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Letter written by Abraham Lincoln

The Bixby letter is a brief, consoling message sent by President Abraham Lincoln in November 1864 to Lydia Parker Bixby, a widow living in Boston, Massachusetts, who was thought to have lost five sons in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Along with the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address, the letter has been praised as one of Lincoln's finest written works and is often reproduced in memorials, media, and print. Controversy surrounds the recipient, the fate of her sons, and the authorship of the letter. Bixby's character has been questioned (including rumored Confederate sympathies), at least two of her sons survived the war, and the letter was possibly written by Lincoln's assistant private secretary, John Hay.

President Lincoln's letter of condolence was delivered to Lydia Bixby on November 25, 1864, and was printed in the Boston Evening Transcript and Boston Evening Traveller that afternoon. The following is the text of the letter as first published:efn|The Transcript wrote the letter's date as "Nov. 21, 1864" while the Traveller wrote it as "21st November, 1864". Schouler had some of the donations given to Bixby and then visited her home on Thanksgiving, November 24. The letter from the President arrived at Schouler's office the next morning. Trying to secure a discharge for him, his mother filed an affidavit on October 17, 1862, which claimed Edward had enlisted underage without her permission. Born July 13, 1843, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Returned to Boston after the war. Sergeant Charles N. Bixby – Company D, 20th Massachusetts Infantry (served July 18, 1861 – May 3, 1863). Killed in action near Fredericksburg. Born c.1841 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Corporal Henry Cromwell Bixby – 1st enlistment, Company G, 20th Massachusetts Infantry (served July 18, 1861 – May 29, 1862). Born March 30, 1830, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Died November 8, 1871, in Milford, Massachusetts, from tuberculosis he contracted while a soldier. Private Oliver Cromwell Bixby, Jr. – Company E, 58th Massachusetts Infantry (served February 26, 1864 – July 30, 1864). Wounded at Spotsylvania on May 12, 1864. Killed in action near Petersburg, Virginia. Born February 1, 1828, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Writing to her daughter in 1904, Boston socialite Sarah Cabot Wheelwright claimed she had met and had given charitable aid to Lydia Bixby during the war, hoping that one of her sons, in Boston on leave, might help deliver packages to Union prisoners of war; but she later heard gossip that Bixby "kept a house of ill fame, was perfectly untrustworthy and as bad as she could be". In the 1920s, Lincoln scholar William E Barton interviewed the oldest residents of Hopkinton, Massachusetts for their memories of Bixby's family before she moved to Boston. They recalled her sons as being "tough" with "some of them too fond of drink". One son may have "served a jail sentence for some misdemeanor". On August 12, 1925, Elizabeth Towers, a daughter of Oliver Bixby, told the Boston Herald that her grandmother had "great sympathy for the South" and that her mother recalled that Bixby had been "highly indignant" about the letter with "little good to say of President Lincoln". In 1949, Towers' nephew, Arthur March Bixby, claimed that Lydia Bixby had moved to Massachusetts from Richmond, Virginia; though this assertion is contradicted by contemporary records which list her birthplace as Rhode Island.

The fate of the original letter given to Bixby is unknown. William A. Bixby, a son of Oliver, told The New York Times in an August 9, 1925, interview that he did not know what happened to the letter after his grandmother received it, though he doubted it still survived. A few days later, William's sister, Elizabeth told the Boston Herald that she also did not know the letter's fate but speculated Bixby may have torn it up, resenting that it incorrectly said five of her sons had been killed. In the early 20th century, it was sometimes claimed that the original letter could be found on display at Brasenose College at the University of Oxford along with other great works in the English language. Lincoln scholar F. Lauriston Bullard investigated this claim in 1925, discovering that it was untrue and the college had never heard of the Bixby letter.

Christie's auction house receives many supposed original Bixby letters every year, including copies of a lithographic facsimile of the letter in widespread circulation. These first appeared in 1891, when New York City print dealer Michael F. Tobin applied for a copyright to sell souvenir copies of the letter with an engraving of Lincoln by John Chester Buttre for $2 each. Soon, Huber's Museum, a dime museum in Manhattan, began displaying a copy, "stained by coffee and exposure", of Tobin's facsimile as "the original Bixby letter" and selling their own copies for $1 each. Charles Hamilton, an autograph dealer and handwriting expert, examined the Tobin facsimile; concluding it had been copied from a poorly executed forgery originally written in pencil and retraced in ink to imitate Lincoln's handwriting, calling it "halting and awkward and makes his forceful hand appear like a child's scrawl". Tobin's facsimile also errs when compared to the original text of the letter published in Boston newspapers; adding the salutation "To Mrs Bixby, Boston Mass", misspelling the word "assuage" as "assauge", omitting the word "to" after the word "tendering", changing the plural "words" into "word", not capitalizing the words "freedom" and "republic", missing the recipient "Mrs. Bixby" on the bottom left, and combining the original three paragraphs into one. Huber's Museum corrected the spelling of "assuage" in their version of the facsimile.

Scholars have debated whether the Bixby letter was written by Lincoln himself or by his assistant private secretary, John Hay. November 1864 was a busy month for Lincoln, possibly forcing him to delegate the task to Hay. Historian Michael Burlingame, who believes Hay is the author, has pointed out that Hay's scrapbooks have two newspaper clippings of the letter while largely containing Hay's own writing. However, they also contain material written by Lincoln including the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. In 1988, at the request of investigator Joe Nickell, University of Kentucky professor of English Jean G. Pival studied the vocabulary, syntax, and other stylistic characteristics of the letter and concluded that it more closely resembled Lincoln's style of writing than Hay's. A computer analysis method, developed to address the difficulty in attribution of shorter texts, used in a 2018 study by researchers at Aston University's Centre for Forensic Linguistics identified Hay as the letter's author.

The letter's passage "the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom" is inscribed on the base of the statue of Lady Columbia at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii. Discussions on the topic of siblings dying in war have frequently mentioned the letter; such as the Sullivan brothers, the Niland brothers, the Borgstrom brothers, and the Sole Survivor Policy of the United States military. In the 1998 war film Saving Private Ryan, General George Marshall (played by Harve Presnell) reads the Bixby letter to his officers before giving the order to find and send home Private James Francis Ryan after Ryan's three brothers died in battle, setting in motion the eponymous story of the film. In a voiceover near the end of the film, Marshall quotes the Bixby letter in a letter to Mrs. Ryan. On September 11, 2011, former U. S. President George W. Bush read the Bixby letter during the memorial ceremony at the World Trade Center site on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.