The south had 480,000 men and the north had 861,000 fighting men in early 1864.*

By early 1864 the southern-rebel war machine was grinding to a slow drip in terms of availability of eligible fighting men. Thus, the losses of the Army of Tennessee during the summer of 1864 and then Hood’s Tennessee campaign (fall/winter 1864) were irrecoverable and irreplaceable to Jefferson Davis and the Confederate States.

*Source: Thomas L. Livermore, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America (1900); repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 45, 47, 48.