een, in either case, between his foes, preventing
their junction, and in a situation to strike them in succession; but in
the one case his rear was safe, and in the other it was threatened.

With the true trimming instinct, he elected to take a middle course; he
divided his army, and sought to meet both dangers at the same time. Is
it saying too much that he was saved from utter destruction by the
heroic courage, against vast odds, of that fragment of his army which
fought at Perryville? It is the popular idea that a commander is
out-generaled when he is deceived. Military phraseology can mystify the
popular mind, but it can not eradicate from it this idea. Buell
certainly deceived Bragg, and by sending detachments, numbering in all
not more than twelve thousand, through a country from which a mere
handful of men could have prevented them from debouching, he kept thirty
thousand men, the bulk of General Bragg's army, idle, and rendered them
useless until the game was decided.

After the battle of Perryville (where he certainly got the better of the
forces opposed to him)--an earnest of what might have been done if the
whole army had been concentrated--and after an accurate knowledge had
been obtained, of how Sill's and Dumont's detachments had deceived him
into the belief that they were the whole Federal army--General Bragg had
his entire army concentrated at Harrodsburg. The two armies then fairly
confronted each other, neither had any strategic experiments to fear, on
flank or rear, for Sill's division was making a wide and prudent circuit
to get to Buell, and Dumont was stationary at Frankfort. It would have
been a fair, square, stand up fight. It is, now, well known that there
was not the disparity in numbers which General Bragg and his friends
claimed to have existed. There was less numerical inequality, between
the armies, than there has been on many battlefields--where the
Confederate arms have been indisputably victorious. Buell's strength was
less than at any other period of the eight or ten days that a battle was
imminent. Sill had not gotten up--the Federal army was fifty-eight
thousand strong--minus the four thousand killed and wounded at
Perryville, and the stragglers. Buell had in his army, regiments and
brigades, of raw troops, thirty-three thousand in all. Bragg had not
more than five thousand; most of them distributed among veteran
regiments. There were no full regiments, nor even full companies of
rec