In the Name of the Author

 On November 21, 1864, Abraham Lincoln, believing that she had lost all five of

her sons in the Civil War, wrote a letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby of Boston. The brief missive

was meant to offer condolences, but it also acknowledged "how weak and fruitless must

be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so

overwhelming" (308). Along with the Gettysburg address and the second inaugural

speech, the Bixby letter is regarded by many Lincoln biographers as a masterpiece and is

often cited as evidence of his literary genius.4 Intriguingly, the letter is treated by just as

many historians with skepticism, not for the quality of its prose but for doubts about its

authenticity. As it turns out, the letter is historically inaccurate, for Mrs. Bixby only lost

two sons in the war; of the remaining three boys, one deserted the army, the other was

honorably discharged, and the third may have either deserted or died a prisoner of war.

These facts have led some historians to suggest that the extant letter may be a fake.

Others have speculated that John Hay, Lincoln's Secretary of State, may have composed

the letter, imitating the president's voice and perhaps even forging his signature.

Noteworthy in this debate, as Michael Burlingame points out, is the use of the word

"beguile," which evidently appears repeatedly in Hay's correspondences but never in

Lincoln's.5 On the other hand, noted biographer Roy Basler has argued that the letter is

comparable "to the best of Lincoln's lyrical passages" from the Gettysburg address and

the farewell address. Basler is convinced that "the internal evidence of style seems to

mark the letter as Lincoln's" (qtd. in Burlingame 64). But the "original" Bixby letter has

been lost-it was apparently destroyed by Mrs. Bixby, who was a Confederate