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. With the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address, the letter has been praised as one of Lincoln's finest written works and has often been reprinted.

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); at least two of her sons survived the war; and the letter was possibly written by Lincoln's assistant private secretary, John Hay.

Text

President Lincoln's letter of condolence was delivered to Mrs. Bixby on the morning of November 25, 1864, the day after Thanksgiving, and was printed in the Boston Evening Transcript and Boston Evening Traveller that afternoon. The following is the text of the letter as first published:

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, Massachusetts Adjutant General William Schouler wrote to Massachusetts Governor John Albion Andrew about a discharge request sent to the governor by Otis Newhall, the 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. Governor Andrew forwarded Newhall's request to the U.S. War Department with a note requesting that the president honor Mrs. Bixby with a letter. On October 1, 1864, the War Department wrote Schouler asking for the names and units of her sons. Six days later, Schouler sent a messenger to Bixby's home requesting the information and then sent a report to the War Department on October 12th. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton delivered the report to Lincoln sometime after October 28th. Nevertheless, the report erred in regard to the fate of Bixby's sons:

• Private Arthur Edward Bixby – Company C, 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery (enlisted June 24, 1861). Deserted from Ft. Richardson, Virginia on May 28, 1862. In an attempt to obtain a discharge order for him, on October 17, 1862, Lydia Bixby filed an affidavit that claimed Edward had enlisted underage and without her permission. Born July 13, 1843 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Returned to Boston after the war.

• Sergeant Charles N. Bixby – Company D, 20th Massachusetts Infantry (served July 18, 1861 – May 3, 1863). Killed in action near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Born c.1841 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

• Corporal Henry Cromwell Bixby – 1st enlistment, Company G, 20th Massachusetts Infantry (served July 18, 1861 – May 29, 1862). 2nd enlistment, Company K, 32nd Massachusetts Infantry (served August 5, 1862 – December 17, 1864). Captured at Gettysburg and sent to Richmond, Virginia. Paroled on March 7, 1864 at City Point, Virginia. Born March 30, 1830 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Died November 8, 1871 in Milford, Massachusetts.

• Private Oliver Cromwell Bixby, Jr. – Company E, 58th Massachusetts Infantry (served February 26, 1864 – July 30, 1864). Wounded at Spotsylvania on May 12, 1864. Killed in action near Petersburg, Virginia. Born February 1, 1828 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

• Private George Way Bixby – Company B, 56th Massachusetts Infantry (served March 16, 1864 – ?). Enlisted under the name "George Way," apparently to conceal his enlistment from his wife. Captured at Petersburg on July 30, 1864. First held prisoner at Richmond but later transferred to Salisbury Prison in North Carolina, arriving there on October 9, 1864. His fate after that remains uncertain. Later army records report conflicting accounts of him either dying at Salisbury or deserting to the Confederate Army. Born June 22, 1836 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

William Schouler, Massachusetts Adjutant General during the Civil War.

Schouler's report also erroneously listed Lydia Bixby's son Edward as a member of the 22nd Massachusetts Infantry, who died of his wounds at Folly Island, South Carolina. She may have deliberately concealed his 1862 desertion, possibly due to embarrassment or hope of further financial aid. (She had already been receiving a pension following son Charles's death in 1863.)

At the time of her meeting with Schouler, son George had just become a prisoner of war a month and a half prior; making it unlikely she was aware that he had only been captured and not killed in battle. Henry was still hospitalized following his exchange, possibly unable to contact his mother. It is unknown why the War Department failed to correct the Schouler report based on its own records.

In 1904 Boston socialite Sarah Wheelwright claimed she met and gave charitable aid to Mrs. Bixby during the war. Sarah said she went to Bixby's home to see if one son, who was in Boston on leave, could help send care packages to Union prisoners of war; only to later hear gossip that Mrs. Bixby "kept a house of ill-fame, was perfectly untrustworthy and as bad as she could be".

Some accounts claim Lydia Bixby had moved to Massachusetts from Richmond, Virginia and during the war was a Confederate sympathizer; although contemporary records variously listed her birthplace as Massachusetts or Rhode Island. 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. 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.

Copies

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

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. 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.

Christie's auction house receives numerous false original Bixby letters every year, including copies of a lithographic facsimile of the letter in widespread circulation. It first appeared in 1891, when a New York print dealer named Michael F. Tobin applied for a copyright and began selling souvenir copies for $2 each. Soon, Huber's Museum, a dime museum in New York began displaying a copy of the Tobin facsimile as "the original Bixby letter" and selling their own copies of it for $1 each.

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". The facsimile also contains the salutation "To Mrs Bixby, Boston Mass" which is missing from the original version published in Boston newspapers.

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. Lincoln scholar F. Lauriston Bullard investigated this claim in 1925, discovering that the college had never heard of the Bixby letter and did not have a copy, let alone the original.

Authorship

John Hay, Lincoln's personal secretary.

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

Second and third-hand recollections of acquaintances suggest that Hay may have claimed to friends that he had written the letter, but Hay's children could not recall their father ever mentioning that he had composed it. Writing to William E. Chandler in 1904, Hay said "the letter of Mr. Lincoln to Mrs. Bixby is genuine", although he may only have meant that the text itself was genuine. 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. Hay's scrapbooks, which largely contain his own writing, have two newspaper clippings of the letter. However, they also contain material written by Lincoln including the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural.

Supporters of Lincoln's authorship note that the Gettysburg Address and the Farewell Address are similar examples of Lincoln's highly regarded style. 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. 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. Still, in the letter, the word beguile seems to mean "to divert" rather than "to charm," the sense in which Hay frequently employed it. 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.

Legacy

Inscription quoting the Bixby letter at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific

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.

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.

References

Citations

Sources

• Barton, William E. A Beautiful Blunder: The True Story of Lincoln's Letter to Mrs. Lydia A. Bixby. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1926.

External links

• Images of the Pension Application of Lydia Bixby, filed after the death of son Charles on Fold3.
• Images of the U.S. Civil War Service Record of Arthur E. Bixby, C co. 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, containing an affidavit of Lydia Bixby, on Fold3.