"In a closely contested civil suit,"writes his associate,Ward Hill Lamon,"Lincoln proved an account for his client,who was,though he did not know it at the time,a very slippery fellow.
The opposing attorney then proved a receipt clearly covering the entire cause of action.By the time he was through Lincoln was missing.The court sent for him to the hotel.'Tell the Judge,'said he,'that I can't come;my hands are dirty and Icame over to clean them.'"[11]
"Discourage litigation,"he wrote."Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can.Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser,in fees,expenses,and waste of time.As a peacemaker,the lawyer has a Superior Opportunity of being a good man.There will still be business enough."[12]
He held his moral and professional views with the same inflexibility with which he held his political views.Once he had settled upon a conviction or an opinion,nothing could move him.He was singularly stubborn,and yet,in all the minor matters of life,in all his merely personal concerns,in everything except his basal ideas,he was pliable to a degree.
He could be talked into almost any concession of interest.He once told Herndon he thanked God that he had not been born a woman because he found it so hard to refuse any request made of him.His outer easiness,his lack of self-assertion,--as most people understand self-assertion,--persist in an amusing group of anecdotes of the circuit.Though he was a favorite with the company at every tavern,those little demagogues,the tavern-keepers,quickly found out that he could be safely put upon.In the minute but important favoritism of tavern life,in the choice of rooms,in the assignment of seats at table,in the distribution of delicacies,easy-going Lincoln was ever the first one to be ignored."He never complained of the food,bed,or lodgings,"says a judge of the circuit,David Davis.
"If every other fellow grumbled at the bill of fare which greeted us at many of the dingy taverns,Lincoln said nothing."[13]
But his complacency was of the surface only.His ideas were his own.He held to them with dogged tenacity.Herndon was merely the first of several who discerned on close familiarity Lincoln's inward inflexibility."I was never conscious,"he writes,"of having made much of an impression on Mr.Lincoln,nor do I believe I ever changed his views.I will go further and say that from the profound nature of his conclusions and the labored method by which he arrived at them,no man is entitled to the credit of having either changed or greatly modified them."[14]
In these years of the early 'fifties,Herndon had much occasion to test his partner's indifference to other men's views,his tenacious adherence to his own.Herndon had become an Abolitionist.He labored to convert Lincoln;but it was a lost labor.The Sphinx in a glimmer of sunshine was as unassailable as the cheery,fable-loving,inflexible Lincoln.The younger man would work himself up,and,flushed with ardor,warn Lincoln against his apparent conservatism when the needs of the hour were so great;but his only answer would be,"Billy,you are too rampant and spontaneous."[15]
Nothing could move him from his fixed conviction that the temper of Abolitionism made it pernicious.He persisted in classifying it with slavery,--both of equal danger to free institutions.He took occasion to reassert this belief in the one important utterance of a political nature that commemorates this period.An oration on the death of Henry Clay,contains the sentence:"Cast into life when slavery was already widely spread and deeply sealed,he did not perceive,as I think no wise man has perceived,how it could be at once eradicated without producing a greater evil even to the cause of human liberty itself."[16]
It will be remembered that the Abolitionists were never strongly national in sentiment.In certain respects they remind one of the extreme "internationals"of to-day.Their allegiance was not first of all to Society,nor to governments,but to abstract ideas.For all such attitudes in political science,Lincoln had an instinctive aversion.He was permeated always,by his sense of the community,of the obligation to work in terms of the community.Even the prejudices,the shortsightedness of the community were things to be considered,to be dealt with tenderly.Hence his unwillingness to force reforms upon a community not ripe to receive them.In one of his greatest speeches occurs the dictum:"A universal feeling whether well or ill-founded,can not be safely disregarded."[17]
Anticipating such ideas,he made in his Clay oration,a startling denunciation of both the extreme factions of "Those (Abolitionists)who would shiver into fragments the union of these States,tear to tatters its now 'venerated Constitution,and even burn the last copy of the Bible rather than slavery should continue a single hour;together with all their more halting sympathizers,have received and are receiving their just execration;and the name and opinion and influence of Mr.Clay are fully and,as I trust,effectually and enduringly arrayed against them.But I would also if Icould,array his name,opinion and influence against the opposite extreme,against a few,but increasing number of men who,for the sake of perpetuating slavery,are beginning to assail and ridicule the white man's charter of freedom,the declaration that 'all men are created free and equal.'"[18]
In another passage he stated what he conceived to be the central inspiration of Clay.Had he been thinking of himself,he could not have foreshadowed more exactly the basal drift of all his future as a statesman:
"He loved his country partly because it was his own country,and mostly because it was a free country;and he burned with a zeal for its advancement,prosperity,and glory,because he saw in such the advancement,prosperity and glory of human liberty,human right and human nature."[19]
