What I mean by "play with the numbers" is that you and 67 make revisionist claims about the numbers, and in every single case, 100% of the time, your revisions either try to inflate McClellan or deflate his rivals.
This would be what's called an "area of interest" - plus, of course, the fact that people like Lee and Grant and so on have had rather more people willing to argue their cases.
I don't have confidence in the numbers claims by you and 67 because I know there's an agenda, and that agenda is not historical accuracy. I'll go with the credible historians, like Young and Rhea.
I think the problem here is that you're imputing an agenda which does not exist. That agenda
is historical accuracy - I feel McClellan is hard done by by the general historical consensus, for example, not because I think historical accuracy is bad for him but because I feel historical accuracy is
good for him and it's
lacking.
But as for Grant, which of these numbers do you disagree with?
- The number of PFD in the Army of the Potomac upon crossing the Rapidan was 120,384.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b2979871&view=1up&seq=15
- The number of PFD in the 9th Corps upon crossing the Potomac was 20,780.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b2979871&view=1up&seq=15
- The number of reinforcements Grant got was not less than 42,600 north of the James.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo1.ark:/13960/t4kk9w68r&view=1up&seq=745
- The strength of Smith's reinforcement column from Butler's army was not less than 16,000.
Because if they're all accurate, then you can just add them up for an estimate of the number of men Grant had available to him before reaching the James; if at least one of them is inaccurate, then we can ask why.
If I'm wrong here, then
at least one of those is inaccurate. If they're all accurate, then I'm not wrong.
You can't just dismiss numbers not because "I see an error here" but because "I know you're wrong even though I can't find any errors"; the Lost Cause was not shown to be wrong by pointing out that they were pro-South, because everyone knew that anyway. They were shown to be wrong by pointing out the inaccuracies in their maths.