The Bixby Letter

[ELCore]

(03-27-2013 02:12 PM)Liz Rosenthal Wrote:  Ed, do you have a link to the article on the site? Thanks.

I would like to see it, too.

I should have written, above, something about stylistic analysis, but I'm not sure my thoughts are very well defined yet.

If Hay wrote the Bixby letter, he would have been trying to write it as Lincoln would. By that time (Nov. 1864), Hay had worked with Lincoln for nearly four years; indeed, he and Nicolay lived in the White House. Surely, Hay knew how Lincoln talked and wrote, and would have been especially familiar with Lincoln's way of drafting presidential correspondence. And Hay himself had his own literary skills to work from, eventually becoming a professional journalist and published poet.

I see that the Nickell study is nearly 25 years old. I wonder if he ever did a study of the Collected Works to determine which writings from the presidential years were actually not written by Lincoln: we do know, don't we, that Nicolay and Hay wrote some presidential correspondence? I mean, if stylistic analysis could tell us that he wrote something in particular, it could also tell us that he did not write something in particular.