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 external Lincoln that came into practical contact with his fellows.

This is especially true of the growing politician.  He served four consecutive terms in the Legislature without doing anything that had the stamp of true leadership.  He was not like either of the two types of politicians that generally made up the legislatures of those days—­the men who dealt in ideas as political counters, and the men who were grafters without in their naive way knowing that they were grafters.  As a member of the Legislature, Lincoln did not deal in ideas.  He was instinctively incapable of graft A curiously routine politician, one who had none of the earmarks familiar in such a person.  Aloof, and yet, more than ever companionable, the power he had in the Legislature—­for he had acquired a measure of power—­was wholly personal.  Though called a Whig, it was not as a party man but as a personal friend that he was able to carry through his legislative triumphs.  His most signal achievement was wholly a matter of personal politics.  There was a general demand for the removal of the capital from its early seat at Vandalia, and rivalry among