Who is this person?

[David Lockmiller]

For those interested in reading the unabridged portion of Professor Burlingame's writing on the subject of THE BIXBY LETTER in his book Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume Two, you may go here. The narrative runs from page 14 to page 19.

According to footnote 69 on page 16, Professor Burlingame wrote an entire book titled "Authorship of the Bixby Letter."

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Brown University Alumni Magazine
Ghostwriter
By Emily Gold / September / October 1999
November 7th, 2007

At left, the newspaper clipping of the Bixby letter pasted into John Hay's scrapbook. Below, John Singer Sargent's 1903 painting of Hay, and at right, a photo of Hay taken in 1861, when he was twenty-three.

Buried in a scrapbook kept under lock at the John Hay Library is a newspaper clipping of a letter signed by Abraham Lincoln. Addressed to a woman named Lydia Bixby, it has been considered by many scholars to be on a rhetorical par with Lincoln's Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses. According to a recent book by Connecticut College history professor Michael Burlingame, however, there's only one problem with the letter: Lincoln didn't write it.

In his new book, Inside Lincoln's White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, Burlingame argues that the author of the Bixby letter was none other than Lincoln's secretary, John Hay, Brown class of 1858, after whom the Hay library is named. "This one letter," Burlingame says, "entitles [Hay] to at least a secondary position in the ranks of distinguished American writers."

Authorship of the Bixby letter has been a subject of dispute for many years. Burlingame first became interested in it about six years ago, when he was at the Hay library researching a multi-volume Lincoln biography. When a staff member suggested he look at Hay's scrapbook, Burlingame politely flipped through it. Until he came upon the Bixby letter, which was tucked among two pages of Hay's Civil War poems. Why, the professor wondered, would Hay take the trouble to clip and paste the article if he was not the author? "I thought, 'Well, for heaven's sake, this bears looking into.' "

The Bixby letter, Burlingame concluded, bears Hay's "stylistic fingerprint." The word "beguile," for instance, is used at least thirty times in Hay's writings, while Lincoln never used it. Other Hay writings include the phrases "I pray that our Heavenly Father" and "I cannot refrain from tendering you," which are completely absent from Lincoln's writings. Burlingame also noticed a similarity in tone between the Bixby letter and several condolence letters signed by Hay. What's more, Hay told six people that he'd authored the letter, and as secretary, Hay often wrote letters for the President at busy times. "You add all those things up," Burlingame says, "and it seems to be pretty conclusive."

Other Lincoln scholars contest his assertion, but Burlingame says they should not fear that Hay's authorship might tarnish Lincoln's literary reputation. "What it should do is not diminish respect for Lincoln," he says, "but enhance respect for Hay."

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Technology steps in.

Attributing the Bixby Letter using n-gram tracing

By Jack Grieve, Isobelle Clarke, Emily Chiang, Hannah Gideon, Annina Heini, Andrea Nini, Emily Waibel

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Volume 34, Issue 3, September 2019, Pages 493–512

Published: 26 October 2018

Abstract

There is a long-standing debate about the authorship of the Bixby Letter, one of the most famous pieces of correspondence in American history. Despite being signed by President Abraham Lincoln, some historians have claimed that its true author was John Hay, Lincoln’s personal secretary. Analyses of the letter have been inconclusive in part because the text totals only 139 words and is thus far too short to be attributed using standard methods. To test whether Lincoln or Hay wrote this letter, we therefore introduce and apply a new technique for attributing short texts called ‘n-gram tracing’. After demonstrating that our method can distinguish between the known writings of Lincoln and Hay with a very high degree of accuracy, we use it to attribute the Bixby Letter. We conclude that the text was authored by John Hay—rewriting this one episode in the history of the USA, while offering a solution to one of the most persistent problems in authorship attribution.

The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press

[David Lockmiller]

(03-10-2023 02:54 PM)Steve Wrote:  

(03-10-2023 04:28 AM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  Professor Burlingame provided additional evidence regarding the character of Mrs. Bixby (Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume Two, page 737):

"She lost two of her boys and tried to cheat the government out of money by claiming the others had been killed. Of the three survivors, one had deserted to the enemy, another may have done so, and the third was honorably discharged. Mrs. Bixby was born in Virginia, sympathized with the Confederacy, and disliked Lincoln so much that she apparently destroyed the letter in anger. Evidence suggests that she ran a whorehouse in Boston and was 'perfectly untrustworthy.'"

Almost none of that is true.

She definitely didn't run a whorehouse in Boston.

Son Edward did desert the Army in 1862 and Bixby does seem to have lied to Schouler about it.

Abbreviated “response” from Professor Michael Burlingame in his book, John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (2000), Appendix 1 - The Authorship of the Bixby Letter, 169 – 184, at pages 170 -171:

[Mrs. Bixby’s] granddaughter believed that the widow “was secretly in sympathy with the Southern cause . . . and had ‘little good to say of President Lincoln.” She added, “I remember so clearly my surprise when my mother told me how Mrs. Bixby resented” the letter. (Helen R. Towers of Athol, Massachusetts, quoted in the Providence Evening Bulletin, 12 August 1925.)

The widow’s great-grandson similarly recalled, “In my boyhood days I was advised by my Father that my Great-Grandmother was an ardent Southern Sympathizer, and when she received the letter, she destroyed it in angry [sic].” On another occasion he asserted that Mrs. Bixby, “originally from Richmond, Virginia, destroyed it shortly after receipt without realizing its value.” (Arthur March Bixby to David C. Mearns, New York, 31 August 1948, Mearns Paper, Library of Congress; Arthur March Bixby to the editor of the New York Sun, East Haven, Connecticut, 28 October 1949, clipping collection, Lincoln Museum, Fort Wayne, Indiana.)

Some respectable Bostonians looked askance at Mrs. Bixby. Sarah Cabot Wheelwright, who at the age of twenty-six became acquainted with her, described the widow in unflattering terms: “Another woman to whom I gave work,” she recalled forty years after the event, was a Mrs. Bixby, who had been recommended to me by Mrs. Charles Paine as being very deserving.” She was, as Mrs. Wheelright remembered, “a stout woman, more or less motherly-looking, but with shifty eyes.” Although she did not like widow, Mrs. Wheelwright approached her in an attempt to help convey “small comforts” to Union prisoners of war. When the widow suggested that she could expedite such an errand of mercy through one of her sons, Mrs. Wheelwright visited her home. “I did not like the look of things at all,” Mrs. Wheelwright remembered, “and the woman was very evasive, would give me no definite information . . . . Soon after this, I received a very distressed letter from Mrs. Paine, saying that the police on finding that we were helping this woman had told her that she kept a house of ill-fame, was perfectly untrustworthy and as bad as she could be.” (George C. Shattuck, ed., “Sarah Cabot Wheelwright’s Account of the Widow Bixby,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 75 (1963):107-8. Shattuck reproduces this excerpt from “The Reminiscences of Sarah Cabot Wheelwright,” 20 April 1904, a typed copy of which he found in the papers of Mrs. Wheelwright’s only child, Mary Cabot Wheelwright (1878-1958).)

I apologize if this is the inappropriate location to post this comment. But I wanted to post Professor Burlingame's detailed response somewhere.

[RJNorton]

No googling please. Thanks.

Who wrote this about Abraham Lincoln?

"Surrounded by all sorts of conflicting claims, by traitors, by half-hearted, timid men, by Border States men, and Free States men, by radical Abolitionists, and Conservatives, he has listened to all, weighed the words of all, waited, observed, yielded now here and now there, but in the main kept one inflexible, honest purpose, and drawn the national ship through."

[Wild Bill]

William H. Seward

[RJNorton]

That is a logical guess, Bill, but it wasn't Seward.

[Rogerm]

John Hay.

[Anita]

Walt Whitman?

[RJNorton]

Your guesses are also logical, Roger and Anita. However, neither is correct.

Hint #1: The correct answer is female.

[David Lockmiller]

Julia Grant?

[RJNorton]

Nope, it was not Julia Grant.

[Anita]

Rebecca Pomroy

[RJNorton]

Nope, it was not Rebecca Pomroy.

[Juan Marrero]

(04-03-2023 04:43 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  Nope, it was not Rebecca Pomroy.

Harriet Beecher Stowe?

[RJNorton]

Excellent, Juan! Yes, the words in the question come from Harriet Beecher Stowe.

[Juan Marrero]

I had a "memory trace" about the "national ship" and, when you said it was a lady, it came back to me.

I think that it is too bad that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" today does not get the kind of literary and popular respect it should. Uncle Tom is a Christ-like character and that is not appreciated for the great honor it is.