But, in the second place, even if other good reasons did not exist, there were but five companies of regular troops, or four hundred men, available for the garrisoning of nine fortifications in six highly excited Southern States. How were they to be distributed? Distributed equally, they would have amounted to a reinforcement of forty-four men and a fraction in each fort. In whatsoever proportions they might be distributed, according to the conjectured degree of exposure of the various posts, the movement could have been nothing but an invitation of attack, which the force would have been entirely inadequate to repel. The whole army of the United States then consisted of only eighteen thousand men. They were, with the exception of the five companies named by General Scott, scattered on the remote frontiers and over the great Western plains, engaged in the protection of the settlers and the emigrant trains; and for this duty their numbers were, and had long been, and have ever since been, notoriously inadequate. At a later period, after President Buchanan had retired from office, General Scott, in a controversy in the public prints which he thought proper to provoke with the ex-President, referred to six hundred recruits in the harbor of New York and at Carlisle barracks in Pennsylvania, which, added to the five companies mentioned in his “views,” would have made a force of one thousand men; and while he admitted that this force would not have been sufficient to furnish “war garrisons” for the nine Southern forts, he maintained that they would have been quite enough to guard against surprises. But it is to be noted that in his “views” of October, 1860, he made known to the President that there were _only_ the five companies, which he named, “within reach, to garrison the forts mentioned in the views;” and, moreover, he was mistaken, in November, 1862, in supposing that he had obtained these recruits when he wrote his “views,” nor did he, in October or November, 1860, in any manner suggest to the President that there were any more than the five companies available. Had he made any military representations to the President before the election, other than those contained in his “views,” it cannot be doubted that they would have received all the consideration due to his official position and his great military reputation.[63] Footnote 63: