feel badly to know that they had been the innocent cause of his wounds and death, it is best not to give publicity to the fact who they were.
Very truly yours,
General J. A. Early.
It is very manifest from the authorities now furnished that the whole story of General Revere is a fiction, or that the "Lieutenant Jackson" with whom he traveled on the steamer up the Mississippi and Ohio in 1852 was not the same person with the world-renowned commander of the Second corps of the Army of Northern Virginia; as well as that the cavalcade which rode so near to General Revere on his picket line on the night of the 2d of May, 1863, was not composed of General Jackson and his party; and that the "group of several persons gathered around a man lying upon the ground, apparently badly wounded," alleged to have been seen by General Revere when he rode out alone on the Plank road, did not consist of Captain Wilbourn and his companion Wynn, of the Signal Corps, who were the only persons with General Jackson when their attention was attracted to a man on horseback near them, just as they were bearing the General from the road into the woods.
It must be remembered that General Jackson had been brevetted a major in the United States army in 1847 for his gallant conduct in Mexico, and if he had been in that army in 1852 he would have borne the title of major and would have worn the insignia of his brevet rank, according to the custom then prevailing, though his actual rank in the line may have been only that of a lieutenant. The statement of General Smith, Superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, however, puts the question at rest, and shows that it was impossible for the Lieutenant Jackson of whom General Revere speaks to have been Stonewall Jackson, as the latter had located at the Institute in the summer of 1851, and did not make a trip South in 1852. In 1852 General Jackson had severed his connection with the United States army, though it appears from Cullum's biographical register of officers and graduates of West Point that his resignation did not take effect until the 29th of February, 1852 ; but it was a very frequent occurrence for the time for an officer's resignation to take effect to be postponed for some months after he was relieved from duty. The same register shows that General Jackson was a professor at the Institute in 1851, and Dabney's life of him shows that he was admitted a member of the Presbyterian Church at Lexington, Virginia, on the 22d of Novem-
