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)