Two arguments about that week recur in the literature. Burlingame holds that Lincoln was "unusually preoccupied" after the election and had no time for a condolence letter, citing Hay's note of 25 November to Charles S. Spencer of New York, who had asked for a letter from the President to read at a banquet: "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's edition of Hay's Civil War letters, At Lincoln's Side, 2000, p. 101, as quoted in Burlingame 1999). Bullard and Emerson hold that a request of this kind, sent by a governor through the Secretary of War, was exactly what Lincoln reserved for himself.
We counted what survives. Basler's edition lists every known Lincoln document with its manuscript source. For the thirteen full weeks from 3 October to 1 January the mean is 21 items a week. The week of 21 to 27 November has 15, the same as the week before and fewer than election week (23) or the week of the annual message (35). In that week Lincoln wrote in his own hand a 154-word letter to General Nathaniel P. Banks with a draft, five telegrams and several endorsements. The Spencer note shows that Hay drafted routine acknowledgments and that Lincoln kept some letters for himself even when he then failed to write them; it does not say which kind the Bixby letter was. The "crush" was callers, General Grant's visit on 23 November, the resignation of the Attorney General, Edward Bates, on 24 November, and the annual message to Congress read to the cabinet on 25 November; it was not correspondence.
| Dated 21 November 1864 | Source Basler found | In Lincoln's hand? |
|---|---|---|
| To Mrs Lydia Bixby, 139 words | Boston Transcript, 25 November 1864; no manuscript | Unknown |
| To John Phillips, the 104-year-old voter of Sturbridge, about 95 words | Copy in the Nicolay Papers "on Executive Mansion stationery in an unidentified handwriting"; New York Tribune, 9 December 1864 | No surviving text in his hand |
| To Augustus R. Wright, telegram, about 40 words | Autograph letter signed (Basler's code ALS), National Archives, Presidential Telegrams | Yes |
| To William P. Fessenden, the Secretary of the Treasury, endorsement for Joseph G. Bowman, 70 words | Illinois State Historical Library | Yes |
| Three endorsements to Stanton, 15 to 75 words | A 1912 dealer's catalogue; Nicolay and Hay's edition of Lincoln's works (1894); Gilbert Tracy's Uncollected Letters of Abraham Lincoln (1917) | Manuscripts not located |
The two composed letters of the day are the two for which nothing in Lincoln's hand survives, and both went to Massachusetts civilians, the class of letter (all those "of a non-political kind", he said) that Nicholas Murray Butler claimed Hay wrote for Lincoln (Bullard, pp. 81 to 82). The coincidence is consistent with Hay's authorship but on its own does not establish it. The Phillips copy is not in Hay's hand either, and Hay's own drafts for Lincoln in these months usually survive in the Nicolay or Lincoln papers (to Charles Butler of New York, 9 November; to the Shakers, 8 August; to Thomas J. Durant of New Orleans, 24 December; to William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist editor, 7 February), which the Bixby letter does not. Hay was in Washington all that week, back since the morning of 15 November from City Point, Grant's headquarters in Virginia, and he wrote for Lincoln on 23, 25, 27 and 28 November (CW VIII, 122, 568 to 569). Nicolay was ill in St Louis from 17 to 30 November, so the two-candidate framing is sound for the secretaries; the clerks Hay mentioned to Mrs Langford are a third possibility nobody has examined, and a 139-word text cannot exclude them.
Basler's notes let us sort the war-era documents by hand. Our copy of volumes IV, VII and VIII holds 3,125 items. Of those dated from 18 May 1860 onward, 1,887 survive in Lincoln's own hand (Basler's codes ALS, ADfS and AES, for an autograph letter, draft or endorsement, signed), 1,094 survive in other hands or only in print, and 31 survive only in Hay's hand, with Lincoln's signature or without it. The Hay-hand items are telegrams, orders, a draft to the Shakers, acknowledgments of gifts (a congressman's salmon trout: to John F. Driggs, 3 February 1865), a declined invitation (Charles Butler, 9 November 1864) and a letter of thanks to Garrison (7 February 1865). Lincoln's two surviving letters of condolence, to the parents of Elmer Ellsworth, the young colonel and friend of his killed in May 1861 (25 May 1861), and to Fanny McCullough, the daughter of an Illinois friend killed that month (23 December 1862), are in his own hand, and so is his letter of religious reflection to Eliza Gurney, a Quaker minister who had visited him in 1862 (4 September 1864). Hay's known compositions in Lincoln's name are courteous and flat: "I could not ask, and no one could merit, a better reward" (to the Philadelphia poet George H. Boker, 26 October 1863); "I beg that you will convey to Mr. Williams my cordial thanks for his kind thoughtfulness" (to Driggs). Nothing Hay is known to have written for Lincoln is a letter of condolence. This record is the starting point of the weighing in section 5, and section 4 asks whether the stylometry changes it.