He estimated his own requirement at a "total effective force" of 208,000 men, which implied "an aggregate, present and absent, of about 240,000 men." Of these he designed 150,000 as a "column of active operations;" the rest were for garrisons and guards. He said that in fact he had a gross aggregate of 168,318, and the "force present for duty was 147,695." Since the garrisons and the guards were a fixed number, the reduction fell wholly upon the movable column, and reduced "the number disposable for an advance to 76,285." Thus he made himself out to be fatally overmatched. But he was excessively in error. In the autumn Johnston's effective force was only 41,000 men, and on December 1, 1861, it was 47,000.[152] Such comparisons, advanced with positiveness by the highest authority, puzzled Mr. Lincoln. They seemed very strange, yet he could not disprove them, and was therefore obliged to face the perplexing choice which was mercilessly set before him: "either to go into winter quarters, or to assume the offensive with forces greatly inferior in number" to what was "desirable and necessary." "If political considerations render the first course unadvisable, the second alone remains." The general's most cheering admission was that, by stripping all other armies down to the lowest numbers absolutely necessary for a strict defensive, and by concentrating all the forces of the nation and all the attention of the government upon "the vital point" in Virginia, it might yet be possible for this "main army, whose destiny it [was] to decide the controversy,... to move with a reasonable prospect of success before the winter is fairly upon us." A direct assertion of impossibility, provocative of denial or discussion, would have been less disheartening.