JPK Huson 1863
Brev. Brig. Gen'l
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2012
- Location
- Central Pennsylvania
Yes, I can see the professional historians here rolling their eyes, coming over to Ladies Tea expecting to find the schmaltz attached to the famous Bixby Letter. Not so fast, although there will be some of that- it's a GREAT letter. I'm also more than sure my personal take on both controversies attached to it will not be at all unique, scholars, History buffs and Lincoln experts having tossed this around for 150 years.
A few quotes taken from one website, as a kind of introduction.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-...edly-writes-to-mother-of-civil-war-casualties
“Legend holds that on this day in 1864,( Nov 21 ) President Abraham Lincoln composes a letter to Lydia Bixby, a widow and mother of five men who had been killed in the Civil War. A copy of the letter was then published in the Boston Evening Transcript on November 25 and signed "Abraham Lincoln." The original letter has never been found.”
“Scholars continue to debate the authorship of the letter”
. “.. scholars have discovered that only two of her sons actually died fighting during the Civil War”
THE BIXBY LETTER
" Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.
Dear Madam,--
I have been shown in the files of the War Department 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.
I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.
I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,
A.Lincoln "
Mrs. Lydia Bixby was a widow around who speculation still rages. She was held to have lost all 5 of her sons in the war, attracting attention upwards through political circles until an appeal was made to Lincoln himself, to please write a lette to the mother in this tragic case. As frequently happens, attention turned then to the widow, who, it transpired, may have lied on the subject, ' only' (?) having lost 2 to death, one to capture, one to desertion and the 5th somewhere ' unknown '. Once this was known, BOY did the tides turn against her. Get this-
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/26...ht-on-the-bixby-letter?rgn=main;view=fulltext
“ The manuscript of this document has not been seen since November 24, 1864, when it was delivered to Mrs. Bixby, who evidently did not preserve it. The widow's granddaughter told a journalist that Mrs. Bixby "was secretly in sympathy with the Southern cause ... and had 'little good to say of President Lincoln.' "
“She claimed to have five sons in the army. She was a stout woman, more or less motherly-looking, but with shifty eyes—we called her "Mother Bixby." I did not like her, but there seemed to be good reason for helping her. Having heard that there were means of getting supplies to Libby Prison (a very difficult thing to do) I was desirous of sending a box of small comforts to the soldiers. Speaking of it to her, she said that one of her sons was at home for a time on leave, and that if I would come to her house ... she would tell me more about it. That morning I came in the cars with my cousin, Mary Cabot, and she walked along the street with me while I was telling her about it, and waited on the doorstep while I was in the house. ... I did not like the look of things at all, and the woman was very evasive; would give me no definite information, said her son was not there, and asked if I would not meet him somewhere. I said I would and told her to send him to the ladies [waiting] room in the Albany Station at a certain time. I was there at the time appointed, and presently a very ill looking man, who had lost some of the fingers of his right hand, came towards me. He began with some familiarity, but I soon put a stop to him, finding I could get no information from him, and sent him off. Soon after this I received a very distressed letter from Mrs. Paine, saying that the police on finding that we were helping this woman had told her that she kept a house of ill-fame, was perfectly untrustworthy and as bad as she could be. (Sarah Cabot Wheelwright, who at the age of twenty-six became acquainted with her) “
I'd like to take the time here to say that wow- way to tear down a woman who DID, in fact lose 2 sons killed in the war, the one captured may well have been dead, the deserter, same, since how could he come home and the 5th, it seems to imply here lived in daily expectation of being hauled off to prison or worse. Mrs. Bixby can be the lowest female on the social totem pole and still be an object of sympathy based on these shattering losses, plus, I cannot find a source which shows she personally claimed to have had 5 sons killed in the war. It's possible that as this story made its way around, then up, ' lost 5 sons ' took on an assumptive character this woman never intended. She could easily have said it, and meant it, without wishing to actually get a letter from A. Lincoln himself. 2 sons dead, the rest for all intents and purposes lost to her- the most hardened female on the planet of any era would have indulged in depressive thought, ' They are lost to me, all of them'. I do fail to see where this famous letter therefore would be the result of some ruse on her part as an awful lot fo these websites on the subject seem to imply.
I understand it is not the begin-all and end-all as far as documentation, but my intent is not to ' prove' points here, just to give background, let minds be challenged themselves. Here's a basic background on ' what happened ', from Wiki.
"In a report to Governor John A. Andrew, regarding the father of five sons serving in the war, the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, William Schouler, wrote that Lydia Bixby had five sons who had died fighting for the Union. Andrew sent the report to the U.S. War Department with an additional note requesting the president to honor the mother with a letter. The report found its way to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who delivered it along with the records of the five sons to President Lincoln at which point the letter was written."
It also contains a rare defense of Lydia Bixby, refreshing to see amidst the seas of scorn. She's been reported to have been a Southern sympathizer, which will not have been her ' fault ', since it would have not been foreseable that A. lincoln himself would have taken a personal interest in her losses and written to commiserate with her.
"Bixby herself has been criticized as perhaps being a poor model of a grieving Union mother. Lydia (Parker) Bixby, by some reports, had moved to Boston from Richmond, Virginia, yet continued sympathizing with the South as a Copperhead.[3] Contemporaries described her as a madam and "untrustworthy and as bad as she could be". The original Schouler report might have been constructed with insufficient fact checking of her claims, which she could have exaggerated in hopes of financial compensation. One of her great-grandsons repeated his father's story that she angrily destroyed Lincoln's letter after receiving it.] However, it is also possible that she was innocently unaware that three of her sons had not died (Henry, for example, was released from a Confederate prison only after she received the letter). Mrs. Bixby continues to be a mysterious figure in the story about the letter."
The War Department incorrectly informed Lincoln about the fate of Mrs. Bixby's sons: Two had died in battle, the others eventually survived the war. It is unclear whether the errors in Mrs. Bixby's story were intentional, and why the War Department had failed to correct the report based on their own records. "
The larger controversy attached to this letter rages ( seems to rage, not merely putter along ) around who wrote the letter, was it indeed Lincoln himself or was it the work of John Milton Hay, Lincoln's secretary, and Lincoln merely approved it before signing his name?
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/26...ht-on-the-bixby-letter?rgn=main;view=fulltext
"The authorship of the letter has been debated by scholars, some of whom believe it was written instead by John Hay, one of Lincoln's White House secretaries. The original letter was either destroyed by the newspaper editor after publication or by Mrs. Bixby, who may have been a Confederate sympathizer and disliked President Lincoln. Copies of an early forgery have been circulating for many years, causing some people to believe they have the original letter."
“ The manuscript of this document has not been seen since November 24, 1864, when it was delivered to Mrs. Bixby, who evidently did not preserve it. The widow's granddaughter told a journalist that Mrs. Bixby "was secretly in sympathy with the Southern cause ... and had 'little good to say of President Lincoln.' "
Since I am not at all conversant with the subject, and feel I would make a poor interpretor of 150 year's worth of progress and debate on the subject, have found what seems to me ( personal opinion ) the best synopsis on the authorship on the web- which is the above link. It's from the journal of The Abraham Lincoln Association, and the article is written by MICHAEL BURLINGAME.
The Bixby Letter is lyrical and eloquent enough in content to have found its way into popular culture, most recently in ' Saving Private Ryan, read before the men set off on the mission to bring the only surviving Ryan brother home alive.
Again, from Wiki:
" The letter is frequently mentioned in America in relation to the topic of siblings going to war, such as when discussing the Sullivan brothers, the Niland brothers, the Borgstrom brothers, and the Sole Survivor Policy of the United States military.
The 1998 war film Saving Private Ryan dramatized the tragedy of three out of four brothers dying in war, motivating a dangerous mission to find the youngest and last surviving brother missing in France after D-Day. In the film, General George Marshall (played by Harve Presnell) reads the Bixby letter to his officers before giving the order to find that brother, Private Ryan, and send him home.
Former President George W. Bush read the letter during the ceremony at the World Trade Center site on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on September 11, 2011.”
Mrs. Lydia Bixby
John Milton Hay
Bixby Letter Forgery
A few quotes taken from one website, as a kind of introduction.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-...edly-writes-to-mother-of-civil-war-casualties
“Legend holds that on this day in 1864,( Nov 21 ) President Abraham Lincoln composes a letter to Lydia Bixby, a widow and mother of five men who had been killed in the Civil War. A copy of the letter was then published in the Boston Evening Transcript on November 25 and signed "Abraham Lincoln." The original letter has never been found.”
“Scholars continue to debate the authorship of the letter”
. “.. scholars have discovered that only two of her sons actually died fighting during the Civil War”
THE BIXBY LETTER
" Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.
Dear Madam,--
I have been shown in the files of the War Department 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.
I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.
I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,
A.Lincoln "
Mrs. Lydia Bixby was a widow around who speculation still rages. She was held to have lost all 5 of her sons in the war, attracting attention upwards through political circles until an appeal was made to Lincoln himself, to please write a lette to the mother in this tragic case. As frequently happens, attention turned then to the widow, who, it transpired, may have lied on the subject, ' only' (?) having lost 2 to death, one to capture, one to desertion and the 5th somewhere ' unknown '. Once this was known, BOY did the tides turn against her. Get this-
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/26...ht-on-the-bixby-letter?rgn=main;view=fulltext
“ The manuscript of this document has not been seen since November 24, 1864, when it was delivered to Mrs. Bixby, who evidently did not preserve it. The widow's granddaughter told a journalist that Mrs. Bixby "was secretly in sympathy with the Southern cause ... and had 'little good to say of President Lincoln.' "
“She claimed to have five sons in the army. She was a stout woman, more or less motherly-looking, but with shifty eyes—we called her "Mother Bixby." I did not like her, but there seemed to be good reason for helping her. Having heard that there were means of getting supplies to Libby Prison (a very difficult thing to do) I was desirous of sending a box of small comforts to the soldiers. Speaking of it to her, she said that one of her sons was at home for a time on leave, and that if I would come to her house ... she would tell me more about it. That morning I came in the cars with my cousin, Mary Cabot, and she walked along the street with me while I was telling her about it, and waited on the doorstep while I was in the house. ... I did not like the look of things at all, and the woman was very evasive; would give me no definite information, said her son was not there, and asked if I would not meet him somewhere. I said I would and told her to send him to the ladies [waiting] room in the Albany Station at a certain time. I was there at the time appointed, and presently a very ill looking man, who had lost some of the fingers of his right hand, came towards me. He began with some familiarity, but I soon put a stop to him, finding I could get no information from him, and sent him off. Soon after this I received a very distressed letter from Mrs. Paine, saying that the police on finding that we were helping this woman had told her that she kept a house of ill-fame, was perfectly untrustworthy and as bad as she could be. (Sarah Cabot Wheelwright, who at the age of twenty-six became acquainted with her) “
I'd like to take the time here to say that wow- way to tear down a woman who DID, in fact lose 2 sons killed in the war, the one captured may well have been dead, the deserter, same, since how could he come home and the 5th, it seems to imply here lived in daily expectation of being hauled off to prison or worse. Mrs. Bixby can be the lowest female on the social totem pole and still be an object of sympathy based on these shattering losses, plus, I cannot find a source which shows she personally claimed to have had 5 sons killed in the war. It's possible that as this story made its way around, then up, ' lost 5 sons ' took on an assumptive character this woman never intended. She could easily have said it, and meant it, without wishing to actually get a letter from A. Lincoln himself. 2 sons dead, the rest for all intents and purposes lost to her- the most hardened female on the planet of any era would have indulged in depressive thought, ' They are lost to me, all of them'. I do fail to see where this famous letter therefore would be the result of some ruse on her part as an awful lot fo these websites on the subject seem to imply.
I understand it is not the begin-all and end-all as far as documentation, but my intent is not to ' prove' points here, just to give background, let minds be challenged themselves. Here's a basic background on ' what happened ', from Wiki.
"In a report to Governor John A. Andrew, regarding the father of five sons serving in the war, the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, William Schouler, wrote that Lydia Bixby had five sons who had died fighting for the Union. Andrew sent the report to the U.S. War Department with an additional note requesting the president to honor the mother with a letter. The report found its way to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who delivered it along with the records of the five sons to President Lincoln at which point the letter was written."
It also contains a rare defense of Lydia Bixby, refreshing to see amidst the seas of scorn. She's been reported to have been a Southern sympathizer, which will not have been her ' fault ', since it would have not been foreseable that A. lincoln himself would have taken a personal interest in her losses and written to commiserate with her.
"Bixby herself has been criticized as perhaps being a poor model of a grieving Union mother. Lydia (Parker) Bixby, by some reports, had moved to Boston from Richmond, Virginia, yet continued sympathizing with the South as a Copperhead.[3] Contemporaries described her as a madam and "untrustworthy and as bad as she could be". The original Schouler report might have been constructed with insufficient fact checking of her claims, which she could have exaggerated in hopes of financial compensation. One of her great-grandsons repeated his father's story that she angrily destroyed Lincoln's letter after receiving it.] However, it is also possible that she was innocently unaware that three of her sons had not died (Henry, for example, was released from a Confederate prison only after she received the letter). Mrs. Bixby continues to be a mysterious figure in the story about the letter."
The War Department incorrectly informed Lincoln about the fate of Mrs. Bixby's sons: Two had died in battle, the others eventually survived the war. It is unclear whether the errors in Mrs. Bixby's story were intentional, and why the War Department had failed to correct the report based on their own records. "
The larger controversy attached to this letter rages ( seems to rage, not merely putter along ) around who wrote the letter, was it indeed Lincoln himself or was it the work of John Milton Hay, Lincoln's secretary, and Lincoln merely approved it before signing his name?
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/26...ht-on-the-bixby-letter?rgn=main;view=fulltext
"The authorship of the letter has been debated by scholars, some of whom believe it was written instead by John Hay, one of Lincoln's White House secretaries. The original letter was either destroyed by the newspaper editor after publication or by Mrs. Bixby, who may have been a Confederate sympathizer and disliked President Lincoln. Copies of an early forgery have been circulating for many years, causing some people to believe they have the original letter."
“ The manuscript of this document has not been seen since November 24, 1864, when it was delivered to Mrs. Bixby, who evidently did not preserve it. The widow's granddaughter told a journalist that Mrs. Bixby "was secretly in sympathy with the Southern cause ... and had 'little good to say of President Lincoln.' "
Since I am not at all conversant with the subject, and feel I would make a poor interpretor of 150 year's worth of progress and debate on the subject, have found what seems to me ( personal opinion ) the best synopsis on the authorship on the web- which is the above link. It's from the journal of The Abraham Lincoln Association, and the article is written by MICHAEL BURLINGAME.
The Bixby Letter is lyrical and eloquent enough in content to have found its way into popular culture, most recently in ' Saving Private Ryan, read before the men set off on the mission to bring the only surviving Ryan brother home alive.
Again, from Wiki:
" The letter is frequently mentioned in America in relation to the topic of siblings going to war, such as when discussing the Sullivan brothers, the Niland brothers, the Borgstrom brothers, and the Sole Survivor Policy of the United States military.
The 1998 war film Saving Private Ryan dramatized the tragedy of three out of four brothers dying in war, motivating a dangerous mission to find the youngest and last surviving brother missing in France after D-Day. In the film, General George Marshall (played by Harve Presnell) reads the Bixby letter to his officers before giving the order to find that brother, Private Ryan, and send him home.
Former President George W. Bush read the letter during the ceremony at the World Trade Center site on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on September 11, 2011.”
Mrs. Lydia Bixby
John Milton Hay
Bixby Letter Forgery
Last edited: