generous to the Jacksons.  The emigrant of 1748 left a valuable estate, and his many sons were uniformly prosperous.  Nor was their affluence the reward of energy and thrift alone, for the lands reclaimed by axe and plough were held by a charter of sword and musket.  The redskin fought hard for his ancestral domains.  The stockaded forts, which stood as a citadel of refuge in every settlement, were often the scene of fierce attack and weary leaguer, and the nursing mothers of the frontier families were no strangers to war and bloodshed.  The last great battle with the Indians east of the Ohio was fought in 1774, but the military experience of the pioneers was not confined to the warfare of the border.  John Jackson and his sons bore arms in the War of Independence, and the trained riflemen of West Virginia were welcome recruits in the colonial ranks.  With the exception of the Highlanders of the ’45, who had been deported in droves to the plantations, no race had less cause to remain loyal to the Crown than the men of Ulster blood.  Even after the siege of Londonderry they had been proscribed and persecuted; and in the War of Independence the fiercest enemies of King George were the descendants of the same Scotch-Irish who had held the north of Ireland for King William.