That is to say, Lincoln did not at once cast off any of his previous
characteristics. It is doubtful if he ever did. His experience was
tenaciously cumulative. Everything he once acquired, he retained, both
in the outer life and the inner; and therefore, to those who did not
have the clue to him, he appeared increasingly contradictory, one thing
on the surface, another within. Clary's Grove and the evolutions from
Clary's Grove, continued to think of him as their leader. On the other
hand, men who had parted with the mere humanism of Clary's Grove, who
were a bit analytical, who thought themselves still more analytical,
seeing somewhat beneath the surface, reached conclusions similar to
those of a shrewd Congressman who long afterward said that Lincoln was
not a leader of men but a manager of men.(1) This astute distinction
was not true of the Lincoln the Congressman confronted; nevertheless, it
betrays much both of the observer and of the man he tried to observe. In
the Congressman's day, what he thought he saw was in reality the shadow
of a Lincoln that had passed away, passed so slowly, so imperceptibly
that few people knew it had passed. During many years following 1835,
the distinction in the main applied. So thought the men who, like
Lincoln's latest law partner, William H. Herndon, were not derivatives
of Clary's Grove. The Lincoln of these days was the only one Herndon
knew. How deeply he understood Lincoln is justly a matter of debate;
but this, at least, he understood--that Clary's Grove, in attributing
to Lincoln its own idea of leadership, was definitely wrong. He saw in
Lincoln, in all the larger matters, a tendency to wait on events, to
take the lead indicated by events, to do what shallow people would have
called mere drifting. To explain this, he labeled him a fatalist.(2) The
label was only approximate, as most labels are. But Herndon's effort
to find one is significant. In these years, Lincoln took the
initiative--when he took it at all--in a way that most people did not
recognize. His spirit was ever aloof. It was only the every-day, the