Who is this person?

[David Lockmiller]

(03-10-2023 01:54 PM)Steve Wrote:  

(03-10-2023 03:28 AM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  Professor Burlingame provided additional evidence regarding the character of Mrs. Bixby (Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume Two, page 737):

"She lost two of her boys and tried to cheat the government out of money by claiming the others had been killed. Of the three survivors, one had deserted to the enemy, another may have done so, and the third was honorably discharged. Mrs. Bixby was born in Virginia, sympathized with the Confederacy, and disliked Lincoln so much that she apparently destroyed the letter in anger. Evidence suggests that she ran a whorehouse in Boston and was 'perfectly untrustworthy.'"

Almost none of that is true.

She definitely didn't run a whorehouse in Boston.

Son Edward did desert the Army in 1862 and Bixby does seem to have lied to Schouler about it.

Abbreviated “response” from Professor Michael Burlingame in his book, John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (2000), Appendix 1 - The Authorship of the Bixby Letter, 169 – 184, at pages 170 -171:

[Mrs. Bixby’s] granddaughter believed that the widow “was secretly in sympathy with the Southern cause . . . and had ‘little good to say of President Lincoln.” She added, “I remember so clearly my surprise when my mother told me how Mrs. Bixby resented” the letter. (Helen R. Towers of Athol, Massachusetts, quoted in the Providence Evening Bulletin, 12 August 1925.)

The widow’s great-grandson similarly recalled, “In my boyhood days I was advised by my Father that my Great-Grandmother was an ardent Southern Sympathizer, and when she received the letter, she destroyed it in angry [sic].” On another occasion he asserted that Mrs. Bixby, “originally from Richmond, Virginia, destroyed it shortly after receipt without realizing its value.” (Arthur March Bixby to David C. Mearns, New York, 31 August 1948, Mearns Paper, Library of Congress; Arthur March Bixby to the editor of the New York Sun, East Haven, Connecticut, 28 October 1949, clipping collection, Lincoln Museum, Fort Wayne, Indiana.)

Some respectable Bostonians looked askance at Mrs. Bixby. Sarah Cabot Wheelwright, who at the age of twenty-six became acquainted with her, described the widow in unflattering terms: “Another woman to whom I gave work,” she recalled forty years after the event, was a Mrs. Bixby, who had been recommended to me by Mrs. Charles Paine as being very deserving.” She was, as Mrs. Wheelright remembered, “a stout woman, more or less motherly-looking, but with shifty eyes.” Although she did not like widow, Mrs. Wheelwright approached her in an attempt to help convey “small comforts” to Union prisoners of war. When the widow suggested that she could expedite such an errand of mercy through one of her sons, Mrs. Wheelwright visited her home. “I did not like the look of things at all,” Mrs. Wheelwright remembered, “and the woman was very evasive, would give me no definite information . . . . Soon after this, I received a very distressed letter from Mrs. Paine, saying that the police on finding that we were helping this woman had told her that she kept a house of ill-fame, was perfectly untrustworthy and as bad as she could be.” (George C. Shattuck, ed., “Sarah Cabot Wheelwright’s Account of the Widow Bixby,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 75 (1963):107-8. Shattuck reproduces this excerpt from “The Reminiscences of Sarah Cabot Wheelwright,” 20 April 1904, a typed copy of which he found in the papers of Mrs. Wheelwright’s only child, Mary Cabot Wheelwright (1878-1958).)

I apologize if this is the inappropriate location to post this comment. But I wanted to post Professor Burlingame's detailed response somewhere.