It may therefore be said that every
commanding officer ought to know the divisions and brigades of his
enemy. The strength of a brigade is fairly estimated from the
average of our own, for in people of similar race and education, the
models of organization are essentially the same, and subject to the
same causes of diminution during a campaign. Such considerations as
these leave no escape from the conclusion that McClellan's estimates
of Lee's army were absolutely destructive of all chances of success,
and made it impossible for the President or for General Halleck to
deal with the military problem before them. That he had continued
this erroneous counting for more than a year, and through an active
campaign in the field, destroyed every hope of correcting it. The
reports of the peninsular campaign reveal, at times, the difficulty
there was in keeping up the illusion. The known divisions in the
Confederate army would not account for the numbers attributed to
them, and so these divisions occasionally figure in our reports as
"grand divisions." [Footnote: In his dispatch to Halleck on the
morning after South Mountain (September 15), D. H. Hill's division
is called a corps.
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