On one occasion, exasperated at the discrepancy between the aggregate of troops forwarded to McClellan and the number the same general reported as having received, Lincoln exclaimed, “Sending men to that army is like shoveling fleas across a barnyard—half of them never get there.”

To a politician who had criticized his course he wrote, “Would you have me drop the war where it is, or would you prosecute it in future with elder stalk squirts charged with rosewater?”

When, on his first arrival in Washington as President, he found himself besieged by office seekers, while the war was breaking out, he said, “I feel like a man letting lodgings at one end of the house while the other end is on fire.”