Historical mysteries · The Bixby letter
In November 1864 a Boston widow received a letter of condolence of 139 words signed by Abraham Lincoln. It became one of the most often reprinted of his writings. The manuscript has never been found, and for more than a century it has been said that his young secretary John Hay wrote it. This report reads the whole printed record, reruns the one statistical study of the wording, and ends with a narrow lean to Lincoln.
In September 1864 a widow named Lydia Bixby came to the Boston office of William Schouler, the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, the officer who kept the state's military records, and showed him five letters. Each was from an army company commander, and each reported the death of one of her sons. Schouler told the story to the governor, John A. Andrew, who sent it on to the War Department in Washington with the request that the President himself write to her. On 21 November a letter of 139 words, dated from the Executive Mansion (as the White House was then called) and signed "A. Lincoln", was sent to Boston. Schouler put it into Mrs Bixby's hands on the morning of Friday 25 November, and the Boston Evening Transcript, an evening newspaper, printed it the same day.
The letter is short enough to quote in full, and section 1 does. It tells her that the President has been shown "a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle", admits "how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine" against such a loss, and offers "the thanks of the Republic they died to save" and "the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom". Other newspapers reprinted it. It has been in anthologies of American prose ever since, and in 1998 it was read aloud in the film Saving Private Ryan. Its facts were wrong: two of the sons had been killed, one had deserted, one had been honourably discharged, and one had been captured and either deserted to the enemy or died in prison. The error was Schouler's, and it has no bearing on who wrote the sentences.
Who composed those sentences is the mystery. Lincoln signed the letter, but the manuscript disappeared. No draft, copy or letter-book entry has ever been found in his papers or anyone else's, the newspaper text is the only authority for the wording, and the "facsimiles" of a manuscript that dealers sold from 1891 onward are forgeries. Lincoln had two private secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay, and Hay, then 26, drafted many of the letters that went out over the President's signature. Hay went on to a long public life (he was Secretary of State from 1898 until his death in 1905). During his last years a story went round Washington that he had written the Bixby letter, and after he died several men said that he had told them so in confidence.
None of those men wrote the story down while Hay lived. The earliest record of any of the claims is a letter of 1922, seventeen years after Hay's death and fifty-eight after the letter, and every one of them reached print through at least two intermediaries. Hay himself left the opposite on paper. In January 1904 he wrote to William E. Chandler, a former senator from New Hampshire who had asked him about a suspect facsimile, that "the letter of Mr. Lincoln to Mrs. Bixby is genuine", and around 1902 he told Robert Lincoln, the President's eldest son, that he knew nothing of where the printed text had come from and had never seen a draft or copy. He never mentioned the letter in his diary, in his letters or to his family.
Both answers fit the record, which is why the argument has lasted. For Hay: drafting letters for Lincoln's signature was his job; "beguile", the letter's most unusual word, is one he used often and Lincoln never; and a clipping of the letter is pasted into two of his scrapbooks. For Lincoln: he wrote his own letters of condolence (the two that survive from his presidency are in his hand); the request came to him from a governor through the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, and was the kind of letter he kept for himself; and Hay's own statements point away from Hay. Historians have divided along these lines since the 1940s. F. Lauriston Bullard, a Boston editor whose 1946 book Abraham Lincoln and the Widow Bixby is still the fullest study, argued for Lincoln, as did Joe Nickell, an investigator of questioned documents, in 1989, and Jason Emerson, a historian of the Lincoln family, in 2006 and 2008. Michael Burlingame, the author of the fullest modern life of Lincoln, has argued for Hay since 1995. Roy P. Basler, the editor of the standard edition of Lincoln's writings (1953), printed the letter as Lincoln's and called the claim for Hay "unproved".
In 2019 the question seemed to close. Jack Grieve, a linguist at the University of Birmingham, and six colleagues applied a technique called n-gram tracing to the letter. The technique counts how many of the short strings of letters and words in a questioned text (its "n-grams") also occur somewhere in each candidate's known writing, and gives the text to the candidate who shares more of them. Tested on more than 1,600 known texts by the two men, most of them shorter than 200 words, the technique almost never erred, and on the letter it chose Hay at every one of seventeen string lengths. The authors concluded that Hay "was almost certainly its primary author", and newspapers reported the mystery as solved.
Two kinds of evidence exist, and this report works through both. The first is documentary: everything Hay is reported to have said, everything he wrote himself, what he told Robert Lincoln, the paper trail of the request from Boston to Washington, and the record of what Lincoln and Hay each wrote in the week the letter was sent. All of it is in print, in Bullard's book, in Burlingame's and Emerson's articles, in Hay's published letters and diary, and in Basler's edition, which records for every Lincoln document whose handwriting the surviving copy is in. We read these sources in full rather than through summaries, dated every reported claim and traced who told whom, and counted from Basler's notes what came from the President's desk that week and in whose hand.
The second kind is stylometry, the statistical comparison of writing styles, and here the report does three things. It rebuilds the 2019 technique from the paper's description and checks that it gives the answers the paper reported, on the letter and on the known texts used to validate it (it does). It then runs three tests the paper did not run, each asking whether the technique still works when the known Lincoln texts resemble the letter in date, in kind of writing (its register, in the linguists' term) and in the form in which they survive (manuscript or print, which we call the edition). A second implementation of the same tests, written from the paper by a different hand without sight of ours, was run as a check on the first. Last, it tries the technique and three other standard methods on the evidence that matters most: known letters that Hay wrote for Lincoln's signature, to see whether any method can tell Hay writing as Lincoln from Lincoln.
The result is a lean. The 2019 attribution reproduces, and its validation reproduces, but under the added tests it proves sensitive to the design of the comparison: the same technique sends between roughly a quarter and a half of Lincoln's own elevated wartime prose to Hay (28 to 48 percent, depending on the pieces and the pool), the Gettysburg Address among it, and no method we ran detects Hay writing in Lincoln's name. We therefore treat the stylometry as neutral. What remains is documentary and close to a balance. On Hay's side are the reported claims and the scrapbook clippings; on Lincoln's, the office's practice and Hay's own written statements. Weighing those items as explicit numbers (section 5 shows each one and what happens when it changes) gives Lincoln about 53 percent, Hay about 42, and another hand in the office about 5. Changing any one weight moves Lincoln between 26 and 75 percent, and taking the 2019 study at face value puts him at 11.
The one piece of evidence that had seemed to settle the question, the 2019 n-gram study, reproduces under its own design and passes the validation its authors ran. Under the added tests, with Lincoln texts closer to the letter in date, register and edition, its attribution proves sensitive to all three, and no method we ran tells the two men apart in this kind of writing. The second implementation reproduces the attribution and finds the register effect in the same direction and smaller: 19 of 63 pieces of Lincoln's own elevated wartime prose (cuts of about 140 words, matched to the letter's kind of writing) go to Hay there, 30 here, and the difference lies in the choice of Lincoln texts, not in the code (section 4). What remains is documentary, and it is close to a balance. No new document was found; everything new here is analysis of evidence already in print. The table gives the confidence for each claim separately.
| Claim | Confidence and what it rests on |
|---|---|
| Lincoln signed and sent the letter, and the Transcript text of 25 November 1864 is the letter as sent. | Beyond reasonable doubt. Governor Andrew's request, Schouler's delivery, the printing on the day of delivery, and Hay's 1904 statement. The 1891 facsimile and its copies are forgeries (Hay 1904; Bullard 1946). |
| No claim by Hay to have written it survives in his own hand or from his lifetime. | Established. Five reported claims, none first-hand, the earliest written down in 1922. Bullard (1946) and Emerson (2008) showed this; confirmed here from the sources. |
| The 2019 attribution to Hay reproduces under its own design. | Confirmed by replication: all seventeen string lengths point to Hay, the shortest by a margin of four parts in a hundred thousand. The study's own validation reproduces too: under its design every one of the 1,011 known texts of 50 to 400 words in the corpora built for this report (the paper's own set was 1,662) is attributed correctly by the majority vote (each string length casts one vote for the man whose known writing shares more of the text's strings, and the majority decides). |
| Under added tests, the 2019 design's attribution is sensitive to period, register and edition. | Reproduced in direction by the second implementation. Under that design 19 to 30 of 63 register-matched pieces of Lincoln's wartime prose go to Hay, the Gettysburg Address among them in both runs, the rate depending on the size of the Lincoln pool, the set of known Lincoln texts the letter is compared against (section 4); Lincoln's war texts in his own hand of 100 to 200 words go to Hay 14 percent of the time; print versions of his texts sit nearer Hay than manuscript versions at every string length. This report puts the chance at about 90 percent that the same direction would hold on the paper's own corpus (its collection of known texts), which neither run could obtain. The Hay side of the register set is three documents, which limits what the test can show (section 4). |
| Controlled stylometry cannot decide the question. | About 85 percent, conditional on the corpora and designs used here. Under the own-hand design (Lincoln's writing in his own hand from his presidency against Hay's letters and diary of the same years) the n-gram lengths split eight to nine; a classifier (a statistical model trained to sort texts by author, its probabilities adjusted so that a stated 60 percent is right about 60 percent of the time) and Burrows's Delta (a measure of stylistic distance), both described in section 4, lean to Lincoln; and the methods call 18 of the 19 documents in Basler's edition that survive in Hay's handwriting, three of Hay's four known letters for Lincoln's signature, and Hay's own condolence "Lincoln". Weight in the final reckoning: none (a likelihood ratio of 1, with 1:3 to 3:1 as the range; the term is explained in section 5). The second implementation finds the same under period-matched pools of its own. |
| Lincoln composed the letter. | About 53 percent, Hay about 42, another hand about 5, conditional on the weights given in section 5, which are judgments. Changing any one weight moves Lincoln between 26 and 75 percent; taking the 2019 stylometry at face value puts him at 11. This is a lean. It does not establish that Lincoln wrote the letter. |
This report does not show that Hay did not write the letter, or that Lincoln did; nothing found excludes either man. It shows that the stylometric case for Hay depends on the comparison design, and that the rest of the evidence is a near balance that leans, on the office's practice and Hay's own words, to Lincoln.
| Line of inquiry | Finding | Weight | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hay's reported claims | Five chains of report, none first-hand, none written down before 1922, two prompted by framed copies of the letter. The one datable occasion, a visit by the British statesman John Morley in November 1904, is contradicted by Hay's own letter of January 1904 and by his diary. For Hay. | ●●○○ moderate | Bullard (1946) and Emerson (2008) established the hearsay character; the chains are dated and cross-checked here against the memoirs of the men involved and Hay's diary |
| Hay's own words | "The letter of Mr. Lincoln to Mrs. Bixby is genuine" (to Chandler, 1904); he told Robert Lincoln he "knew nothing whatever of the source" and had "never seen any draft or copy" (reported by Robert's secretary in 1908 and by Robert in 1917). Nothing in his diaries, letters, essays or family. For Lincoln. | ●●○○ moderate | Bullard printed the Chandler letter; Emerson (2008) found Robert Lincoln's letters; weighed here against Burlingame's narrow reading |
| The office's practice | Of the documents in the three volumes of Basler's edition that could be read, dated from May 1860, 1,887 survive in Lincoln's hand and 31 in Hay's; both surviving presidential condolences are in Lincoln's hand; Hay's known compositions for Lincoln are routine. Hay wrote bodies for Lincoln's signature four times that week, and a letter of the same day to John Phillips, a 104-year-old Massachusetts voter, survives in an unidentified hand. For Lincoln. | ●●○○ moderate | Argued by Bullard, Emerson and Robert Lincoln; counted here from the handwriting notes in Basler's edition |
| The week's workload | Basler's edition has 15 documents for 21 to 27 November, against a thirteen-week mean of 21, 23 in election week and 35 in the week of the annual message to Congress. Hay's letter of 25 November to Charles S. Spencer, saying that the "crush" of business had stopped the President writing a note he had meant to write himself, shows Lincoln reserving a letter to himself. Removes a premise of the Hay case. | ●○○○ weak | Bullard argued it; counted here |
| The scrapbooks | A clipping of the letter in two Hay scrapbooks, beside other Lincoln letters and Lincoln material Hay did not write; the copy of the Phillips letter kept beside it is not in Hay's hand. For Hay. | ●○○○ weak | Burlingame (1995) found them; Emerson (2008) examined them; the Phillips-hand point added here |
| Vocabulary | "Beguile" is Hay's (none in 338,000 words of Lincoln). The office idiom ("tendering to you", "the files of the War Department", "should attempt to") is Lincoln's alone; the elegiac idiom ("the altar of", "solemn pride", "gloriously") is Hay's alone, and mostly from after 1865. Split. | ●○○○ weak | Burlingame, Nickell and Jean Pival, the linguist who examined the letter's grammar for Nickell's 1989 article, supplied the examples; the full table across four corpora is new |
| The 2019 n-gram tracing | Reproduces (all seventeen lengths to Hay, in both implementations) and passes the validation its authors ran. Under the added tests the same design misattributes 19 to 30 of 63 register-matched Lincoln pieces, the Gettysburg Address among them, and is sensitive to period and edition. Neutral. | ●○○○ weak | Grieve and colleagues (2019). The authors named register sensitivity as untested in their 2016 presentation; the replication and the three specific tests are new; a second implementation of the register test found the same direction and a lower rate |
| Controlled stylometry | Own-hand n-gram tracing splits eight lengths to nine; the calibrated classifier gives a probability of Hay of 0.29 to 0.41 against 0.66 for Hay's own pieces; Delta says Lincoln; and 18 of 19 Hay-hand items, three of four known Hay-for-Lincoln letters and Hay's own condolence are called Lincoln. Neutral. | ●○○○ weak | New; the second implementation's period-matched design agrees |
Weight is our judgement of how much each line moves the question on its own; the direction is given at the end of each finding. The 2019 study was the only line that had seemed decisive, and under the added tests it is the one that proves design-dependent.
Section 1 gives the text of the letter as printed and traces the request from Boston to the White House. Section 2 sets out the documentary record: what Hay is reported to have said, what he wrote himself, and what he told Robert Lincoln. Section 3 reconstructs the President's desk in the week of 21 November 1864 from Basler's edition, item by item. Section 4 is the stylometry: the 2019 study replicated, then tested in ways its authors did not run, then rerun by a second, independent implementation. Section 5 weighs the documentary items as likelihood ratios, a way of giving each item a number that is explained there, and shows how far the result moves when any one of them changes. Section 6 states the case for Hay at full strength, in ten parts, with what was found against each. Section 7 lists what would overturn the verdict in either direction. Section 8 separates what was known from what this report adds and says where it falls short. Section 9 lists the sources and the saved code and data.