6. The strongest case for Hay

Michael Burlingame built the case for Hay in 1995 and 1999, and the 2019 study added a statistical argument to it. Burlingame's articles and the 2019 study were read in full; his 2000 chapter in At Lincoln's Side could not be obtained and is cited through Emerson and through Burlingame's own later summaries of it. The case has ten parts. Each is stated here as its advocates state it, followed by what we found.

1. Hay's job. Hay to Herndon, 1866: Lincoln "gave the whole thing over to me, and signed without reading them the letters I wrote in his name." Basler's notes confirm the practice in the week itself. Hay drafted Lincoln's letter of 9 November declining Charles Butler's dinner, referred letters to Stanton for him on 23 and 27 November, acknowledged a gift of beef on 25 November, and wrote the body of the letter to Henry F. Harrington of 28 November (CW VIII, 97 n., 122, 568 to 569). Found: all true, and all routine. The same 1866 letter says Lincoln wrote "perhaps half a dozen a week himself", and Basler's source codes show what those were: letters to generals, governors and editors, telegrams, endorsements, and both surviving condolence letters of his presidency. The practice makes Hay's authorship possible but does not make it likely for this letter.
2. The reported confessions. Hay is said to have told John Morley (1904), W. C. Brownell and Walter Hines Page (before 1905) that he wrote the letter; two further stories are anonymous. Burlingame concedes that none of these "clinch the case" and relies on their number (1995, p. 71). Found: none is first-hand, none was written down before 1922, and the one tied to a datable occasion, Morley's visit of November 1904, is contradicted by Hay's own letter to Chandler ten months earlier, which calls it "the letter of Mr. Lincoln", and by Hay's diary of those days, which records Morley's visits and says nothing of the letter. The story was "afloat in Washington" by 1904 (Bullard, p. 127), so the chains are not independent witnesses. Section 2 sets them out.
3. Lincoln was too busy. Hay to Charles S. Spencer, 25 November 1864: the President "was literally crowded out of the opportunity of writing you a note ... the crush here just now is beyond endurance." Burlingame reads the letter as showing that Lincoln lacked time for the Bixby letter as well, so that "for the president's signature Hay wrote a letter of condolence" (the unedited manuscript of his Abraham Lincoln: A Life, II, ch. 35). Found: the same passage says Lincoln "fully intended to do so himself, and for that reason, I did not prepare a letter for him." Hay did not draft the banquet note Lincoln had reserved to himself, and it went unwritten. Basler's items for 21 to 27 November number 15, against 23 in election week and 35 in the week of the annual message (section 3). On 21 November itself Lincoln wrote a telegram and an endorsement in his own hand.
4. The words. "Beguile" occurs in Hay's writing at least thirteen times by Burlingame's itemised count and "at least thirty" by his later one, and never in Lincoln's Collected Works. "I cannot refrain from" is in Hay's letters of 1858 and 1864. "Heavenly Father", "gloriously", "altar", "anguish" and "costly" are said to be Hay's words. Found: the table in section 4 gives the counts in the corpora. "Beguile" is Hay's: none in 338,000 words of Lincoln, eight in 502,000 words of Hay, and more in journalism outside our corpus. The rest divide. "I cannot refrain from" is Lincoln's too (to Salmon P. Chase, then governor of Ohio, 21 September 1859), and the 2019 study's own table lists "cannot refrain from" and "tendering" among the strings found only in its Lincoln corpus. "Our Heavenly Father" is in Lincoln's proclamations of 1862 and 1864. "Tendering to you", "the files of the War Department" and "should attempt to" occur in Lincoln's own-hand writing and nowhere in Hay's. "The altar of", "solemn pride" and "gloriously" occur in Hay's writing and nowhere in Lincoln's, and nearly all of Hay's uses are from after 1865. The letter's office idiom is Lincoln's and its elegiac idiom is Hay's. The counts on each side are single digits and carry little weight.
5. Hay the mimic. "Hay would obviously try to imitate the president's voice while composing the Bixby letter, and Hay was a gifted literary mimic" (Burlingame 1995, p. 65); in the Page version Lincoln sent the draft unchanged because Hay "had so perfectly captured his style". Found: this cannot be tested, and it works in both directions: every Lincoln-like feature becomes good mimicry and every Hay-like feature a lapse. Jean Pival's syntactic markers (the letter's "should" where Hay would write "would", its active voice, its two passives) are the features a mimic is least likely to reproduce, and the letter has them Lincoln's way (Nickell 1989, p. 139). We give the argument no weight either way.
6. The scrapbooks. A clipping of the letter is pasted into two of Hay's scrapbooks, one of them otherwise filled with his own poems and their reviews. Found: section 2. Both volumes also hold Lincoln material Hay did not write, and the Phillips letter kept beside the Bixby clipping survives only in a hand that is not Hay's. They are weak evidence for Hay, and the best documentary item on his side.
7. The 2019 study. All seventeen n-gram analyses attributed the letter to Hay, and the method had attributed over 1,600 known texts of both men, most of them shorter than 200 words, with almost no errors. Found: section 4. The result reproduces under the study's own design. It also passes the validation the authors ran. On register-matched known texts, a test the authors did not run, the same design sends 30 of 63 pieces of Lincoln's wartime prose, the Gettysburg Address among them, to Hay. The design compares Lincoln before 1860 with Hay's whole life, and its Lincoln corpus is printed text, whereas the Lincoln texts in our own-hand design are manuscripts. Under the own-hand design the n-gram evidence splits eight lengths to nine, and under that design 18 of the 19 Basler items in Hay's own hand are called Lincoln's.
8. Hay's "genuine" read narrowly. Hay's 1904 letter answers a question about the forged facsimile, so "genuine" means only that the printed text is authentic (Burlingame 1995, p. 68). Found: the reading is possible. Hay's 1903 letter to Mrs Langford shows that when he knew a body was a clerk's he said so unasked. We weigh the 1904 letter at a ratio of 1.2 for Lincoln, which is nearly nothing.
9. Butler's reasons. Lincoln "wrote very few letters that bore his signature"; Hay could imitate Lincoln's hand "in well-nigh perfect fashion" (Butler 1940, II, 392). Found: handwriting is beside the point when no manuscript survives. Butler attributed the claim about imitation to Robert Lincoln, who wrote the opposite to Markens in 1917, and Butler's other stories from Robert Lincoln were shown false by David Mearns of the Library of Congress (Emerson 2008, p. 91).
10. The historians' lean. Tyler Dennett, Hay's biographer (1940), James G. Randall and Richard N. Current in the last volume of Randall's life of Lincoln (1955), and the editor of the Lincoln Herald, the journal that printed Emerson's article (2008), leaned to Hay, and after 2019 the press reported the question as settled. Found: the lean rests on the nine items above. Basler's headnote of 1953 kept the question open, "with the claim remaining unproved" (CW VIII, 117 n.).

The case for Hay is cumulative and circumstantial. Its testimony is hearsay throughout. Its two strongest items, the scrapbooks and the 2019 study, each fail a specific test. It remains a respectable hypothesis: nothing we found excludes it, and the verdict above gives it about two chances in five.