Jan Morris notes early in the introduction of her book Lincoln: A Foreigner's Quest that the desire to write and read about Abraham Lincoln is so strong that by the year 2000 "more words had been written about him than about anyone else except Jesus Christ, to whom he was frequently likened.” The number of pages-per-year, however, might skew in Lincoln’s favor after accounting for Christ’s 1,800 year head start. Why then did Jan Morris write another book about Lincoln? It seems the answer is so Morris, an Englishwoman, can play contrarian to American historical lore. She rejects Lincoln-as-Christ, instead comparing the great President to “grape jelly.” Upon her first visit to America in the 1950s, she found Lincoln and the unappetizing diner condiment equally ubiquitous and commercialized. This distaste for Lincoln kitsch fueled her skepticism of Lincoln’s legend and pointed her toward a quest to discover the man for herself.Unencumbered by an American childhood, Morris has few preconceptions about Lincoln. To her, he is not the Great Emancipator, or, indeed, an American Christ. Instead he is just a man, and she aims to find out what sort of man he was, warts and all. At first this is refreshing. Instead of romanticizing Lincoln’s childhood, as so many others have, Morris launches into the glib dismissal of Lincoln lore that would border on sacrilege for an American: the young Lincoln to Morris is little more than white trash, a boy she condescendingly refers to as a “frontier urchin.”
