# The strongest case that John Hay composed the Bixby letter

Assembled from Burlingame, "New Light on the Bixby Letter," *JALA* 16:1 (1995) pp. 59-71; Burlingame, "The Trouble With the Bixby Letter," *American Heritage* 50:4 (July 1999); Burlingame, "The Authorship of the Bixby Letter," in *At Lincoln's Side* (2000) pp. 169-184 (not available to me; cited through Emerson 2008 and Wikipedia); Burlingame, unedited *Abraham Lincoln: A Life* vol. 2 ch. 35 (Knox College text) pp. 3854-3857; Butler, *Across the Busy Years* 2:390-393; Grieve, Clarke, Chiang, Gideon, Heini, Nini and Waibel, "Attributing the Bixby Letter using n-gram tracing," *Digital Scholarship in the Humanities* 34:3 (2019) pp. 493-512 (preprint, line numbers cited). Lincoln counter-examples follow each point.

## 1. Hay's job description (Hay to Herndon, 5 Sept. 1866)
"He wrote very few letters ... at last he gave the whole thing over to me, and signed without reading them the letters I wrote in his name" (Burlingame 1995 p. 64). Corroborated by the documents Basler labels "Hay for Lincoln" and "in John Hay's handwriting" in the very week of the Bixby letter (CW 8:97 n., 122, 125, 158, 568-569; see `hay_nov1864.md`) and by Hay's diary of 20 Oct. 1863 ("a letter I wrote to Col. Rowland") (Bullard p. 84).
*Counter:* the next sentence, "He wrote perhaps half a dozen a week himself - not more" (Emerson 2008 p. 88); Robert Lincoln never saw a Hay-written letter signed by his father (Emerson 2008 p. 107); Sandburg's counts of autograph items (Bullard p. 67). Bullard pp. 134-135 argues the letters Hay is known to have composed (Boker) are stylistically nothing like Bixby.

## 2. The reported confessions (Morley/Butler, Brownell/Ogden, Page/Jackson/Lucas, Coolidge, Eddy)
Burlingame 1995 pp. 62-64 assembles all five; he concedes none "clinch the case" alone but argues that together with the scrapbooks they make Hay's authorship "highly likely" (p. 71). Butler adds Robert Lincoln's alleged statement "that it was the custom of John Hay to write in the name of Lincoln all letters of a non-political kind" (Bullard pp. 81-82).
*Counter:* see `hay_claims.md`; every chain is second- to fifth-hand, undated or misdated, and contradicted by Hay's 1904 letter and by what Hay told Robert Lincoln (Emerson 2008 pp. 103-105).

## 3. Lincoln was too busy in the week of 21 November 1864
Burlingame (Knox ch. 35 p. 3854): "In the immediate aftermath of the election, Lincoln was unusually preoccupied," citing Hay to Spencer, 25 Nov. 1864: Lincoln "was literally crowded out of the opportunity to writing a note" because "the crush here just now is beyond endurance"; "Nor did Lincoln have time to write a suitable reply when Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew requested a presidential acknowledgment ... For the president's signature Hay wrote a letter of condolence."
*Counter:* the same letter says Lincoln "fully intended to do so himself, and for that reason, I did not prepare a letter for him" - i.e. Hay did not draft what Lincoln reserved to himself; Basler's items for 21-27 Nov. 1864 number 15, fewer than election week (26) or annual-message week (35) (see `lincoln_calendar_nov1864.md`); on 21 Nov. Lincoln wrote in his own hand at least the Wright telegram (ALS) and endorsements (CW 8:117-120); Bullard p. 142 (Greeley letter "written at white heat").

## 4. Stylistic fingerprints (Burlingame 1995 pp. 65-67; 1999)
| Bixby phrase | Hay parallels (text, date, source) | Lincoln counter-examples |
|---|---|---|
| "beguile you from the grief" | "those whom the charm of strychnine circe had beguiled" (Ecarte letter, *Missouri Democrat*, 13 June 1860); "I was beguiled into the shop today" (to Anna Ridgely, 19 Mar. 1861, 1908 *Letters* 1:6); "trimmings beguiled from neighboring cabbage-patches" (Springfield *Daily State Journal*, 20 May 1861); "hatched to beguile the blockading fleet" (*Missouri Republican*, 22 Oct. 1861); "this subject of Fremont beguiled me away" (ibid., 8 Nov. 1861); "the beguiling embraces of a mad and ruinous rebellion" (ibid., 14 Jan. 1862); "Lander has been beguiling the tedium" (ibid., 14 Feb. 1862); "the beguiling Lothario of rebellion" and "the beguiling ruin that tempted them" (ibid., 25 June 1862); "insidious beguiling of the malarious atmosphere" and "His geniality beguiled" ("Colonel Baker," *Harper's*, Dec. 1861); "beguiled me into taking a big house" (to S. Weir Mitchell, 8 Aug. 1880); "a volume which may beguile an hour" (to Lodge, 26 Dec. 1890) - "at least thirty times" in all (Burlingame 1999) | None: the word does not occur in the *Collected Works* (Burlingame 1995 p. 65). Pival: Lincoln's sense would be the Elizabethan "divert," Hay's the modern "charm/entice" (Nickell LH 91:139); Nickell's Lincoln parallel "which might divert your mind" (N&H 1:183). Emerson 2008 p. 93: absence from the *Collected Works* "does not mean he never wrote nor spoke nor understood it." |
| "I cannot refrain from tendering to you" | "I cannot refrain from availing myself of the opportunity presented by your letter of expressing to you my gratitude" (Hay to Sarah Helen Whitman, Warsaw, Ill., 15 Dec. 1858, Hay Papers, LC: Burlingame 1995 p. 66 n. 31); "I cannot refrain from tendering you" (Hay to Quincy Gillmore, 1864, *At Lincoln's Side* p. 86, per Wikipedia) | Lincoln to Chase, 21 Sept. 1859: "I cannot refrain from ..." (CW 3, cited in the Wikipedia article); Lincoln's nine uses of "tender/tendered" between 24 Dec. 1860 and 8 Feb. 1861 (Nickell LH 91:139: "tender you my sincere thanks," "so kindly tendered," "cordially tendered him," "tendering me," "so generously tendered" etc.); Grieve et al. Table 5 list "cannot refrain," "I cannot refrain," "cannot refrain from" and "tendering" as n-grams found in *Lincoln's* corpus and not Hay's (preprint lines 586-587). |
| "our Heavenly Father," "Republic," "gloriously" | An unidentified magazine article in the Sandburg Papers (Univ. of Illinois) suggested Hay "regularly used the terms 'Heavenly father,' 'Republic,' and 'gloriously'" (Burlingame 1995 p. 66 n. 32); Burlingame 1999: Hay "occasionally employed the phrases 'I pray that our Heavenly Father'" | Lincoln: "our Heavenly Father" (proclamation, 10 Apr. 1862), "our heavenly Father" (proclamation, 20 Oct. 1864), "our Heavenly Father" (to Mrs Gurney, Oct. 1862), "our Father in Heaven" (to Mrs Gurney, 4 Sept. 1864) (Bullard pp. 96-105); "prayers to our Father in Heaven" (Nickell Table 2). |
| Tone of condolence | Hay to Manning Leonard, 9 June 1864: "my prayer that a merciful God may give you that consolation which mortal love is too weak to offer" (Burlingame 1995 pp. 66-67) | Lincoln to Fanny McCullough, 23 Dec. 1862 (CW 6:16-17); to the Ellsworths, 25 May 1861 (CW 4:385-386) ("May God give you the consolation which is beyond all earthly power"); Emerson 2008 pp. 93-94 prints Hay's 1870 and 1878 condolence letters as "not as elevated or mature." |
| "Adjutant General," "altar," "anguish," "costly" | Grieve et al. Table 5: 1-grams found only in the Hay corpus: "adjutant, altar, anguish, beguile, costly"; Hay-only 2-grams include "a loss," "altar of," "anguish of," "any words," "been shown," "I pray," "thanks of," "weak and" (19) versus Lincoln-only "a sacrifice," "and fruitless," "cannot refrain," "father may," "files of," "war department," "yours to" (10) | The Lincoln corpus used by Grieve et al. stops on 18 May 1860 (preprint, data section), so wartime usages such as "our Heavenly Father" (1862-64) and "altar of freedom" contexts are outside it; Nickell's Lyceum parallel "sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars" (1838). |

## 5. Hay as literary mimic
Burlingame 1995 p. 65: "Hay would obviously try to imitate the president's voice while composing the Bixby letter, and Hay was a gifted literary mimic." The Page/Jackson version has Lincoln struck by how "perfectly" Hay "captured his style."
*Counter:* this makes the stylistic case unfalsifiable in either direction; Pival's syntactic markers (should/would, perfect aspect, passives) are harder to mimic than vocabulary (Nickell LH 91:139).

## 6. The scrapbooks (Burlingame 1995 pp. 70-71; 1999; Emerson 2008 pp. 94-96)
A clipping of the Bixby letter is pasted in Hay's scrapbook of his own poems and reviews at Brown University (110 pages; donated 1954 per Burlingame 1999, "late 1950s" per 1995) and in Hay Scrapbook vol. 54 at the Library of Congress (donated 1952), alongside clippings of Lincoln's letters to John Phillips (21 Nov. 1864), Wyman (11 Dec. 1861), Loomis (12 May 1864) and the New York Committee (2 Dec. 1863). Burlingame: "It is difficult to understand why Hay would have pasted the Bixby letter in these scrapbooks, full of his own literary creations, unless he had composed it himself" (quoted Emerson 2008 p. 94); of Phillips, "It hardly strains credulity to believe that Hay wrote this routine letter" (1995 p. 71) - and the Phillips copy in the Nicolay Papers is "in an unidentified handwriting" (CW 8:118 n.). Editor's introduction, *Lincoln Herald* 110 (2008) p. 84: many, "including your editor, felt that his evidence had tipped the balance in the direction of Hay."
*Counter (Emerson 2008 pp. 94-96):* the same scrapbooks contain items "definitely not Hay's creations" (other Lincoln letters, a French notice about Mary Lincoln); the LC scrapbook for 1860-74 is "replete with articles about Abraham Lincoln"; OV 40 holds photostats of the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, which Hay did not write; Hay was collecting Lincoln material for the history from 1861 and revered Lincoln; the inclusion "cannot sustain a definitive conclusion." A further counter (mine): if Hay pasted the Phillips clipping because he wrote Phillips, the "unidentified handwriting" of the Phillips copy is not Hay's, which weakens the inference from the scrapbook to his authorship of either.

## 7. The 2019 n-gram tracing attribution (Grieve et al.)
Method: overlap of all 1-3 word and 3-16 character n-grams in the 139-word letter with equal-sized (c. 260,000-word) random samples of Lincoln (1,085 texts, 400,747 words, all dated before 18 May 1860) and Hay (577 texts, 261,126 words, from Thayer and Gutenberg) (preprint data section and lines 530-543). Result: "all 17 of these analyses identify Hay as the author"; "clear and consistent differences between Hay and Lincoln are identified by 100,000 words for all word-level analyses"; the 5-word n-gram analysis alone points to Lincoln, on the single phrase "may be found in the" (Lincoln, 11 Jan. 1837), which the authors discount (lines 545-563). Conclusion: "Assuming that only these two men could have written the Bixby Letter, our analysis shows that John Hay was almost certainly its primary author, providing strong linguistic support for the attributions made by Burlingame (1995, 1999)" (lines 592-596). Validation: the method attributed over 1,600 known texts of both men, "a majority of which are shorter than 200 words" (lines 613-616); the mean length of successfully attributed texts was 160 words (line 1507 of the preprint text file).
*Counter:* (a) the Lincoln sample is entirely pre-presidential and pre-war, whereas the questioned text is a wartime official condolence; the Hay sample includes his 1860s journalism and diary; (b) the authors' own Table 5 shows "cannot refrain from," "tendering," "bereavement," "war department," "files of" as Lincoln-only; (c) Proisl, Evert, Jannidis, Schoech, Konle and Pielstroem, "Delta vs. N-Gram Tracing: Evaluating the Robustness of Authorship Attribution Methods," *LREC 2018* (aclanthology.org/L18-1523), testing the method on English, French and German literary texts, found that "both methods require relatively long texts and are furthermore highly sensitive to the choice of authors and texts in the comparison corpus" (abstract as given on cris.fau.de/publications/201093222/); (d) the two-author assumption excludes Nicolay (absent, ill in St. Louis 17-30 Nov.: Lincoln Log) and the clerks Hay himself mentioned to Mrs Langford (Bullard pp. 129-133); (e) no independent replication on the Bixby letter has been published (see `since_2019.md`).

## 8. The Chandler letter read narrowly
Burlingame's reading (1995 p. 68; 1999): Hay's "genuine" answers only Chandler's question about the engraved facsimile, affirming the authenticity of the printed text as against the forgery, and does not assert Lincoln's composition.
*Counter:* Bullard pp. 129-133 (Langford letter shows Hay volunteering the composed/signed distinction when it applied); the letter says "The letter of Mr. Lincoln to Mrs. Bixby is genuine."

## 9. Butler's reasons
Butler 2:392: Lincoln "wrote very few letters that bore his signature. John G. Nicolay wrote almost all of those which were official, while John Hay wrote almost all of those which were personal. Hay was able to imitate Lincoln's handwriting and signature in well-nigh perfect fashion." Butler to Wakefield (*Hobbies*, Feb. 1941; Bullard p. 73): "John Hay was very secretive as to all his intimate personal relations with Lincoln, and frequently recorded as facts the public impression of what took place, he knowing perfectly well that something other was the case."
*Counter:* Bullard pp. 79-82, 113-115; Emerson 2008 p. 91.

## 10. Later adherents
Basler's 1953 headnote (CW 8:117 n.) keeps the question open; Randall and Current (1955), Dennett (1940: Hay "was able at that age to write such a letter," Bullard pp. 136-137; Burlingame 1995 p. 69) and the *Lincoln Herald* editor (2008) leaned to Hay after 1995; Wikipedia (as of my copy) reports the 2018/2019 study without adjudicating. My overall assessment: the Hay case is a cumulative, circumstantial one whose two strongest legs (scrapbooks; n-gram tracing) are each open to specific objections, and whose testimonial leg is uniformly hearsay; it is a respectable hypothesis, not an established fact.