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.”
WHY LINCOLN MISTOOK A DRIVER TO BE AN EPISCOPALIAN.
The first corps of the army commanded by General Reynolds was once reviewed by the President on a beautiful plain at the north of Potomac Creek, about eight miles from Hooker’s headquarters. The party rode thither in an ambulance over a rough, corduroy road, and as they passed over some of the more difficult portions of the jolting way the ambulance driver, who sat well in front, occasionally let fly a volley of suppressed oaths at his wild team of six mules.
Finally, Mr. Lincoln, leaning forward, touched the man on the shoulder, and said:
“Excuse me, my friend, are you an Episcopalian?”
The man, greatly startled, looked around and replied: