What made such proximity so remarkable was that, whereas in July the Union had outnumbered its rivals 35,000 to 32,000, there were now 150,000 Federal troops in the field against 40,000 rebels, a mismatch so absurd that many politicians and pundits in the North were beginning to wonder why they were watching reviews at all instead of reading about military victories.8 This was the grand irony of McClellan’s Grand Review.
