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.

"It is understood in society, that a person who has been properly introduced to you, has some claim on your good offices in future; you cannot, therefore, slight him without good reason, and the chance of being called to an account for it.

-- Martine's Handbook of Etiquette and Guide to True Politeness

On the Tuesday before Christmas, December 22, 1853, Charles Burks Christian found himself, for at least the second time, at a private party with the beautiful young Mary Evelyn Anderson. Both had attended Judge John White Brockenbrough's Christmas party, held in the Judge's home and law school, a large house on the southwest side of Washington Street just opposite the President Junkin's house on the Washington College Campus. They had not, however, been formally introduced.

Happily for Christian he had a friend, Robert White, who was living in the Brockenbrough house while he attended law school.

Christian, it would seem, prevailed upon White to introduce him to Mary Evelyn Anderson. Once formally introduced, however, Christian quickly took matters firmly into his own hands. As Mary Evelyn Anderson later told a jury, "Very soon after being introduced, Christian . . . asked me if I had company to church the next Sunday night. 'I told him I had not.' 'He then asked me if he might call for me.' She agreed.

After all, she later testified, Christian had been introduced to her properly, by a "gentleman," in his own home.

Despite Charles Burks Christian's reputation as something of a bad boy, Mary Evelyn's guardians, and Lexington society in general, clearly considered him "a gentleman" as well.

The Christian and Burks families were well known and respected in Lynchburg, Campbell, Bedford and Amherst counties. His cousins on his widowed mothers side, among them the nine sons of Bedford County's Martin Parks Burks, would become some of the state's most distinguished jurists, teachers and soldiers. Young "C.B." had, thus, already been invited into the homes of some of Lexington's finest families.

Charles was, however, the last of his father's Amherst County line. Charles Mask Christian, of "Rose Hill" had died when Charles was only 10, leaving behind his wife, Frances Ann Burks, 34, and four small children.

As the only son of a widowed mother, Christian had come to Lexington, he said, with a purpose: to learn a profession, and then practice it well enough to care for her and his three still-unmarried sisters.

Though considered something of a man of the world in Lexington, friends of the family later insisted he had only really been "away from home" once before, while a student in Richmond.

There he had attended the Virginia Baptist Seminary, (later the University of Richmond) for "a few months" before being "asked to leave," apparently for threatening the Seminary President, the Reverend Robert Ryland, with pistols.

In addition to his other duties, Ryland, also served as pastor of Richmond's First African Baptist Church. Though a slave owner, and a true believer in the positive ethical value of slavery, Ryland was well known for skirting or ignoring Virginia's slave laws: teaching members of his congregation to read and marrying couples who were enslaved.

At about the time of Christian's expulsion, Ryland had openly and publicly tested the tolerance of white Richmond yet again. A member of his First African Baptist congregation had been convicted of the highly publicized murder of white children in her charge. Ryland rode with her to the scaffold, standing beside her in an open cart. He then prayed with her, before her sentence was carried out.

Much of white Richmond was outraged. And while there is no direct evidence that Christian's problems with Ryland were related to the latter's reputation, there is no doubt that he was not the only young man in Richmond who might well have threatened the pastor of First African Baptist and been praised for the deed.

In any case, shortly after his expulsion for seminary Christian was accepted as a law student by Lexington's Judge John White Brockenbrough. Brockenbrough, who would be dispatched eleven years later to personally invite Robert E. Lee to become President of Washington College, was, in 1854, already well on his way to becoming a legend. He was barely 40, in 1846, when President James K. Polk appointed him Judge of the United States Court for the Western District of Virginia. By 1854 his record on the federal bench was not only respected, but by some standards, perfect. Not one of his decisions had been reversed on appeal, and none would be, for years.

On October 31, 1849, Brockenbrough opened a soon-to-be-famous private law school in Lexington, the Rockbridge County Seat, and the home of Washington College and the Virginia Military Institute. By 1852 he was a member of the Washington College Board of Trustees.

As a result of his growing reputation, and no doubt the steady stream of relatively well-to-do young men through Lexington's schools, Brockenbrough had no trouble attracting students.

By 1854, at forty eight, he was well on his way to running what would become the largest private law school in the state of Virginia. By all accounts, he needed the additional income.

Charles Burks Christian's life would soon depend on Judge John White Brockenbrough, and the people who visited, lived, studied and worked with him in the house where Christian first met Mary Evelyn Anderson.

To be continued