Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Villard

Prejudice is doing a lot of quiet work here: Villard doesn’t confess to disagreement, he confesses to a bias he knows is irrational, sticky, and embarrassingly durable. The phrasing is almost legalistic in its self-exoneration. He was "imbued" by "personal contact", as if the prejudice seeped into him passively, rather than being chosen or cultivated. It’s the vocabulary of a reporter who wants to admit fallibility without surrendering authority.

Context matters. Villard met Lincoln in 1858, when Lincoln was still a regional figure and the national spotlight belonged to Stephen Douglas. In that pre-presidential moment, Lincoln could read as ungainly: the prairie lawyer with the odd humor, the homespun manner, the unvarnished face. Many educated observers - especially those with European sensibilities like the German-born Villard - carried class and aesthetic expectations about what leadership should look and sound like. Lincoln violated them. Villard’s "prejudice against Lincoln" is likely less ideological than visceral: a recoil from style that he misread as substance.

The line’s real charge is retrospective tension. Villard is writing after Lincoln has been transfigured by war, martyrdom, and national mythmaking. Admitting he "had not got over" an early dislike is a way of staging how hard it is to revise first impressions even when history screams you should. The subtext is about the limits of proximity: seeing a person up close can shrink them, and it can take catastrophe - and distance - to make them legible.