Jerusalem: The Biography

* Dorr’s young master, plantation owner Cornelius Fellowes, decided to set off on a three-year tour of the world from Paris to Jerusalem. Fellowes offered a deal to his intelligent and literate young slave. If Dorr served him on the trip, he would be freed on his return. In his effervescent travelogue, Dorr recorded everything from the gorgeous ladies of Paris to the ‘scarce towers and charred walls’ of Jerusalem. On his return, his master refused to manumit him so Dorr escaped to the north and in 1858 published AColored Man Round the World by a Quadroon. It was the American Civil War, which started soon afterwards, that finally gave him his freedom. The winner of that war, President Abraham Lincoln, was not formally religious, but longed to visit Jerusalem, perhaps because as a young man he had lived in one of the American Jerusalems, New Salem, Illinois; he knew the Bible by heart and he had probably heard the stories of his Secretary of State, William H. Seward who had visited Jerusalem on his world tour. On the way with his wife to Ford’s Theatre, on 14 April 1865, he proposed a ‘special pilgrimage to Jerusalem’. At the theatre, moments before he was shot, he whispered: ‘How I should like to visit Jerusalem.’ Afterwards Mary Todd Lincoln decided he ‘was in the midst of the Heavenly Jerusalem’