This is the story of the 1854 murder of VMI Cadet Tom Blackburn, the trials that followed, and the impact of those events on young men and women who would all too soon face the larger trials of the American Civil War.

Witnesses swore they remembered Tom Blackburn, wearing his VMI dress uniform, stepping onto the columned front porch of Lexington's Presbyterian Church, with Julia Junkin, the minister's daughter on his arm.

Just as the pair were about to enter the church a law student, Charles Burks Christian tapped Blackburn on the shoulder, and asked, politely by all accounts, if he might "have a word" outside. Blackburn obliged, left the Rev. George Junkin's daughter in the care of her friends and family, and walked outside, down the steps, and into the darkness of East Nelson Street.

Those who knew the two young men assumed they were off to settle an earlier "difficulty" over a young woman, Blackburn's cousin, Mary Anderson. Mary was a striking 18-year-old brunette described some thirty years and six children after the events of 1854 as one of the most beautiful women in Virginia. She lived in Fincastle, a valley town some forty miles south of Lexington.

Her father, Francis Thomas Anderson, was a prominent lawyer and state legislator, who would later become Rector of Washington & Lee College. Her uncle, her father's brother, Joseph Reid Anderson, was well known as the founder of Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond. A West Point Graduate, he would later become a general in the Confederate Army.

Mary had been invited to Lexington by her doting aunt, Evaline Moore, a determined matchmaker, with a keen eye for the tactical advantages of spending the Christmas and New Year's holidays in a town blessed with a host of suitably eligible young men, many of them students at the town's three leading institutions of higher learning.

To her aunt's great pleasure, Mary Evelyn Anderson immediately attracted the attention of most, if not all the young men at VMI, Washington College, and Judge John White Brockenbrough's law school.

Not least among them was one of Judge Brockenbrough's students, Charles Burks Christian. Christian, later events would reveal, also caught Mary's eye. He was older (He would be 20 in February) and, perhaps best of all, he was one of Judge Brockenbrough's "bright young men." He had grown up in Amherst County, a long thirty miles southeast of Lexington, on the far side of the Blue Ridge. His father had died in 1844, leaving his young widow to care for Charles, then barely 10, and three younger sisters. Their home, "Rosedale," still stands, not far from the massive "Edgehill" Plantation on the James.

Like Mary's ill-fated cousin Tom, Christian enjoyed a reputation as a bad boy. Some said that he reveled in it. Shortly before entering law school he had been expelled from Baptist College in Richmond for threatening to shoot the school's President, the highly controversial Rev. Robert Ryland.

Christian was, by local standards, a fashion plate, said to favor jackets in the English style and a neatly trimmed mustache. Nor was he shy.

After meeting Mary Evelyn Anderson at a holiday party, he immediately asked her to "walk out" with him to church, much to the chagrin of her cousin, Tom and Tom's VMI roommate, "Sandy" Bruce, the son James Coles Bruce of "Berry Hill," one of the richest men in Virginia.

After overhearing Christian joke that he could "seduce any woman in Lexington," Blackburn warned his cousin Mary, in no uncertain terms, to stay away from him.

An unfortunate series of events soon led to a face to face confrontation and what had become a well-publicized apology.

By Sunday, January 15, however, most believed that the two young men had settled their differences. Indeed, not one of either Blackburn's or Christian's friends followed the pair as they disappeared into the darkness of Nelson Street for "a word" with each other.

Five minutes later, however, Tom Blackburn lay bleeding to death, with knife wounds in his back, his throat cut, and both carotid arteries severed.

Christian fled, as word spread that Thomas Blackburn had not only been wounded, but that his wounds were fatal.

A crowd began to gather, and shock began to turn to anger. When the news reached VMI, Cadets mustered in the quad and quickly resolved to march on the town. One later claimed that only the personal intervention of Major Jackson prevented the Cadets from lynching Christian.

A posse assembled by Lexington's Mayor, William Jordan, soon found Christian in his Lexington hotel room, still covered with Blackburn's blood, and surrounded by friends worried that he wouldn't survive the night. Christian thus gave himself up, not only without a struggle, but with a real sense of relief.

Fearing a violent confrontation from what appeared to be a growing lynch mob on one side and an increasing phalanx of Christian's friends on the other, Mayor Jordan ordered his prisoner taken to the town jail by what he described as "a circuitous route" through the back streets of Lexington. The armed guard he posted to protect the prisoner was soon reinforced by a band of Christian's fellow law students.

The day after the tragedy, after closely examining Blackburn's body, the county coroner conducted a public inquest, a full and formal hearing, on the grounds of VMI. Murder, they wrote.

Less than two weeks later a full Court of Inquiry heard four more days of testimony. Little if any of it was favorable to Christian.

Without dissent the Court of Inquiry sent the case to the Rockbridge County Grand Jury, which, in turn, indicted Charles Christian . . . for murder.

Testimony in what was expected to be an open-and-shut case began in Lexington on April 12,1854. It would become the O.J. Simpson trial of its day.

To be continued