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e. 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. The cadets of the Institute, although they wore a uniform, were taught by officers of the regular army, were disciplined as soldiers, and spent some months of their course in camp, were not destined for a military career. All aspirants for commissions in the United States army had to pass through West Point; and the training of the State colleges--for Virginia was not solitary in the possession of such an institution--however much it may have benefited both the minds and bodies of the rising generation, was of immediate value o
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