# John Hay's own statements about the Bixby letter and about drafting Lincoln's correspondence Chronological. Each entry gives the document, its date, where the text is printed, and the exact words. ## 1. Diary, 20 October 1863 (letter to Col. Rowland) "Today I induced the President to sign a letter I wrote to Col. Rowland approving his proposed National Rifle Corps. I think Rowland himself rather a humbug but his idea is a good one." In 1878 Hay added: "I was not old enough to know that a good idea is worthless in the hands of a 'humbug.'" (Bullard p. 84, citing Dennett's edition of the Diary; the Rowland letter was omitted from Nicolay and Hay's *Complete Works*.) ## 2. Diary, 24/26 October 1863 (letter to George H. Boker, Union League of Philadelphia) Hay's diary says he wrote the letter on 24 Oct.; the printed letter (Nicolay and Hay, *Complete Works* 9:181 f.) is dated 26 Oct. Text: "It is with heartfelt gratification that I acknowledge the receipt of your communication of the 6th, and the accompanying medal, by which I am made an honorary member of the Union League of Philadelphia ... I am very truly your obedient servant, A. Lincoln." Bullard p. 84-85 prints it and comments: "What a contrast between the style of the President and the style of his junior secretary! No glimmer of Lincoln flickers in this very correct note to Boker." ## 3. Condolence letter to a relative, 9 June 1864 (Hay to Manning Leonard, Hay Papers, Brown University) "I will not intrude upon your sorrow further than to express my deep sympathy for your great loss and my prayer that a merciful God may give you that consolation which mortal love is too weak to offer. I have sent your letter to my mother who will join me in my sympathy and prayers." (Burlingame 1995 p. 66-67 and n. 33; Bullard p. 154 prints the same letter.) Burlingame offers it as a parallel in tone; Bullard as a contrast. ## 4. Diary, 11 November 1864 (the two serenade speeches) "The speeches of the President at the last two serenades are very highly spoken of. The first I wrote after the fact, to prevent the 'loyal Pennsylvanians' getting a swing at it themselves. The second one, last night, the President himself wrote late in the evening, and read it from the window: - 'Not very graceful,' he said: 'but I am growing old enough not to care much for the manner of doing things.'" (*Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary* (1908) 1:245; Thayer 1:217; quoted by Basler, *Collected Works* 8:101 n.) Bullard p. 133 (citing Dennett p. 236) quotes the related entry "I wrote the speech and sent it to Hanscum" and comments that "wrote" here means wrote out what Lincoln had said on 9 November, an example of Hay's "ambiguous use of that term." ## 5. Diary, 12-15 November 1864 (absence from Washington) "12 Nov., 1864. I started for G[rant]'s headquarters. We left the Navy Yard at two o'clock in the afternoon ... We arrived at City Point at three o'clock ... We left Fort Monroe at 3 1/2, and arrived at Washington Tuesday morning, the 15th, at 7 a.m." (1908 *Letters* 1:245-250; Thayer 1:217-218.) The next diary extract printed is 18 December 1864 (1:250). ## 6. Hay to Charles S. Spencer (New York), 25 November 1864 "I regret that the President was literally crowded out of the opportunity of writing you a note for yr. banquet. He fully intended to do so himself, and for that reason, I did not prepare a letter for him. But the crush here just now is beyond endurance." (Burlingame, *At Lincoln's Side* (2000) p. 101, as quoted in Burlingame, *American Heritage* July 1999; Burlingame's unedited *Abraham Lincoln: A Life* vol. 2 ch. 35 p. 3854 (Knox College text) quotes it as "literally crowded out of the opportunity to writing a note.") This is Hay's only surviving statement from the week of the Bixby letter about what Lincoln was and was not writing himself. ## 7. Letters and telegrams in Hay's hand for Lincoln in November-December 1864 (Basler, *Collected Works* vol. VIII) - 9 Nov. 1864, to Charles Butler (declining the Goldwin Smith dinner): "The draft is in John Hay's autograph" (8:97 n.). - 23 and 27 Nov. 1864, referrals to Stanton, "Hay for Lincoln" (appendix, 8:568-569). - 25 Nov. 1864, to George B. Smith, "Hay for Lincoln, acknowledging present of piece of beef, DLC-RTL" (8:569; also *Lincoln Log*, 25 Nov. 1864). - 28 Nov. 1864, to Henry F. Harrington and others: "LS, InFtwL. The body of the letter is in John Hay's handwriting" (8:122). - 1 Dec. 1864, telegram to Andrew Johnson: "The telegram is in John Hay's autograph, 'A. Lincoln' appearing to have been signed by Hay also" (8:125), with Hay's note "Send above John Hay AAG". - 8 Dec. 1864, telegram to Rosecrans: "in John Hay's handwriting except for Lincoln's signature" (8:158). None of these is a statement *about* the Bixby letter, but they document Hay's routine on either side of 21 November. ## 8. Hay to William H. Herndon, Paris, 5 September 1866 "He wrote very few letters. He did not read one in fifty that he received. At first we tried to bring them to his notice, but at last he gave the whole thing over to me, and signed without reading them the letters I wrote in his name. He wrote perhaps half a dozen a week himself - not more. Nicolay received, prepared and filed the papers. ... I opened and read the letters, answered them, looked over the newspapers, supervised the clerks who kept the records and in Nicolay's absence did his work also." (Hay Papers, Brown, and Herndon-Weik Collection, LC; printed Hertz, *The Hidden Lincoln* (1938) p. 307, and in facsimile by Gabriel Wells 1940; quoted Bullard p. 66, Burlingame 1995 p. 64, Emerson 2008 p. 88 who stresses the omitted sentence "He wrote perhaps half a dozen a week himself.") Same letter: "I consider Lincoln Republicanism incarnate ... Lincoln with all his foibles is the greatest character since Christ" (Emerson 2008 p. 95). ## 9. "Life in the White House in the Time of Lincoln," *Century Magazine*, November 1890; reprinted in *Addresses of John Hay* (1906), pp. 323-354 Read in full. It describes Lincoln's receptions, his children, his evenings, his reading of Shakespeare, Burns, Hood and Holmes ("He would ... come to his secretary's room and read aloud something that especially pleased him," p. 335), and the Hackett letters (p. 332). It contains no statement about who drafted Lincoln's letters and no mention of the Bixby letter. ## 10. Nicolay and Hay, *Abraham Lincoln: Complete Works* (1894), 2:600 The Bixby letter is printed as Lincoln's, in one paragraph, headed "Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Massachusetts," signed "Abraham Lincoln," with "Adjutant-General" hyphenated and "heavenly" lower-case (Bullard n. 19, pp. 146-147). The 1905 Gettysburg edition (10:274-275) keeps the text with the footnote "This is one of Lincoln's most famous letters on account of its evident sincerity and the purity of its expression" and, in vol. 11 facing p. 44, reproduces the forged Huber's Museum facsimile captioned "Original Manuscript on Exhibition at Huber's Museum in New York City" (my reading of archive.org `completeworksofv10linc` and `completeworksofav11linc`). Robert Lincoln stated (to Markens, 5 Jan. 1917) that "it was he [Nicolay] and not Colonel Hay who did the work of compiling the two final documentary volumes," though Emerson 2008 n. 64 shows Hay "contributed to the editing choices." ## 11. Hay to Mrs. Laura C. Langford, 4 June 1903 Asked about two Lincoln letters (21 Oct. 1862; 11 Sept. 1863) and a circular of 3 July 1862: "The signatures, of course, are genuine, but the body of the letters was written by one of the clerks in the White House. It was not Mr. Nicolay or myself." (Madigan Catalogue, 1929, no. 122, p. 55; Bullard pp. 129-133.) Bullard uses it to show that Hay, when asked, distinguished carefully between a genuine signature and a clerk-written body, so that his "genuine" of 1904 (next item) should be read as meaning Lincoln's composition. ## 12. Hay to William E. Chandler, 19 January 1904 (in full) "Department of State Washington January 19, 1904 Dear Mr. Chandler:- The letter of Mr. Lincoln to Mrs. Bixby is genuine, is printed in our edition of his Works, and has been frequently re-published; but the engraved copy of Mr. Lincoln's alleged manuscript, which is extensively sold, is, in my opinion, a very ingenious forgery. Yours faithfully John Hay. Hon. William E. Chandler Spanish Claims Commission." Endorsed by Chandler: "Aug. 6, 1909 - gave original of above to W. D. Chandler." The surviving document is a copy in an unidentified hand (probably a Spanish Claims Commission copyist) in the Chandler Collection, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord; the original has not been located. Noticed by N. W. Stephenson (*Autobiography of Abraham Lincoln*, 1926, p. 438 n.; letter to Bullard 24 Nov. 1926); examined by Bullard in 1941 (Bullard pp. 122-128; also Nickell LH 91:137; Wakefield 1948 p. 16, whose OCR misdates it "January 19, 1901"). Hay's diary for 19 Nov. 1904 records another call from Chandler ("W. E. C. told me this morning") (Bullard p. 128). ## 13. Hay's statements to Robert Todd Lincoln (reported by RTL) - Towers to Tweedale, 22 Apr. 1908: "both Mr. Nicolay and Mr. Hay stated that they had never seen any draft or copy of this letter to Mrs. Bixby" (Emerson 2008 n. 68). - RTL to Markens, 5 Jan. 1917: "being in Washington I showed Colonel Hay, in the State Department, this lithograph and told him the story; Colonel Hay knew nothing whatever of the source of the printed copy of the letter in the Nicolay and Hay book. He suggested a curious thing; namely, that my father's handwriting was very easy to imitate ... Colonel Hay went on to say that pretty nearly all the words in the Bixby letter could be found in photographs of genuine letters and that perhaps this lithograph had been made from a forged document. I think Colonel Hay's suggestion a very shrewd one." (Emerson 2008 p. 103.) - RTL to Markens, 24 Feb. 1917: "Your suggestion that neither Nicolay nor Hay probably had any special knowledge of the letter at the time is correct. Hay himself told me so; when I took the matter up Nicolay had died and it was he who had compiled the collection of papers. It is entirely possible that neither of them knew of the letter at all; my father had no letter books and copies of his letters and documents were only made in special cases ... it is entirely possible that my father wrote this letter at his desk, folded it, addressed it and gave it to General [William] Shouler ... without anybody else about him knowing about it." (Emerson 2008 p. 104.) - RTL to Canfield, 25 Feb. 1909: "once in conversation, John Hay and I discussed the ease with which such a forgery could be made in consequence of the possibility of anyone finding for such a use an authentic original of my father's handwriting of almost every word and certainly every letter in the 'Bixby' letter." (Emerson 2008 p. 96, from Bullard, "Again, the Bixby Letter," *Lincoln Herald* 53:2 (1951) p. 27.) ## 14. Hay's diary, 12-16 November 1904 (the Morley visit) 12 Nov.: the President asked Hay to invite Morley to dinner; Morley "talked very interestingly" about English politics. 13 Nov.: "My brother Leonard died last night at Warsaw. John Morley came in a few minutes after I had received the telegram from my sister. I talked with him hardly knowing what I was saying, until the President came in - and then there was no need of any talking. ... He was my earliest and my best friend." 16 Nov.: letter to Roosevelt ("I cannot talk about it - so I will write you a word ..."). Nothing about the Bixby letter (Bullard pp. 116-117, from the diary; the 16 Nov. letter is in Thayer vol. 1 ch. 1). ## 15. What Hay never said - Nothing in *Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary* (3 vols, 1908), Thayer's *Life and Letters* (1915) or, per Bullard and Burlingame, Dennett's *Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay* (1939) mentions the Bixby letter (my full-text searches of the 1908 and 1915 volumes for "Bixby" return nothing). - Hay never told his children (Bullard p. 109; Barton 1926 p. 63) or Theodore Roosevelt (Emerson 2008 n. 79, inferring from Roosevelt's 1919 tribute). - Spender, who "knew [Hay] well," could not trace the rumour to "anything that Hay himself said to me" (Bullard pp. 106-107). ## Reading note on the "wrote"/"genuine" ambiguity Bullard (p. 133) and Basler (1943) stress that Hay used "wrote" both for composing and for writing out; Bullard (pp. 129-133) reads "genuine" in the Chandler letter in the light of the Langford letter, where Hay volunteered that a signature could be genuine while the body was a clerk's. Burlingame 1995 (p. 68) reads the 1866 Herndon letter as showing that Hay routinely composed Lincoln's letters. Both readings are interpretations; the documents themselves are quoted above.