In early 1854, Mary Anderson, arguably one of the most beautiful women in Virginia, refused to go out with a young Washington College law student, Charles Burks Christian. Humiliated and made the object of public scorn, Christian confronted, stabbed and killed her cousin, VMI First Classman Thomas Blackburn, in Lexington Virginia. This is the story of that murder, the trials that followed, and the impact of those events on the men and women of Virginia and Maryland who would all too soon face the larger trials of the American Civil War.

Part One: Out of the Darkness

James Woods Massie had heard the sounds before -- the slash and snap of a heavy switch or cowhide lash and the echoes of hard blows striking home. It sounded, he said, like nothing more than someone thrashing a slave. Nothing unusual, it would seem, for a Sunday afternoon in Lexington.

Massiee said nothing about it to his three friends stepping carefully in the dark along Nelson Street, on their way to late Sunday services at Lexington's main Presbyterian Church.

No one raised an alarm.

It was dark; it was wet; it was Sunday, and whatever was going on in the shadows it was, no doubt, none of their business.

By the time Massie's little group had covered another five or ten paces two men came tumbling out of the darkness behind, locked in each others arms, struggling in what one described as a "deadly silence."

Perhaps recalling recent rumors of slave unrest (and the mobilization of troops in Lexington) only a few years earlier, Massie handed his hymnal to one of the group, a young law student named Benton Taylor, and turned to face whatever might be out there in the dark.

As a preccaution he ordered Taylor to lead the two ladies of their company to the relative light and safety of Main Street.

In the darkness the fighters had gone down, stumbling and falling into the ruts of the barely thawed mud of the heavily traveled street.

Hopelessly near-sighted, Massie could barely see the shadowy antagonists, now rolling on the ground, their faces completely hidden, their bodies only dimly visible in the glow from the church windows behind him.

Inside that brightly lit sanctuary the Reverend Dr. George Junkin, President of Washington College, was just beginning evening services.

His congregation numbered a hundred or more. Among them were the usual assortment of VMI Cadets, Washington College students, and bright young men from Judge John White Brockenbrough's Law School, many of whom, by their own admission, attended services less for religious inspiration than to see or be seen by the young women in the congregation.

Dr. Junkin's family was also there: his wife, his three daughters, and his new son-in-law, a West Point graduate, Mexican war hero, and now a struggling instructor at the Institute, Major Thomas Jonathan Jackson, later better known as "Stonewall."

For the Junkin and Jackson families the recent holiday season had already been exceptional.

"Ellie" Junkin, Major Jackson's new wife, was pregnant with their first child, though it is unlikely that either she or her husband were yet aware of her condition.

Ellie's younger sister, 18-year-old Julia, had walked to church that night on the arm of VMI Cadet, First Classman Thomas Blackburn, tall, blond, and by all accounts one of the most handsome, most popular, and most well-connected young men in the Valley.

He was also something of a bad boy.

He had only recently returned to VMI following a court-martial for a notorious prank played on none other than the famously humorless Major Jackson.

Worse, were his ties of "former kinship" to another woman in the congregation, Sally Campbell Preston McDowell, the daughter of the first Governor of Virginia from west of the Blue Ridge, James McDowell.

Blackburn's uncle, former Maryland Governor Frank Thomas, had met her when he was a congressman and she was a student at a DC finishing school.

Though she was less than half his age he had courted her and married her in her father's house in Lexington.

Within a year, however, Frank Thomas drove divorce legislation through the Maryland legislature and published a widely circulated pamphlet on the process, charging that his teen bride had committed incest with her cousin soon after their marriage and worse, in heavily Catholic Maryland, had aborted the resulting pregnancy.

Tom Blackburn, the eldest son of Frank Thomas's sister, would be dead before his erstwhile Aunt Sally heard benediction.

(to be continued)