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)