Bull Run, a Buffalo Bulls community

Full disclosure: my wife and I agreed that our son's first name would be Thomas before we agreed on what his middle name would be, due in part to the fact that I wanted to name the boy "Thomas Jonathan Jackson King," after the Confederate general. (I also thought "Thomas J.J. King" would sound a lot like "Thomas R.R. Cobb," the son-in-law of Joseph Henry Lumpkin and the author of the Georgia Code.) Accordingly, I threw up in my mouth a little when Dr. Saturday referred to Stonewall Jackson as "a West Virginia native." He may have been born in what is now West Virginia, but General Jackson was born in 1824, and West Virginia was created in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln (who claimed the express reservation of all non-delegated powers to the states and to the people contained in the Tenth Amendment did not authorize the states to secede) quite inconsistently recognized a collection of Virginia counties as a new state, in clear violation of Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1, of the U.S. Constitution ("New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress"). Had any man suggested in General Jackson's presence that he was anything other than a Virginian, Old Blue Light would have been quite clear in correcting the misinformed offender. I don't mean to get political, but, dadgum, there are some errors a Southerner just ought not to make! Go 'Dawgs!

I have to admit, though, that "burned my hometown to the ground" would have been a big strike against certain chief executives. Go 'Dawgs!