I'm stumped...

I am reading and reading about Longstreet and Jackson, and as influential and important as Longstreet is to the effort during the last years of the war... I think Jackson was (just a little bit) more so.

Patton's famous chase of the German's through the Alsace-Lorraine (where he was stopped only by running entirely out of gas for the whole 3rd Army) can be directly attributed to his intimate understanding of military history and strategy... and to Jackson's directives on how to best pursue and defeat a retreating enemy.  I'm not suggesting Patton is less the figure because he followed Jackson's plans (far from) but it does say something about Jackson's abilities that his views were still applicable and worked perfectly more than 80 years later, doesn't it?

In fact, Patton's famous "insight" into Ike's grande strategy that allowed him to pre-plan the movement of more than six full divisions of the 3rd army away from the fighting at Saarbruken and move them towards the fighting at "the Bulge" is exactly the kind of tactical and strategic awareness that made Jackson the "right hand" of Lee right up until his death.  I'm thinking that if Patton makes a spot on this list ahead of MacArthur, then perhaps Jackson needs to make the list ahead of Longstreet.

Thoughts?