“How unfortunate!  Those mules cost us two hundred dollars apiece!” was the President’s only reply.

Mr. Lincoln was a very abstemious man, ate very little and drank nothing but water, not from principle, but because he did not like wine or spirits.  Once, in rather dark days early in the war, a temperance committee came to him and said that the reason we did not win was because our army drank so much whisky as to bring the curse of the Lord upon them.  He said, in reply, that it was rather unfair on the part of the aforesaid curse, as the other side drank more and worse whisky than ours did.

Some one urged President Lincoln to place General Fremont in command of some station.  While the President did not want to offend his friend at a rather critical time of the war, he pushed him gently and firmly aside in this wise:  He said he did not know where to place General Fremont, and it reminded him of an old man who advised his son to take a wife, to which the young man responded, “Whose wife shall I take?”

On one occasion, exasperated at the discrepancy between the aggregate of troops forwarded to McClellan and the number of men the 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.”

Lincoln’s orders to his generals are filled with the kindly courtesy, the direct argument, and the dry humor which are so characteristic of the man.  To Grant, who had telegraphed, “If the thing is pressed, I think that Lee will surrender,” Lincoln replied, “Let the thing be pressed.”

To McClellan, gently chiding him for his inactivity:  “I have just read your despatch about sore tongue and fatigued horse.  Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?”

Referring to General McClellan’s inactivity, President Lincoln once expressed his impatience by saying, “McClellan is a pleasant and scholarly gentleman; he is an admirable engineer, but he seems to have a special talent for stationary engineering.”

After a long period of inaction on the part of the Union forces a telegram from Cumberland Gap reached Mr. Lincoln, saying that firing was heard in the direction of Knoxville.  The President simply remarked that he was glad of it.  As General Burnside was in a perilous position in Tennessee at that time, those present were greatly surprised at Lincoln’s calm view of the case.  “You see,” said the President, “it reminds me of Mistress Sallie Ward, a neighbor of mine, who had a very large family.  Occasionally one of her numerous progeny would be heard crying in some out-of-the-way place, upon which Mrs. Ward would exclaim, ‘There’s one of my children not dead yet!’”

Writing to Hooker, who succeeded Burnside, Lincoln said: