Lincoln several times ironically compared the process to that of a man
trying to shovel a bushel of fleas across a barn floor.
While the month of May insensibly slipped away amid these preparatory
vexations, camps of instruction rapidly grew to small armies at a few
principal points, even under such incidental delay and loss; and during
June the confronting Union and Confederate forces began to produce the
conflicts and casualties of earnest war. As yet they were both few and
unimportant: the assassination of Ellsworth when Alexandria was
occupied; a slight cavalry skirmish at Fairfax Court House; the rout of
a Confederate regiment at Philippi, West Virginia; the blundering
leadership through which two Union detachments fired upon each other in
the dark at Big Bethel, Virginia; the ambush of a Union railroad train
at Vienna Station; and Lyon's skirmish, which scattered the first
collection of rebels at Boonville, Missouri. Comparatively speaking all
these were trivial in numbers of dead and wounded--the first few drops
of blood before the heavy sanguinary showers the future was destined to
bring. But the effect upon the public was irritating and painful to a
degree entirely out of proportion to their real extent and gravity.
The relative loss and gain in these affairs was not greatly unequal.
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