The Numerical Strength of the Confederate Army / An examination of the argument of the Hon. Charles Francis Adams and others

AN EXAMINATION OF THE ARGUMENT OF THE HON. CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS AND OTHERS BY
Late 1st Lieut, and A. D. C. 3d Brigade Army of Northern Virginia. Author of A Soldier's Recollections. Exigui numero sed bello vivida virtus—Virgil
It will be difficult to get the world to understand the odds against which we fought.
—General Robert E. Lee
NEW YORK THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY 1912
Copyright, 1912, by The Neale Publishing Company
The distinguished soldier and critic whose name appears on the title page argues, as do various other Northern critics, that the usual Southern estimate of the strength of the Confederate army is too small by half. This conclusion is supported, they contend, both by the census of 1860, according to which there were at the very beginning of the war between the States nearly a million men in the Southern States of military age, and by the number of regiments of the several armies, as shown by the muster rolls of the Confederate army, captured on Lee's retreat from Richmond, and now stored among the archives in Washington. This second line of argument has been developed, among others, by two well-known military critics, Colonel Wm. F. Fox, in his monumental work entitled Regimental Losses in the Civil War (who concludes that the Southern Armies contained the equivalent of 764 regiments, of ten companies each), and by Thomas L. Livermore, Colonel of the 18th New Hampshire Volunteers, in his laborious and painstaking monograph, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America, published in 1901.
Both these authors have had the advantage of studying the Muster Rolls of the Confederate army just alluded to, but General Marcus J. Wright, of the Adjutant General's Office, War Department, Washington, writes me that he knows of no Southern man who has ever examined these Rolls, although General T. W. Castleman of Louisiana has recently received permission to copy the Louisiana Rolls. Colonel Walter H. Taylor, of General Lee's staff was also permitted to examine some of the official returns of Lee's Army.