The case for Hay rests on things he is reported to have said in private. The case for Lincoln rests on things Hay wrote down himself and on what he told Robert Lincoln. We read every source that prints either kind of statement (the 1940 memoir of Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University; Bullard 1946; Sherman Day Wakefield's two pamphlets of 1947 and 1948; Burlingame 1995 and 1999; Emerson 2006 and 2008; Nickell 1989) and set the two kinds side by side.
| Hay allegedly told | When | Chain to print | First written down | What survives a check |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| John Morley, the British statesman and biographer of Gladstone, at the State Department | November 1904 | Morley to Nicholas Murray Butler (London, 9 July 1912); Butler's memoir Across the Busy Years II (1940), 390 to 393 | 1926 (Butler to the Lincoln biographer William E. Barton, veiled); 1940 in print | The one claim tied to a datable occasion, recorded 36 years after it. Butler's circumstantial dating of Morley's movements is wrong (Bullard, pp. 113 to 114). Morley's own Recollections (1917) describe the White House week and never mention Hay. Hay's diary for 12 and 13 November 1904 records Morley's visits and his brother Leonard's death, and nothing about the letter (Bullard, pp. 116 to 117). |
| W. C. Brownell, literary adviser to the publisher Charles Scribner's Sons | Undated, before July 1905 | Brownell to the newspaper editor Rollo Ogden "at the time"; Ogden's New York Times editorial of 14 May 1933 and letter to Bullard of 15 May 1933 | 1933 | Ogden: "I know of no scrap of documentary evidence." Brownell died in 1928; nothing in his hand records the confidence (Bullard, pp. 107 to 108). |
| Walter Hines Page, the publisher, later ambassador to Britain | Undated, before July 1905 | Page to Cora, Lady Strafford, an American-born countess (1913 to 1918); she to the Rev. G. A. Jackson, an English clergyman; Jackson to the essayist E. V. Lucas, 16 January 1922; Lucas, Post-Bag Diversions (1934) | 1922 | Five links. This version has Lincoln order a draft and send it unchanged because Hay "had so perfectly captured his style"; the Morley version has Hay explain why no manuscript survived. The two stories do not describe the same event (Bullard, pp. 110 to 112). |
| An informant of Louis A. Coolidge, a Boston journalist | Unknown | Coolidge "emphatically told one person, who in turn told us" (Bullard, pp. 109 to 110) | Never | Anonymous at two links. Not certainly a claim for Hay rather than a denial for Lincoln. |
| Spencer Eddy, Hay's State Department secretary | c. 1898 to 1901 | Eddy to his sister Catherine Beveridge, wife of Senator Albert J. Beveridge; her memorandum of 22 July 1949; Burlingame 1995, p. 64 | 1949 | The memorandum itself says the story was "presumably heard (or inferred)" from Hay or Henry Adams, the historian and Hay's closest friend (Emerson 2008, p. 91). |
Nothing Hay wrote in his lifetime claims the letter. His diaries and letters as printed in 1908, William Roscoe Thayer's biography of 1915 and Tyler Dennett's edition of his Civil War diary and letters (1939) do not mention it. His children told Barton in 1926 and Bullard in 1946 that he never spoke of it to them. J. A. Spender, the English editor who "knew [Hay] well", told Bullard in 1928 that the rumour "could not be raised on anything that Hay himself said to me" and in 1941 that he had it "possibly from Lord Morley" (Bullard, pp. 106 to 107, 114 to 115). The earliest written record of any claim is Jackson's letter of 1922; the earliest publication is Ogden's editorial of 1933. Burlingame, the most careful advocate of Hay's authorship, concedes that none of these reports "clinch the case" and relies on their number (1995, p. 71). Their number is not independent evidence: Morley, Page and Brownell moved in the same circles, the story was "afloat in Washington" by 1904 (Bullard, p. 127), and none of the three first recipients left a record.
Burlingame reads "genuine" narrowly: the printed text is authentic, the facsimile is not, and Hay says nothing about who composed it (1995, p. 68). Bullard read it broadly, and pointed to Hay's letter of 4 June 1903 to a Mrs Langford, who had asked about two Lincoln letters, in which he volunteered that "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" (pp. 129 to 133). Both readings are possible. The 1903 letter shows that when Hay knew a body was not Lincoln's he said so unasked; the 1904 letter shows that ten months before he allegedly confessed to Morley he described the Bixby letter to Chandler as "the letter of Mr. Lincoln".
Robert Lincoln's testimony, published by Emerson in 2008 from Robert's letters to Isaac Markens, a New York writer on Lincoln, now at the Chicago History Museum, is the nearest thing to a first-hand record. Robert showed Hay a lithograph of the letter at the State Department around 1902. "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 ... and that perhaps this lithograph had been made from a forged document" (to Markens, 5 January 1917; the "book" is the edition of Lincoln's works that Nicolay and Hay published in 1894, which printed the letter). "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" (24 February 1917). Robert's secretary had written in 1908 that "both Mr. Nicolay and Mr. Hay stated that they had never seen any draft or copy of this letter" (Towers to a correspondent named Tweedale, 22 April 1908; Emerson 2008, pp. 103 to 105, n. 68). Robert also wrote that his father "never dictated correspondence; he sometimes wrote a document and had his draft copied by either Nicolay or Hay", and "I do not now recall having seen any letter written by either Nicolay or by Hay which was personally signed by him" (13 February 1918; Emerson 2008, pp. 106 to 107). The last statement is wrong: Basler's notes record dozens of letters and telegrams in Hay's hand signed by Lincoln, several of them in the weeks around the Bixby letter (section 3). Robert had spent the war years away from Washington, so his knowledge of office routine is second-hand, while his report of what Hay told him is first-hand.
Burlingame quotes the first four sentences; Emerson points out that the fifth is usually left out (2008, p. 88). Both halves are true. Hay composed and signed for the President as a matter of routine, and Lincoln wrote letters himself every week, the ones he cared about. The question is which kind the Bixby letter was, and the 1866 letter cannot answer it.
Burlingame's strongest documentary find (1995, pp. 70 to 71) is that a clipping of the Bixby letter is pasted into two of Hay's scrapbooks, one at Brown University filled mostly with Hay's own poems and their reviews, one at the Library of Congress (vol. 54) filled with his anonymous journalism of 1860 to 1865. "It is difficult to understand why Hay would have pasted the Bixby letter in those scrapbooks, full of his own literary creations, unless he had composed it himself." Emerson examined the same volumes (2008, pp. 94 to 96): the Brown scrapbook also holds other letters signed by Lincoln and a French newspaper notice about Mary Lincoln; the Library of Congress volume holds clippings of Lincoln's letters to John Phillips, L. B. Wyman, F. B. Loomis and a New York committee; a third oversized volume is half filled with Lincoln's writings including photostats of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. Hay had been collecting material for a history of the administration since 1861. The scrapbooks show that Hay kept a clipping of the letter, and nothing in them records why he kept it. We weigh them as weak evidence for Hay, and note that the Phillips letter kept beside it survives only in a copy "in an unidentified handwriting" that is not Hay's (Basler, CW VIII, 118 n.), which cuts against reading the scrapbook as a record of Hay's own compositions.