[Footnote: Official Records, vol. xii. pt. ii. pp. 940-941.]
"General Stuart reports that General Pope's chief quartermaster, who
was captured last night, positively asserts that Cox's troops are
being withdrawn by the way of Wheeling." Of course Lee suggests the
importance of "pushing things" in the Kanawha valley. Stuart thus
knew my movement on the day I left Parkersburg.

Even when the captured person tells nothing he is bound to conceal,
enough is necessarily known to enable a diligent provost-marshal to
construct a reasonably complete roster of the enemy in a short time.
In the Atlanta campaign I always carried a memorandum book in which
I noted and corrected all the information of this sort which came to
me, and by comparing this with others and with the lists at General
Sherman's headquarters, there was no difficulty in keeping well up
in the enemy's organization. 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. Official Records, vol. xix. pt. ii. p. 294.] That
the false estimate was unnecessary is proven by the fact that
General Meigs, in Washington, on July 28th, made up an estimate from
the regiments, brigades, etc., mentioned in the newspapers that got
through the lines, which was reasonably accurate. But McClellan held
Meigs for an enemy. [Footnote: General Meigs found ninety regiments
o