Bixby 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.
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 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.
In the letter, Schouler recalled how, two years prior, they had helped a poor widow named Lydia Bixby to visit a son who was a patient at an Army hospital.
In his initial letter to Governor Andrew, Schouler called Bixby "the best specimen of a true-hearted Union woman I have yet seen,"[28] but in the years following her death both her character and loyalty were questioned.
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.
[37] 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.
[35] William's son, Arthur March Bixby, told the New York Sun in 1949 that he recalled his father telling him that she had angrily destroyed the letter after receiving it.
[38][39] 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.
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.
[61] 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.
[62][63] 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.
[64] 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.
