BUY Rebel Flags For SaleTake a trip through living history by visiting Lexington, Virginia, home of the Virginia Military Institute. Known simply as VMI, the school has one of the longest and proudest histories of any college in the South. Stonewall Jackson taught in its classrooms, Robert E. Lee spent his last years just next door, and its young cadets earned lasting fame on the battlefield at New Market.
The West Point of the South
VMI was founded in 1839 on the site of an old state arsenal, making it the first state military college in the United States. Its cadets lived under strict military discipline while studying engineering, science and the classics. Before and during the war, VMI graduates served as officers in nearly every Confederate army, and the school became known as the “West Point of the South.” The parade ground where cadets still drill today looks much as it did in the 1860s.
Professor Jackson
From 1851 to 1861, Thomas J. Jackson taught natural philosophy, what we would now call physics, and artillery tactics at VMI. Cadets found him strict and serious, and some called him “Tom Fool” behind his back. No one called him that after the First Battle of Manassas in July 1861, where he and his brigade stood “like a stone wall” and earned him the name the world remembers. When the war began, Jackson led VMI cadets to Richmond to help train new recruits. After he died in 1863, he was buried in Lexington.
The Cadets at New Market
On May 15, 1864, about 250 VMI cadets, many of them just 15 to 18 years old, marched to join General John C. Breckinridge’s small army at New Market in the Shenandoah Valley. When a gap opened in the Confederate line, Breckinridge sent the cadets forward. They charged across a muddy wheat field, where many lost their shoes in the mud, and helped capture a Union cannon. The spot is still known as the Field of Lost Shoes.
Ten cadets were killed or mortally wounded and dozens more were wounded. One of the cadets who fought that day, Moses Ezekiel, later became a famous sculptor and created the memorial Virginia Mourning Her Dead in honor of his fallen classmates.
Visiting Lexington
Today, visitors can tour VMI and its museum, see Jackson’s home in town, visit Washington and Lee University next door, where General Lee served as president after the war and is buried, and drive about an hour north to the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, which is owned and operated by VMI.
Read more about General Jackson in There Stands Jackson Like a Stone Wall, and honor Virginia’s soldiers with a flag from our Confederate flag collection.
Source: HistoryNet: Explore, Generals and Professors: The Virginia Military Institute
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