The Global Lincoln

[Eva Elisabeth]

This book is really fascinating. As for Lincoln's image and the foreign touch-up, I thought the following might also be worth sharing with you, (briefly) mentioned in "Lincoln in the English imagination" by Adam I. P. Smith (I did a little further research).

I wonder what Lincoln would have thought of the idea of descending from a Viking king, as imagined by John Buchan in "The Path of the King" (1921).

John Buchan was a conservative Tory (ops, this is synonymous, isn't it?), a historian, journalist, and diplomat, and in his fantasy the explanation for transcendent greatness was a noble lineage.
"The Path of the King" is a collection of 14 fictionalized tales of great leaders through more than a thousand years of history all of whom, in Buchan's fantasy, were descended from a Viking king. The culmination of the book is Lincoln's rise to greatness.

In "The Last Stage" (Chapter 13), a young mother, married to a ‘Tom Linkhorn’ is dying in the Indiana wilderness; she is in agony over her debilitation and her lost ambition for a life of public service for her young son – but in her dying hallucinations, she sees a long line of youthful seekers, ending with her own son, and she knows that she has “given the world a master”. The final story (Chapter 14, "The End of the Road") takes the reader to the adulthood of this son – who turns out to be Abraham Lincoln. At his funeral he is described as "the first American", but also "the last of the Kings".

You can read chapter 13 here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/r...pageno=134

Chapter 14 is here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/r...pageno=141

Here's April 14, 1865:
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/r...pageno=157

...and the epilogue is IMO the most interesting:
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/r...pageno=160

According to a review, the book is based on the suggestion, made to the author in a discussion with friends, that great leaders or creative geniuses may seem to arise from humble backgrounds, but who knows whether they have descended from great men or rulers in the distant past? “We none of us know our ancestors beyond a little way. We all of us may have kings’ blood in our veins …The spark once transmitted may smoulder for generations under ashes, but the appointed time will come, and it will flare up to warm the world.”
Ok, and now it's time to (re-)write your own life's noble story...and don't forget to pass it on to your children and grandchildren!

PS: I like this cover: