Decoying the Yanks: Jackson's Valley Campaign (Civil War)

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly bad, the worst in the Time-Life series
Review: I've found the Time-Life series to be generally well done, presenting mostly introductory and basic material, but at least accurate. This volume is an exception. Despite conferring with Robertson, Jackson's main biographer, the author still repeats the myths about lemons, Jackson standing sole guard for his army, etc. etc. Overall the analysis seems light and the maps, which are very good in some other volumes, are too few. This book seems to me to only be worth reading for the illustrations. Skip it, and get Tanner's book instead.

Rating:
Summary: Stonewall Jackson's legendary Shenandoah Valley Campaign
Review: One of the best things about the Time-Life series on the Civil War is that since it takes over two dozen volumes to tell the story of America's Homeric epic, it can devote an entire book to something like "Stonewall" Jackson's campaign in the Shenandoah Valley. It was this campaign, more than anything else, which made Jackson's reputation as a military genius. The Valley was of great strategic importance, considered the key to Virginia, which was the key to the Confederacy. Not only did it supply food and supplies to the Army of Northern Virginia, any troops in the Valley threatened Washington, D.C. With a small army, never numbering more than 17,000 men, Jackson spent eight months paralyzing McClellan's 120,000 soldiers in the Army of the Potomac and eventually caused 40,000 troops to be diverted from the March on Richmond.

Champ Clark takes the opportunity of this book's focus to detail Jackson's military and personal life up to the start of the Valley Campaign in his first chapter. Subsequent chapters detail the strategic and tactics of Jackson's campaign, including the battles at Kernstown, McDowell, Winchester, Fort Royal, and Port Republic, as well as numerous skirmishes. "Decoying the Yanks" is illustrated with historic photographs, drawings, etchings, and paintings depicting the Valley Campaign, including an ironic photo essay showing the heavily fortified Union positions established around the Federal capital. Whatever the shortcomings of the biographical section on Jackson, which I am certainly in no position to comment upon, this volume does give me a much better sense of Jackson's brilliant campaign in the Valley than I had ever had from the more general histories of the Civil War that I have read.