The Bixby Letter

[Eva Elisabeth]

(07-21-2017 06:04 PM)Steve Wrote:  Mrs. Bixby had already been receiving a pension after son Charles's death in 1863 at the time of her meeting Schouler in early September 1864. Schouler didn't explain the purpose of Mrs. Bixby meeting with him in his letter to Gov. Andrew and was only brought her up incidentally to compare her case to that of a father who had 5 sons serving in the war and asking the governor if there was anything that could be done to help her. Schouler did help provide her charitable aid for Thanksgiving but that was about 2 months after her meeting. She couldn't apply for a pension for another son and if she wanted charitable aid, why would she go to Adjutant General for that? I would guess the meeting had something to do with either sons Oliver or George who had both on July 30th been killed and taken prisoner (and thought dead), respectively.

Her son Henry had already been exchanged as a prisoner of war but was a patient at the York military hospital in Pennsylvania recovering until October 1864 when he was sent back to his unit who subsequently sent him to the Readville, Mass. military hospital to recover even further before he was discharged in December. Both the Traveller and Transcript articles describe him as a "sixth son", so Mrs. Bixby obviously wasn't keeping it a secret that Henry was alive. Either Schouler misunderstood her or purposely misled the newspaper reporter to prevent embarrassing the President. It's likely that Henry wasn't able to contact his mother until after he was sent to Massachusetts.

George was captured as a prisoner of war on July 30, 1864 just over a month prior to Mrs. Bixby's meeting with Schouler. About a month following her meeting, George arrived at Salisbury Prison on October 9, 1864; being transferred from Richmond. He did not desert to the Confederates but in fact died at Salisbury sometime between October 1864 and early February 1865. A former Salisbury POW at Camp Parole reported that in March 1865. Unfortunately, no specific death date was provided and those types of records from Salisbury didn't survive the war.

So, Mrs. Bixby had good reason to believe four of her sons had been killed when she met with Schouler. However, it seems that she did lie to Schouler about son, Edward, who deserted from his the 1st Mass. Heavy Artillery in May 1862 while the unit was manning Ft. Richardson, one of the protective forts surrounding Washington D.C. (In fact, based on his unit's history, I doubt Edward was ever in a battle during his year in the Army when he deserted.) She claimed that Edward had died of wounds at Folly Island, South Carolina while serving in the 22nd Mass. Infantry.

That's an interesting explanation!
This is what Harold Holzer wrote in the article I linked to above:

"According to the historian George C. Shattuck, one of Mrs. Bixby’s contemporaries remembered the 'stout . . . motherly-looking' widow as a shifty-eyed schemer, 'perfectly untrustworthy and as bad as she could be.' In the end, few of the stubbornly lingering questions about Lincoln’s letter or its controversial recipient were definitively answered by F. Lauriston Bullard’s charming 1946 book Abraham Lincoln & the Widow Bixby or by scholars trying to unravel the truth in the six decades since.
One thing is certain. If Mrs. Bixby was a fake, she certainly managed to convince a number of high-ranking public officials otherwise. Her documentation proved more than sufficient to persuade the adjutant general of Massachusetts, William Schouler, of her legitimacy. To Schouler, Mrs. Bixby was 'the best specimen of a true-hearted Union woman' he had ever met, and he brought her case to the attention of the state’s governor, John A. Andrew. Equally impressed, the governor sent the War Department a request for a personal acknowledgment from no less than the President of the United States “taking notice of a noble mother of five dead heroes so well deserves.” Andrew was a loyal Lincoln ally. He had been a Lincoln delegate at the 1860 Republican National Convention and later became the first Union governor to respond to the new President’s call for troops after the firing on Fort Sumter. It is no surprise that Lincoln responded immediately to the governor’s request.
Lincoln’s condolence note was carried to “Mother Bixby” a few days later by Schouler himself, who evidently first made a wise detour to a Boston newspaper to make sure the letter would be set in type so it could be shared with the public that evening. Such a perfectly expressed credit to Yankee motherhood and Massachusetts patriotism promised a public relations coup. In the following days the letter was widely republished. But the original letter, and Mrs. Bixby too, promptly vanished from history.
We know now that the Widow Bixby either calculatingly exaggerated her claims of loss—seeking government remuneration to which she was not entitled—or simply did not know the true fate of her boys. In fact, of the five young Bixbys Lincoln was led to believe had been killed in the war, only two, it turned out, had actually died in battle (a grievous enough loss, to be sure). The third had received an honorable discharge (and may have been hiding at home), the fourth had deserted, and the fifth either had been captured and died as a prisoner of war or had deserted.
According to a faded 1949 clipping from the New York Sun now in the files of the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Lincoln’s masterpiece did little to “assuage” the allegedly grieving widow. Apparently Mrs. Bixby had migrated to Boston from Richmond, bringing with her a stubborn loyalty to the Old South, cherishing anti-Union sentiments she somehow managed to conceal from the pro-Union adjutant general, governor, and President. Her own granddaughter recalled that the widow, who died in 1878, was “secretly in sympathy with the Southern cause” and had 'little good to say' about Lincoln. She apparently so 'resented' the President’s condolence message that she 'destroyed it shortly after receipt without realizing its value.'
If true, here was the final irony in the life of Lydia Bixby. Whether she was a grieving Union mother or a wily Rebel sympathizer, a proper old widow or the owner of a house of ill repute, she failed to preserve and profit from the one item that would have brought her fame and fortune, not to mention a hearty last laugh on the Union: the priceless original copy in Lincoln’s hand of the most famous condolence letter of the nineteenth century. From the thousands of alleged 'facsimiles' sold over the years, the still mysterious Widow Bixby received not a penny."