Great Captain

MIGHTY STONEWALL (547 pp.)--Frank Vandiver--McGraw-Hill ($6.50).

If the young Thomas Jonathan Jackson had been called up in World War II, he would have been a problem. The doctors would have noted that he was underweight, had weak eyes and a bad stomach. The psychiatrists would have frowned at his religious fanaticism, his unwillingness to fight on Sunday, and his neurotic habit of raising one arm in the air to "lighten it" because he was convinced that it was heavier than the other one.

Despite these quirks and quiddities, when Stonewall Jackson fell, mortally wounded by his own men in the confusion of battle at Chancellorsville, the last hope of the Confederacy fell with him. This book, the best biography of Jackson in more than half a century, makes clear why General Robert E. Lee said of him: "Such an executive officer the sun never shone on. I have but to show him my design, and I know that if it can be done it will be done. No need for me to send or watch him. Straight as the needle to the pole he advances to the execution of my purpose."

Jackson or a Rabbit. Like most outstanding Civil War leaders, Jackson was blooded in the Mexican War. A West Pointer ('46, with budding Union General George Brinton McClellan and the Confederacy's George Edward Pickett, who led the charge at Gettysburg), Jackson served as an artillery officer under Winfield Scott on the epic march from Vera Cruz to the heights of Chapultepec. It was wily General Scott who taught him the military secret on which all his future success was based: scout, flank and pursue. He early showed another trait--a stubborn insistence on perfection--that was invaluable on the battlefield and infuriating off it. His career in the U.S. Army came to a clouded end because of a rancorous quarrel over a finicky point of military etiquette. As professor at Virginia Military Institute, where he taught optics and astronomy, Jackson was alternately laughed at and hated by his students. His own Confederate staff officers raged at his humorless and dictatorial manner. Yet what friends he made stayed his friends forever.

It took the Civil War to reveal his towering qualities. All that had seemed rough and comic and exasperating in times of peace was shown to be the perfect equipment for a leader of men. His troops marched until they dropped. Stragglers were flogged, deserters summarily shot. His veterans had a motto: "Man that is born of woman, and enlisteth in Jackson's army, is of few days and short rations." Yet with the instinctive knowledge that distinguishes the martinet from the great captain, his ragged "foot cavalry" so revered Jackson that, whenever a burst of cheering swept the camp, men would say: "It's Jackson or a rabbit."

No Superman. At Bull Run, when he stood fast against the surging Union attack, Jackson won his nickname of Stonewall. No appellation could be less accurate, for the essence of Jackson's tactics was movement. In the Shenandoah Valley his swift marches and countermarches totally baffled four Union commanders, and he defeated two of them (Fremont and Shields) in separate actions on succeeding days. When McClellan was strangling Richmond with his siege lines, Jackson broke through a Federal entrapment, raced down the valley to throw Washington into a panic, and then seemingly vanished from the earth--to appear days later on McClellan's flank outside Richmond. With fewer than 20,000 men, Jackson had in effect paralyzed 175,000 enemy troops.

Stonewall was no superman. He stumbled into an ambush at Kernstown, and his failure to press home the attack during the Seven Days' Battles has never been satisfactorily explained. But he resembled U.S. Grant in his habitual willingness to fight, and Napoleon in his instant grasp of the weakness of an enemy position. His own officers were infuriated by his secrecy, often knowing as little of his plans as did the foe. Occasionally this habit cost him a victory. More often it resulted in stunning surprises, as at Chancellorsville when his entire force suddenly appeared in the enemy rear.

Had He Lived. Southern enthusiasts like to dream that, had Jackson lived, he and Lee might well have made up for the material deficiencies of the Confederacy. In this absorbing book, Texas-born Historian Vandiver (Rice Institute) does not hazard a guess, but notes that Stonewall's magic was greatly aided by the mediocrity of his opponents. Tactics that bewildered Banks and Pope and Hooker might well have foundered against commanders like Grant and Sherman. As it was, Jackson's greatest coups were repeatedly frustrated by the dogged resistance of the often outwitted but seldom outfought Union soldier. At the Second Battle of Bull Run, Jackson struck with sledgehammer force against an unsuspecting Federal column miles behind the front. Instead of disintegrating in a rout, the Federals slugged it out toe to toe for two hours, and Jackson's own beloved Stonewall Brigade lost a third of its men.

Had he lived, the war might have lasted another year or so, cost even more in blood and bitterness. Instead, he died at 39, at the height of his powers and fame and at the moment of his greatest victory. He died confident that his end was the one ordained for him by his very personal Old Testament God, and he left for posterity perhaps the most moving last words ever spoken by a hero: "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees."

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