The Bixby Letter

[Steve]

(07-13-2017 04:35 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  "Seven years later Rollo Ogden of the New York Times asserted that the Bixby letter "was doubtless signed by Lincoln and is certainly characteristic of his language; but it was actually written by John Hay." When queried about his source, Ogden replied, "I know of no scrap of documentary evidence, but Mr. Hay in his lifetime told more than one person that he really wrote the letter which Lincoln signed. Among others he confided this fact to ... W. C. Brownell, who told me of it at the time"

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"The letters quoted prove not only that Robert Lincoln believed his father had written the Bixby letter but also that John Hay himself told Robert he’d had nothing to do with it."

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The above are quotes from the links in the postings above. It seems clear Hay told different information to different people. Did he tell Robert what he thought Robert wanted to hear? If Hay told a bunch of folks that he wrote the letter, but told Robert what he thought his friend would want to hear about his father, then I might begin to agree with Burlingame's analysis. I have always thought Lincoln wrote the letter, but at this moment I am divided. I do find it somewhat strange that Hay apparently told several people he was the author, but he never told his own family.

The problem with all of the accounts of Hay claiming authorship listed by Burlingame, is that none of them come from somebody who specifically claimed to have spoken to Hay himself about the letter. The only such account is from Robert Lincoln who claimed the opposite. The accounts listed by Burlingame which specifically say that Hay claimed authorship are all by somebody who claimed that years earlier somebody else told them that decades earlier Hay had told them he wrote the letter. But all those accounts were written down after the claims of Hay authorship of the letter were already circulating among scholars and the media. The accounts all share a "whisper down the lane" quality where they could've been distorted by transmission from person to person or by the passage of time on memory (not to mention the effects of speculation about Hay being the author possibly further distorting that memory).

Hay's secretary, Spencer Eddy, did tell his sister of his belief that Hay wrote the letter but that didn't say if the claim had originated with a conversation with Hay or not.

Also, I'd like to point out the accounts of Nicholas Murray Butler and the Rev. G. A. Jackson seem suspiciously similar to one another, down to Hay revealing his authorship after the other person is admiring a framed copy of the letter on the wall. I suspect one of the two men made up his account after reading the other man's account. This may be a shot in the dark, but does anybody know anything about the Rev. G. A. Jackson and his character? I have a copy of Michael Rosenthal's biography of Butler, Nicholas Miraculous, which I'll look over to see if it has any relevant information.