“Stonewall” Jackson’s most famous campaign happened at this juncture, and to save Washington, Lincoln and Stanton placed themselves, or were placed, in the trying position of actually directing movements of troops.  There were to the south and south-west of Washington, besides the troops under McDowell’s command, two Northern forces respectively commanded by Generals Banks and Fremont.  These two men were among the chief examples of those “political generals,” the use of whom in this early and necessarily blundering stage of the war has been the subject of much comment.  Banks was certainly a politician, a self-made man, who had worked in a factory and who had risen to be at one time Speaker of the House.  He was now a general because as a powerful man in the patriotic State of Massachusetts he brought with him many men, and these were ready to obey him.  On the other hand, he on several occasions showed good judgment both in military matters and in the questions of civil administration which came under him; his heart was in his duty; and, though he held high commands almost to the end of the war, want of competence was never imputed to him till the failure of a very difficult enterprise on which he was despatched in 1864.  He was now in the lower valley of the Shenandoah, keeping a watch over a much smaller force under Jackson higher up the valley.  Fremont was in some sense a soldier, but after his record in Missouri he should never have been employed.  His new appointment was one of Lincoln’s greatest mistakes, and it was a mistake of a characteristic kind.  It will easily be understood that there were real political reasons for not leaving this popular champion of freedom unused and unrecognized.  These reasons should not have, and probably would not have, prevailed.  But Lincoln’s personal reluctance to resist all entreaties on behalf of his own forerunner and his own rival was great; and then Fremont came to Lincoln and proposed to him a knight-errant’s adventure to succour the oppressed Unionists of Tennessee by an expedition through West Virginia.  So he was now to proceed there, but was kept for the present in the mountains near the Shenandoah valley.  The way in which the forces under McDowell, Banks and Fremont were scattered on various errands was unscientific; what could be done by Jackson, in correspondence with Lee, was certainly unforeseen.  At the beginning of May, Jackson, who earlier in the spring had achieved some minor successes in the Shenandoah valley and had raided West Virginia, began a series of movements of which the brilliant skill and daring are recorded in Colonel Henderson’s famous book.  With a small force, surrounded by other forces, each of which, if concentrated, should have outnumbered him, he caught each in turn at a disadvantage, inflicted on them several damaging blows, and put the startled President and Secretary of War in fear for the safety of Washington.  There seemed to be no one available