Richard H. Jackson - Early Life

Early Life

He was born on a plantation near Tuscumbia, Alabama, the youngest of seven children of George Moore Jackson and Sarah Cabell Perkins, and was appointed by Alabama Congressman Joseph Wheeler to the U.S. Naval Academy, which he entered on June 4, 1883.

Jackson graduated from the Academy in 1887 and was immediately sent to sea as a passed cadet, first aboard the protected cruiser Boston, then aboard the wooden-hulled screw steamer Trenton. In those days, Academy graduates were required to complete two years of satisfactory sea duty before being awarded an ensign's commission. However, due to an 1882 statute limiting the number of available naval commissions, there were not enough vacancies in the service to retain all of the Academy's graduates. Jackson's poor grades placed him near the bottom of his graduating class, so he was to be cashiered from the Navy upon completing his sea duty.

While awaiting his discharge, Jackson was serving aboard Trenton in Samoa when it was wrecked by the 1889 Apia cyclone on March 16, 1889. As the ship had been caught with no steam in its boilers, crewmen were ordered to form a line along the deck and spread their coats to form a makeshift sail. Jackson led a group of sailors into the rigging where they spread their coats to increase the sail area, at significant hazard to their lives. This desperate measure successfully propelled Trenton out of danger long enough to help rescue the ship's company of the similarly wrecked Vandalia, before both crews were compelled to abandon ship.

On returning to the Naval Academy, Jackson passed his final examinations but fell just below the grade cutoff and was second on the list of cadets denied a commission and honorably discharged. In the hopes of becoming a naval surgeon, he and several of his Academy classmates studied medicine at the University of Virginia, where Jackson was a member of Beta Theta Pi and graduated fourth in the medical class of 1890. Meanwhile, word of Jackson's heroics at Apia had reached Congress, which was spurred to act by testimonials from Trenton's commanding officer, Captain Norman von Heldreich Farquhar, and Secretary of the Navy Benjamin F. Tracy.

On September 26, 1890, Congress passed special legislation authorizing the President to appoint one additional ensign in the United States Navy. The final statute noted that Jackson had behaved "with conspicuous gallantry by leading the men into the mizzen rigging to form a sail, when this position in the rigging was one of great danger, as the mast was liable to be carried away and fall overboard when the ship struck, and did thereby contribute largely to the success of the maneuver which the captain of the Trenton, in his official report to the admiral, says saved the lives of four hundred men from certain destruction." Congressman Wheeler, Jackson's original Academy sponsor, declared more extravagantly, "England would have knighted this young man."