by letter—­that he adopted in toto what I had done, and promised to meet the radicals—­Lovejoy and such like men—­among us.”  Mr. Herndon adds:  “Never did a man change as Lincoln did from that hour.  No sooner had he planted himself right on the slavery question than his whole soul seemed burning. He blossomed right out. Then, too, other spiritual things grew more real to him.”

Mr. Herndon had been an Abolitionist from birth.  It was an inheritance with him; but Lincoln’s conversion was a gradual process, stimulated and confirmed by the influence of his companion.  “From 1854 to 1860,” says Mr. Herndon, “I kept putting into Lincoln’s hands the speeches and sermons of Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, and Henry Ward Beecher.  I took ‘The Anti-Slavery Standard’ for years before 1856, ’The Chicago Tribune,’ and ‘The New York Tribune’; kept them in my office, kept them purposely on my table, and would read to Lincoln the good, sharp, solid things, well put.  Lincoln was a natural anti-slavery man, as I think, and yet he needed watching,—­needed hope, faith, energy; and I think I warmed him.”

It is stated that “when Herndon was very young—­probably before Mr. Lincoln made his first protest in the Legislature of the State in behalf of liberty—­Lincoln once said to him:  ’I cannot see what makes your convictions so decided as regards the future of slavery.  What tells you the thing must be rooted out?’ ‘I feel it in my bones,’ was Herndon’s emphatic answer.  ’This continent is not broad enough to endure the contest between freedom and slavery!’ It was almost in these very words that Lincoln afterwards opened the great contest with Douglas.  From this time forward he submitted all public questions to what he called ’the test of Bill Herndon’s bone philosophy’; and their arguments were close and protracted.”

Lincoln’s attitude on slavery aroused formidable opposition among his friends, and even in his own family.  Mrs. Lincoln was decidedly pro-slavery in her views.  Once while riding with a friend she said:  “If my husband dies, his spirit will never find me residing outside the limits of a slave State.”  But opposition, whether from without or within, could never swerve him from a course to which conscience and reason clearly impelled him.  Long before Mr. Herndon published the call for the Bloomington convention, he had said to a deputation of men from Chicago, in answer to the inquiry whether Lincoln could be trusted for freedom:  “Can you trust yourselves?  If you can, you can trust Lincoln forever.”

The convention met at Bloomington, May 29, 1856.  One of its chief incidents was a speech by Lincoln.  This speech was one of the great efforts of his life, and had a powerful influence on the convention.  “Never,” says one of the delegates, “was an audience more completely electrified by human eloquence.  Again and again his hearers sprang to their feet, and by long continued cheers expressed how deeply the