But beside that, the use of the faint to set up ambushes have been used by militaries for thousands of years. The American Indians used it against the Pony Soldiers out west. The Greeks, the Roman, the Persian, even the Zulus used the faint retreat as a tactic to lure their enemy into the open. Even as a cop you don't chase a criminal blindly down a dark alley just in case he has a friend down there.
How hard is that to understand? Evidently it was something that Lincoln didn't seem to understand. Lincoln's entire war policy from his badgering of McClellan, to Burnsides, to Hooker, to Meade, to Grant, seemed to be simply "Kill Rebels, Kill Rebels, Kill more Rebels."