The Bixby Letter

[David Lockmiller]

(04-03-2013 11:38 AM)wsanto Wrote:  Reading through some of these very well written arguments supporting the supposition that Hay was the author of the letter, I've noticed what I consider a contradiction.

Part of the argument is that Hay told Herndon that Lincoln gave the duty of writing letters in general to Hay and that was especially true during certain times when Lincoln was stressed with other duties. It goes on, from Herndon, that Lincoln would sign Hay's letters without reading them. If one is to believe this then one can assume that Hay wrote a large percentage of Lincoln's letters. Lincoln was a very busy man.

Another argument is that certain words and phrases (beguile) in the Bixby letter were never used by Lincoln in his other writings but that these same words and phrases were frequently used in Hay's writings.

Now if Hay wrote the Bixby letter in the course of his normal duties of writing a large percentage of Lincoln's correspondence why did he not use these same words and phrases in these other letters typically credited to Lincoln?

I was reading last night the letter written by John Hay at the Legation of the United States, Paris, on September 5, 1866 to William Herndon. In that letter John Hay wrote:

“He [Lincoln] wrote very few letters. He did not read one in fifty that he received. At first we tried to bring them to his notice, but at last he gave the whole thing over to me, and signed without reading them the letters I wrote in his name. He wrote perhaps half a dozen a week himself, not more.

I opened and read the letters, answered them, looked over the newspapers, supervised the clerks who kept the records, and in Nicolay’s absence did his work also.”

By my calculations, if “Lincoln wrote perhaps half a dozen a week himself, not more,” and “Lincoln did not read one in fifty that he received,” Lincoln would have received approximately three hundred letters per week, or approximately fifteen thousand letters per year (50 weeks times 300 per week). Now, if Hay is correct in his numbers and Hay responded to only one in ten letters Lincoln received from the public, by writing letters in Lincoln’s behalf and Lincoln signed all these letters without reading them, the total for one year would be 1,500 or approximately 6,000 such letters over Lincoln’s first term of office.

My question to you is: How do you know, without reading copies of each and all of these hundreds of letters, that Hay did "not use these same words and phrases in these other letters typically credited to Lincoln?"