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.”