Oh I agree, that the actual field commanders did know exactly how many men they had available for duty. But did army and department commanders have such an accurate view of the situation?

One thing that amazes me is the National Park Service Soldiers and Sailors List. When you look at their total numbers of persons in a regiment you will quite often see 2,000 to 2,500 men that were in a regiment. But when you look at a muster roll of that same regiment taken every two months you don't see anywhere near those numbers. Which tells me that there was a continual turn over of men present for duty. That these muster roll and such were only good on paper. And those "paper numbers" was what those Department and Richmond commanders were looking at, in my opinion.

Another thing is something that we have discussed on this board before, with Bryan Howerton and others, was the large numbers of men on "detached duties" and not with their regiments. One statement that rings true was the attempt to hire slaves to do the support duties of the regiment. This number was upward of 50 slaves per regiment to provide cooks and teamsters for the regimental needs. Well that alone would have been 10% of the normal regimental strenght, that would be returned to the line. In the latter part of the war these servants were sent back home because of the lack of provisions to support them and that returned those duties to the soldiers to take care of those needs.

All of these factors played upon the "regimental strength" and the total numbers of "effective" men of a Regiment, or a Division, a paper number that was totally mythical in its nature.