3. Lincoln in Retirement.

Whether Seward and Chase and the other opponents of the Compromise were right, as it now seems they were, or not, Lincoln was not the man who in the unlooked-for crisis of 1850 would have been likely to make an insurrectionary stand against his old party-leader Clay, and the revered constitutional authority of Webster.  He had indeed little opportunity to do so in Illinois, but his one recorded speech of this period, an oration to a meeting of both parties on the death of Clay in 1852, expresses approval of the Compromise.  This speech, which is significant of the trend of his thoughts at this time, does not lend itself to brief extracts because it is wanting in the frankness of his speeches before and after.  A harsh reference to Abolitionists serves to disguise the fact that the whole speech is animated by antagonism to slavery.  The occasion and the subject are used with rather disagreeable subtlety to insinuate opposition to slavery into the minds of a cautious audience.  The speaker himself seems satisfied with the mood of mere compromise which had governed Clay in this matter, or rather perhaps he is twisting Clay’s attitude into one of more consistent opposition to slavery than he really showed.  In any case we can be quite sure that the moderate and subtle but intensely firm opinion with which a little later Lincoln returned to political strife was the product of long and deep and anxious thought during the years from 1849 to 1854.  On the surface it did not go far beyond the condemnation of slavery and acceptance of the Constitution which had guided him earlier, nor did it seem to differ from the wide-spread public opinion which in 1854 created a new party; but there was this difference that Lincoln had by then looked at the matter in all its bearings, and prepared his mind for all eventualities.  We shall find, and need not be surprised to find, that he who now hung back a little, and who later moved when public opinion moved, later still continued to move when public opinion had receded.

What we know of these years of private life is mainly due to Mr. William Herndon, the young lawyer already quoted, whom he took into partnership in 1845, and who kept on the business of the firm in Springfield till Lincoln’s death.  This gentleman was, like Boswell, of opinion that a great man is not best portrayed as a figure in a stained-glass window.  He had lived with Lincoln, groaned under his odd ways, and loved them, for sixteen years before his Presidency, and after his death he devoted much research, in his own memory and those of many others, to the task of substituting for Lincoln’s aureole the battered tall hat, with valuable papers stuck in its lining, which he had long contemplated with reverent irritation.  Mr. Herndon was not endowed with Boswell’s artistic gift for putting his materials together, perhaps because he lacked that delicacy and sureness of moral perception which more than redeemed