The Bixby Letter

[ELCore]

(04-09-2013 08:32 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  Hopefully, I am not getting too technical here, but as far as I know, Hay never said anything about the letter until after the facsimiles appeared on the scene. So, when he told a few folks that he wrote the letter, did he merely mean he wrote it from Lincoln's dictation or copied it from Lincoln's draft? Or, on the other hand, did he mean he composed the letter totally by himself?

Robert Todd Lincoln is quoted as having written that his father "never dictated correspondence; he sometimes wrote a document and had his draft copied by either Nicolay or Hay...". But from the quotes in Burlingame's 1995 article, it is reported that Hay actually claimed authorship.

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I lean towards Hay's authorship, mostly because I don't think there would be any dispute at all unless Hay had, indeed, claimed authorship, and it is difficult for me to believe he lied about it. Moreover, arguments to the contrary are, to me, unconvincing.

It seems that the evidence, such as it is, is weighted according to each one's own experiences, ways of thinking, and intuitions and impressions. And we'll probably have to leave it at that.