Blacksburg, Va. ? Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, perhaps the most feared and respected of Confederate generals, was by most accounts an odd person to have over for dinner.

Awkward, with a thin, almost feminine voice, he was incapable of chatty conversation. He obsessed about digestion and was known to bring his own food to parties, usually crusts of stale bread.

Besides his military accomplishments, Jackson’s eccentricities are what many acquaintances remembered after his death in 1863. But there was much they didn’t see.

Jackson’s “Book of Maxims,” a collection of slogans and bits of wisdom he compiled as a young officer, reveals the kind of man Jackson hoped to become before the country was split by the Civil War. Considered to have disappeared until about 13 years ago, copies of the book, published by Cumberland House, are now available for the first time.

“Too often, the popular perception of Jackson was of a religious zealot, a loose cannon, a hypochondriac, the village idiot,” said Jackson biographer James I. Robertson Jr., who rediscovered the maxims in a mislabeled box at Tulane University.

“This book shows he was not. He was a very determined man. He was a man who wanted to be liked, who wanted to be part of society if only he could learn how.”

Jackson grew up the orphaned son of failed lawyer in the mountains of what is now West Virginia. He had less than a fourth-grade education when he entered West Point, and his time at the military academy was spent mostly alone.

“He’d be invited to an afternoon tea, and he’d go and just stand against the wall,” Robertson said. “He didn’t know what else to do.”

His maxims, which he collected in his late 20s from books he was reading and from his own experience, provide a rare view into Jackson’s mind at this awkward time.

There were tips for meeting friends: “A man is known by the company he keeps”; “Never weary your company by talking too long or too frequently.”

Longer entries dealt with one of his greater difficulties, how to socialize: “Sit or stand still while another is speaking to you :quot; (do) not dig in the earth with your foot nor take your knife from your pocket & pare your nales (sic) nor other such actions.”

Some of his maxims were meant for inspiration. The most famous, “You may be what ever you will resolve to be,” is now displayed on an archway at Virginia Military Institute, where Jackson was a professor.

At the height of his popularity, Jackson was known for standing “like a stone wall” at Manassas and giving the Yankees their first taste of the bloodcurdling “rebel yell.”

The world also learned of his quirks. He’d keep his shoulder blades from touching the back of a chair. He’d never send a letter that would travel on a Sunday.

“He unquestionably was an unusual creature,” Civil War historian Robert K. Krick said.

Jackson’s book disappeared after his death, and Robertson, like most historians, assumed the book was gone forever. That changed in 1989 when Robertson, searching library archives around the country for documents related to Jackson, got a call from Tulane.

In 1919, Tulane received boxes of Civil War collectibles from a wealthy alumnus named Charles E. Davis. But instead of cataloguing the material individually, the library marked everything under Davis’ name. The three boxes sat untouched for 70 years until librarians relabeled the material in the 1980s as the library switched to a computer cataloguing system.