Bixby letter

The Bixby letter as it first appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript.

The Bixby letter is a brief, consoling message written in November 1864 by President Abraham Lincoln to Lydia Bixby, a widow living in Boston, Massachusetts who was thought to have lost five sons in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Along with the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address, the letter has been praised as one of Lincoln's finest written works; and though the original has been lost, it has often been reprinted.[1]

Controversy surrounds the recipient, the fate of her sons, and the authorship of the letter. Lydia Bixby's character has been questioned (including rumored Confederate sympathies);[2] at least two of her sons survived the war;[3] and the letter was possibly written by Lincoln's assistant private secretary, John Hay.[4]

Text

Lincoln's letter to Mrs. Bixby first appeared in both the Boston Evening Transcript and Boston Evening Traveller on November 25, 1864, the day after Thanksgiving.[5][3] The letter had been personally delivered to her by the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, William Schouler, though the newspapers differed about whether it was delivered on the 24th or 25th.[6][5] The following is the text of the letter as first published:[7]

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States.
Executive Mansion,

Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.

Dear Madam,

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln

Background

On September 24, 1864, Adjutant General Schouler wrote to Massachusetts Governor John Albion Andrew regarding a discharge request sent to the governor by Otis Newhall, a father of five Union soldiers. Schouler mentioned that he had been visited about ten days before by Lydia Bixby, a widow who claimed that five of her sons had died fighting for the Union.[3] Governor Andrew forwarded Newhall's request to the U.S. War Department with a note requesting the president honor Mrs. Bixby with a letter. On October 1, 1864, the War Department wrote to Schouler requesting that he supply the names and units of her sons. Six days later, Schouler sent a messenger to Bixby's home requesting the information; sending a report to the War Department on October 12th. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton delivered the report to Lincoln sometime after October 28th.[3][8] Nevertheless, the report was in error with regard to the fate of Bixby's sons; in fact, two died in battle, two survived the war, and the fate of the fifth is uncertain.[1]

The records of her sons' military service were as follows:

Schouler's report also erroneously listed her son Edward as a member of the 22nd Massachusetts Infantry, who died of his wounds at Folly Island, South Carolina.[3] At the time of Lydia Bixby's meeting with Schouler, son George had just become a prisoner of war a month and a half prior and son Henry was still hospitalized following his exchange.[2][3] She likely was unaware they had only been captured and not killed in battle. It is unknown why the War Department failed to correct the Schouler report based on its own records.[8] The report might have been written carelessly or perhaps Mrs. Bixby deliberately concealed son Edward's desertion in 1862 in hope of further financial aid. (She had already been receiving a pension following son Charles's death in 1863.)[3]

William Schouler, Massachusetts Adjutant General during the Civil War.

In 1904 Boston socialite Sarah Wheelwright claimed to have met and given charitable aid to Mrs. Bixby during the war, including once having gone to Bixby's home to see if one of her sons, who had been in Boston on leave, could help in sending care packages to Union prisoners of war. Shortly after this she heard gossip that Mrs. Bixby "kept a house of ill-fame, was perfectly untrustworthy and as bad as she could be".[14]

Some accounts claim Lydia Bixby had moved to Massachusetts from Richmond, Virginia and during the war was a Confederate sympathizer;[2] although contemporary records variously listed her birthplace as Massachusetts or Rhode Island.[10] The earliest confirmed record of her is a September 26, 1826 marriage in Hopkinton, Massachusetts of Lydia Parker to shoemaker Cromwell Bixby. The couple had at least six sons and three daughters before Cromwell's death in 1854.[10] Sometime after her husband's death, Mrs. Bixby left Hopkinton and eventually settled in Boston just before the start of the Civil War. She died in Boston on October 27, 1878 as a free patient of Massachusetts General Hospital.[15][3]

Copies

The fate of the original letter given to Mrs Bixby is unknown. In a 1925 newspaper interview William A. Bixby, a son of Oliver, said that he did not know what happened to the letter after his grandmother received it.[16] Arthur M. Bixby, a great-grandson, told the New York Sun in 1949 of his father's story that Mrs. Bixby had angrily destroyed the letter after receiving it.[1][14]

Christie's auction house receives numerous false original Bixby letters every year.[17][18] These include copies of a lithographic reproduction of the letter in widespread circulation that first appeared in 1891, when a New York print dealer named Michael F. Tobin applied for a copyright of the facsimile in order to sell souvenir copies for $2 each.[8] Huber's Museum, a dime museum in New York, soon began displaying a copy of the Tobin facsimile as "the original Bixby letter" and selling their own copies of it for $1 each.[3][19]

Lithographic facsimile of the Bixby letter sold by Huber's Museum in New York City.

Charles Hamilton, an autograph dealer and handwriting expert, examined a copy of the Tobin facsimile of the Bixby letter and concluded that it was a poorly executed forgery. He believed it had originally been written in pencil and then retraced in ink, calling the facsimile's handwriting "halting and awkward and makes his (Lincoln's) forceful hand appear like a child's scrawl".[20] Robert Todd Lincoln said his father's handwriting was easy to imitate,[4] and John Hay believed the facsimile to have been made from a "very ingenious forgery".[17] The facsimile also contains the salutation "To Mrs Bixby, Boston Mass" which is missing from the original version published in Boston newspapers.[7]

In the early 20th century, some Americans believed that the original letter, or a copy of it, could be found in Brasenose College at the University of Oxford on display in a place of honor above other great works in the English language. When Lincoln scholar F. Lauriston Bullard investigated this claim in 1925, he discovered that the college had never heard of the Bixby letter and did not have a copy, let alone the original.[3][21]

Authorship

John Hay, Lincoln's personal secretary, is sometimes suggested as the author.

Scholars have debated whether the Bixby letter was written by Lincoln himself or by his assistant private secretary, John Hay.[4] There is no proof for the latter, only hints that Lincoln might have delegated the task.[1]

Second and third-hand recollections of acquaintances suggest that Hay may have claimed to friends that he had written the letter,[1][4] but Hay's children could not recall their father ever mentioning that he had composed it.[3] Writing to William E. Chandler in 1904, Hay said "the letter of Mr. Lincoln to Mrs. Bixby is genuine",[3] although he may only have meant that the text itself was genuine.[14] In a 1917 letter to historian Isaac Markens, Robert Todd Lincoln said Hay had told him that he did not have "any special knowledge of the letter at the time" it was written.[4][22] Hay's scrapbooks, which largely contain his own writing, have two newspaper clippings of the letter.[1] However, they also contain material written by Lincoln including the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural.[4]

Supporters of Lincoln's authorship note that the Gettysburg Address and the Farewell Address are similar examples of Lincoln's highly regarded style.[4] Hay supporters have countered that Hay wrote pieces that compare favorably to the Bixby letter and note words and phrases in the letter that appear more frequently in Hay's writings than those of Lincoln.[23] The most telling example may be the word beguile, which appears 30 times in the works of Hay and, excepting the Bixby letter, not once in the collected works of Lincoln.[1] Still, in the letter, the word beguile seems to mean "to divert" rather than "to charm," the sense in which Hay frequently employed it.[4] In 1988, at the request of investigator Joe Nickell, University of Kentucky professor of English Jean G. Pival studied the vocabulary, syntax, and other stylistic characteristics of the letter and concluded that it more closely resembled Lincoln's style of writing than Hay's.[24]

Legacy

The phrase "the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom", is included on the base of the statue of Lady Columbia in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii. The letter is reprinted in full on a plaque in a memorial garden at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in Southern California.[25]

In the United States, the letter has been frequently mentioned when commentators discuss the topic of siblings going to war, such the Sullivan brothers, the Niland brothers, the Borgstrom brothers, and the Sole Survivor Policy of the United States military.

The 1998 war film Saving Private Ryan dramatized the story of three out of four brothers dying in battle and thereby instigating a dangerous mission to find the youngest and surviving brother missing in France after D-Day. In the film, General George Marshall (played by Harve Presnell) reads the Bixby letter to his officers before giving the order to find Private James Francis Ryan and send him home.

Former President George W. Bush read the letter during the ceremony at the World Trade Center site on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on September 11, 2011.[26]

Notes

  1. ↑ A "George Bixby, nephew of Cuba" was mentioned in the 1878 estate record of Albert Bixby, an uncle who lived in Milford, Massachusetts.[10] However, this George was not included among the surviving children of Cromwell Bixby on the estate's final list of heirs. Milford relatives later admitted confusing Lydia Bixby's sons with cousins having the same name.[13]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Burlingame, Michael (July–August 1999). "The Trouble With the Bixby Letter". American Heritage 50 (4).
  2. 1 2 3 Holzer, Harold (February–March 2006). "'As Bad As She Could Be': Who was the Widow Bixby?". American Heritage. Retrieved October 23, 2015.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Bullard, F. Lauriston (1946). Abraham Lincoln and the Widow Bixby. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. pp. 16–21, 29–33, 46–58, 109, 122–126.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Emerson, Jason (February–March 2006). "America's Most Famous Letter". American Heritage 57 (1). Archived from the original on 1 April 2016.
  5. 1 2 "A Mother is Honored - Five of Her Sons Killed during the War - A Sixth Severely Wounded - President Lincoln Sends her the Thanks of the Republic". Boston Evening Traveller. 25 November 1864. p. 6.
  6. ↑ "Letter from President Lincoln". Boston Evening Transcript. 25 November 1864. p. 2. Retrieved 6 April 2016 – via Google Newspapers.
  7. 1 2 Basler, Roy P. (1953). "Abraham Lincoln to Mrs. Lydia Bixby". Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln Vol. 8. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 2009-07-13.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Steers, Edward; Harold Holzer (2007). "Chapter seven: You can fool all of the people some of the time...". Lincoln legends: myths, hoaxes, and confabulations associated with our greatest president. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 93–101. ISBN 0-8131-2466-2. Retrieved 2009-07-13.
  9. 1 2 Massachusetts Adjutant General Office (1932). Massachusetts Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines in the Civil War: Volume V. Norwood, Massachusetts: Norwood Press. pp. 22, 576.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Bixby, Willard Goldthwaite; Putnam, Eben (1914). A Genealogy of the Descendants of Joseph Bixby 1621-1701 of Ipswich and Boxford Massachusetts. Brooklyn, New York: privately published. pp. 387–394.
  11. 1 2 Massachusetts Adjutant General Office (1931). Massachusetts Soldiers, Sailors and Marines in the Civil War: Volume II. Norwood, Massachusetts: Norwood Press. pp. 523, 549.
  12. ↑ Massachusetts Adjutant General Office (1932). Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors in the Civil War: Volume III. Norwood, Massachusetts: Norwood Press. p. 520.
  13. ↑ Banning, Kendall (February 1922). "The Case of Lydia Bixby". The Bookman: A Review of Books and Life (Vol. 54 No. 6): 516–520.
  14. 1 2 3 Burlingame, Michael (Winter 1995). "New Light on the Bixby Letter". Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 16 (1): 59–71.
  15. ↑ Giesberg, Judith (28 November 2014). "In defense of Boston's Widow Bixby". Boston Globe. Retrieved 11 January 2016.
  16. ↑ "GRANDSON BELIEVES BIXBY LETTER LOST; Declares His Grandmother Would Not Realize the Value of Lincoln's Message. RELATIVES ARE UNCERTAIN But One Says He Is Sure Five of Mrs. Bixby's Sons Were Killed.". New York Times. 9 August 1925. Retrieved 11 December 2015.
  17. 1 2 Nickell, Joe (2005). "Suspect Documents". Unsolved history: investigating mysteries of the past. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 95–105, 164. ISBN 978-0-8131-9137-9. Retrieved 2009-07-14.
  18. ↑ Burke, Monte (February 11, 2009). "Lincoln's Lost Memorabilia". Forbes. Retrieved October 4, 2010.
  19. ↑ Kelly, C. Brian (2000). Best Little Ironies, Oddities, and Mysteries of the Civil War. Nashville: Cumberland House. p. 269.
  20. ↑ Hamilton, Charles (1980). Great Forgers and Famous Fakes. New York: Crown Publishers. pp. 29–37.
  21. ↑ Peterson, Merrill D. (1995). "Ch. 5 Themes and Variations". Lincoln in American Memory. Oxford University Press US. p. 246. ISBN 0-19-509645-2. Retrieved 2009-07-13.
  22. ↑ Emerson, Jason (2012). Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 376, 537.
  23. ↑ Burlingame, Michael (2000). At Lincoln's Side: John Hay's Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 169–184.
  24. ↑ Nickell, Joe (Winter 1989). "Lincoln's Bixby Letter: A Study in Authenticity". Lincoln Herald 91 (4): 135–140. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  25. ↑ Lance Cpl. Damien Gutierrez (July 13, 2009). "Volunteers unveil memorial garden on Pendleton". Marines.mil. U.S. Marine Corps. Retrieved October 2, 2010.
  26. ↑ Landler, Mark; Schmitt, Eric (September 11, 2011). "Bush and Obama, Shoulder to Shoulder". The New York Times.

Further reading

External links

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