Early Life
John Joseph Pershing was born on a farm near Laclede, Missouri, to businessman John Fletcher Pershing and homemaker Ann Elizabeth Thompson. He also had five siblings: brothers James (b.1862) and Ward (b.1874), and sisters Mary Elizabeth (b.1864), Anna May (b.1867) and Grace (b.1869); three other children died in infancy. When the Civil War began, his father worked as a sutler for the 18th Missouri Volunteer Infantry, but did not serve in the military.
John J. Pershing attended a school in Laclede that was reserved for precocious students who were also the children of prominent citizens. Completing high school in 1878, he became a teacher of local African American children.
In 1880, Pershing entered the North Missouri Normal School (now Truman State University) in Kirksville, Missouri. Two years later, he applied to the United States Military Academy. Pershing later admitted that serving in the military was secondary to attending West Point, and he had applied because the education offered was better than that obtainable in rural Missouri.
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“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
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