The Bixby Letter

[wsanto]

(04-06-2013 12:00 PM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  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?"

If you read or browse through the volumes of Lincoln's known writings (all organized and searchable and available for free on-line), you will notice that most are letters that he wrote or is credited to have written while in the White House. This database includes the Bixby Letter.

I suppose someone, while researching this topic, searched this database for the word "beguile" and found it only once; in the Bixby Letter. They then searched for the word "beguile" in all the known writings of Hay and noticed that he used the word with some level of frequency. Some have used these results as a cornerstione of their evidence that Hay, not Lincoln, must have written the Bixby letter.

I contend that if Hay, as claimed in his letter to Herndon, wrote most of this White House correspondence credited to Lincoln then the word "beguile" would appear more often than once in the collected writings of Lincoln.