It was easy enough to fill the ranks of the Northern squadrons.  Men volunteered freely for what they deemed the more dashing branch of the service, ignorant that its duties were far harder both to learn and to execute than those of the other arms, and expecting, says a Federal officer, that the regiment would be accompanied by an itinerant livery stable!  Both horses and men were recruited without the slightest reference to their fitness for cavalry work.  No man was rejected, no matter what his size or weight, no matter whether he had ever had anything to do with horseflesh or not, and consequently the proportion of sick horses was enormous.  Moreover, while the Southern troopers generally carried a firearm, either rifle or shot-gun, some of the Northern squadrons had only the sabre, and in a wooded country the firearm was master of the situation.  During the first two years of the war, therefore, the Federal cavalry, generally speaking, were bad riders and worse horse-masters, unable to move except upon the roads, and as inefficient on reconnaissance as in action.  For an invading army, information, ample and accurate, is the first requisite.  Operating in a country which, almost invariably, must be better known to the defenders, bold scouting alone will secure it from ambush and surprise.  Bold scouting was impossible with such mounted troops as Banks possessed, and throughout the Valley campaign the Northern general was simply groping in the dark.

But even had his cavalry been more efficient, it is doubtful whether Banks would have profited.  His appointment was political.  He was an ardent Abolitionist, but he knew nothing whatever of soldiering.  He had begun life as a hand in a cotton factory.  By dint of energy and good brains his rise had been rapid; and although, when the war broke out, he was still a young man, he had been Governor of Massachusetts and Speaker of the House of Representatives.  What the President expected when he gave him an army corps it is difficult to divine; what might have been expected any soldier could have told him.  To gratify an individual, or perhaps to conciliate a political faction, the life of many a private soldier was sacrificed.  Lincoln, it is true, was by no means solitary in the unwisdom of his selections for command.  His rival in Richmond, it is said, had a fatal penchant for his first wife’s relations; his political supporters were constantly rewarded by appointments in the field, and the worst disasters that befell the Confederacy were due, in great part, to the blunders of officers promoted for any other reason than efficiency.  For Mr. Davis there was little excuse.  He had been educated at West Point.  He had served in the regular army of the United States, and had been Secretary of War at Washington.  Lincoln, on the other hand, knew nothing of war, beyond what he had learned in a border skirmish, and very little of general history.  He had not yet got rid of the common Anglo-Saxon idea that a man who has pluck and muscle