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Abraham Lincoln, despite his limited formal education, was celebrated for his eloquent writing. Among his most famous works is the “Bixby letter,” a heartfelt message sent to a Boston widow thought to have lost five sons in the Civil War. However, as reported by Newsweek, a recent study in the journal Digital Scholarship in the Humanities [PDF] indicates that John Hay, Lincoln’s personal secretary, might have been the true author.
In November 1864, the letter to Lydia Bixby was penned at the urging of William Shouler, Massachusetts’ adjutant general, and Governor John Albion Andrew. It stated, “I realize how inadequate any words of mine must be in easing the pain of such a profound loss. Yet, I offer you the solace found in the gratitude of the Republic for which your sons gave their lives.”
Unbeknownst to Lincoln, Bixby had only lost two sons in combat; the others had either deserted, been honorably discharged, or died as prisoners of war. Despite this, the compassionate letter gained widespread attention when the Boston Evening Transcript published its 139-word contents for the public.
The fate of Bixby’s original letter remains a mystery—some speculate she destroyed it due to her Confederate sympathies—while scholars have long debated whether John Hay was its actual author.
During his lifetime, Hay, who later became a statesman, allegedly confided in several individuals that he, not Lincoln, was the true writer of the famous letter, as reported by TIME. After his death, the rumor gained traction, though some experts believed Hay’s claim referred to transcribing or copying the letter from a draft.
To resolve the debate, a team of forensic linguists in England employed n-gram tracing, a text analysis method that examines the frequency of linguistic patterns in short texts to identify authorship. They analyzed 500 writings by Hay and 500 by Lincoln before evaluating the Bixby letter, as detailed in a statement cited by Newsweek.
“In nearly 90 percent of cases, the analysis pointed to Hay as the author, with the remaining instances yielding inconclusive results,” the linguists stated.
As per Atlas Obscura, the team intends to share their findings at the International Corpus Linguistics Conference, scheduled from July 24 to July 28 at the University of Birmingham in England.
