Bixby Letter is a brief, entertaining message sent by President Abraham Lincoln in November 1864 to Lydia Parker Bixby, a widow living in Boston, Massachusetts, who is thought to have lost five sons in the Union Army during the Civil War America. Together with the Gettysburg Address and its second inaugural address, the letter has been hailed as one of Lincoln's best writings and is often reproduced in memorials, media, and print.
Controversy surrounds the recipients, the fate of their sons, and the authorship of the letter. The Bixby character has been questioned (including the rumored Confederate chimpanzee), at least two of his sons survived the war, and the letter was probably written by Lincoln's personal secretary assistant John Hay.
Video Bixby letter
Teks
Lincoln's will was delivered to Lydia Bixby on 25 November 1864 and printed in Boston Evening Transcript and Boston Evening Traveler that afternoon. The following is the first published text of the letter:
Executive Mansion, Hotel Washington, November 21, 1864.
Dear Mrs,
I have been shown in the archives of the War Department a statement from the Massachusetts General's aide that you are the mother of five sons who have died extraordinarily on the battlefield.
I feel how weak and unfruitful the words I have to say to try to beg you from the sadness of the great loss. But I can not help myself from offering you the comfort that can be found in their Republic's thanks for dying to save.
I pray that our Heavenly Father may ease the suffering of your sorrows, and leave you only the beloved loved ones of the beloved and the lost, and the arrogance you have to have put so much sacrifice on the Freedom altar.
Respectful, very sincere and respectful,
A. Lincoln.Mrs. Bixby.
Maps Bixby letter
History
Lydia Parker married the Cromwell Bixby shoe maker on September 26, 1826, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. The couple had at least six sons and three daughters before Cromwell's death in 1854. Some time before the Civil War, Bixby and his family settled in Boston.
Meet with Adjutant General Schouler
On September 24, 1864, Massachusetts Adjutant General William Schouler wrote a letter to Massachusetts Governor John Albion Andrew about a request for repatriation sent to the governor by Otis Newhall, father of five Union soldiers. In the letter, Schouler recalled how, two years earlier, they had helped a poor widow named Lydia Bixby to visit a son who was a patient at an Army hospital. About ten days earlier, Bixby came to Schouler's office by claiming that his five sons had died fighting for the Union. Governor Andrew forwarded Newhall's request to the US Department of War with a note asking the president to honor Bixby with a letter.
In response to an October 1 War Department request, Schouler sent a messenger to Bixby's home six days later, asking for the name and unit of his sons. He sent a report to the War Department on October 12, sent to President Lincoln by Defense Minister Edwin Stanton around after October 28.
On November 21, both the Boston Evening Traveler and Boston Evening Transcript published an appeal by Schouler for a contribution to help the family soldiers on Thanksgiving mentions a widow who has lost five children in war. Schouler had several donations given to Bixby and then visited his home on Thanksgiving Day, November 24th. A letter from the President arrived at Schouler's office the next morning.
Military footage of Bixby children
Nevertheless, at least two of Lydia Bixby's sons survived the war:
- Private Arthur Edward Bixby (known as "Edward") - Company C, 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery (registered 24 June 1861). Decrease from Ft. Richardson, Virginia on May 28, 1862. Seeking to obtain permission for her, her mother filed a statement on October 17, 1862 claiming Edward had enrolled under the age without permission. Born July 13, 1843 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Back to Boston after the war.
- Sergeant Charles N. Bixby - Company D, 20th Infantry Infantry (served July 18, 1861 - May 3, 1863). Killed in action near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Born c.1841 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.
- Corporal Henry Cromwell Bixby - 1st enrollment, Company G, 20th Infantry Infantry (served 18 July 1861 - May 29, 1862). Second Registration, Company K, Infantry Infantry 32 (served August 5, 1862 - December 17, 1864). Arrested in Gettysburg and sent to Richmond, Virginia. Paroling on 7 March 1864 at City Point, Virginia. Born March 30, 1830 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Died 8 November 1871 in Milford, Massachusetts.
- Private Oliver Cromwell Bixby, Jr. - Company E, Infantry of the 58th Infantry (serving 26 February 1864 - 30 July 1864). Wounded in Spotsylvania on May 12, 1864. Killed in action near Petersburg, Virginia. Born February 1, 1828 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.
- Personal George Way Bixby - Company B, 56th Infantry Infantry (serving March 16, 1864 -Ã ?,). Listed under the name "George Way," apparently to hide his registration from his wife. Arrested in Petersburg on July 30, 1864. First detained in Richmond but then transferred to Salisbury Prison in North Carolina, arrived there on October 9, 1864. His fate after that remains uncertain. Military records report conflicting reports, whether he died in Salisbury or went to the Confederate Army. Born June 22, 1836 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.
Schouler's report to the War Department incorrectly mentions Edward as a member of Mass 22 Infantry who died of his injuries in Folly Island, South Carolina. Bixby might try to hide - perhaps because of embarrassment or hope of further financial help - Edward's desertion 1862. (He had received a pension after Charles's death in 1863.)
At the time of the September meeting with Schouler, Bixby's son, George, had been a prisoner of war for more than a month, and Henry was still hospitalized following the exchange. The War Department failed to use its own records to correct the errors in Schouler's report.
Questions about characters
Lydia Bixby died in Boston on October 27, 1878, while a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital. In his initial letter to Governor Andrew, Schouler called Bixby "the best specimen of a genuine Union woman I have not seen," but in the years after his death both his character and his loyalty were questioned.
Writing to his daughter in 1904, the Boston socialite Sarah Cabot Wheelwright claimed that she had met and had given charity aid to Lydia Bixby during the war, hoping that one of her sons, in Boston to leave, might help deliver the package to Union prisoners of war; but he then hears the rumor that Bixby "keeps the house of fame, totally unbelievable and as bad as he can be".
In the 1920s, Lincoln scholar William E Barton interviewed Hopkinton, Massachusetts's oldest inhabitants for their memories of the Bixby family before he moved to Boston. They remembered his son as "hard" with "some of them too much to drink". One son may have been "serving a prison sentence for minor offenses".
On August 12, 1925, Ny. George M. Towers, a daughter of Oliver Bixby, told the Boston Herald that her grandmother had "great sympathy for the South" and that her mother remembered that Bixby had been "very angry" about letters with "little good to say about President Lincoln ". In 1949, the nephew of Towers, Arthur March Bixby, claimed that Lydia Bixby had moved to Massachusetts from Richmond, Virginia; although this statement contradicts a contemporary record that lists his birthplace as Rhode Island.
Copies
Original
The fate of the original letter given to Bixby is unknown. William A. Bixby, Oliver's son, 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. congratulations. A few days later, William's sister, Mrs. Towers told the Boston Herald that she also did not know the fate of the letter but speculated Bixby might have torn it, hating that it was false to say her five sons had been killed. William's son, Arthur March Bixby, told New York Sun in 1949 that he remembered his father telling him that he had angrily destroyed the letter after receiving it.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was sometimes claimed that the original letter could be found on display at Brasenose College at Oxford University along with other great works in English. The Lincoln Scholar F. Lauriston Bullard investigated this claim in 1925, finding that it was not true and college had never heard of Bixby's letter.
Facsimile Tobin
Christie's auction house receives many original Bixby letters each year, including a copy of facsimile lithographic letters in wide circulation. It first appeared in 1891, when a New York City print dealer, Michael F. Tobin filed a copyright to sell a copy of an invitation letter with Lincoln's engraving by John Chester Buttre for $ 2 each. Soon, Huber's Museum, a dime museum in Manhattan, begins featuring a copy, "colored by coffee and exposure", from the Tobin facsimile as the "original Bixby letter" and sells their own copy for $ 1 each.
Charles Hamilton, a signature trader and handwriting expert, examined the facsimile of Tobin; concluded it had been copied from a poorly done forgery originally written in pencil and repeated in ink to mimic Lincoln's handwriting, calling it "quit and awkward and making his strong hand look like a child's scribble".
Tobin's facsimile was also confused when compared with the original text of a letter published in the Boston newspaper; adds "To Mrs Bixby, Boston Mass", misspelled "assuage" as "assauge", eliminates the word "to" after the word "tendering", converts the word "plural" into "word" instead of capitalizing the word "freedom" "republic", lost the recipient "Mrs Bixby" in the bottom left, and merge three original paragraphs into one. Huber's Museum corrects the "eavesdrop" spelling in their facsimile version.
Authorship
Scholars have debated whether Bixby's letter was written by Lincoln himself or by his personal assistant secretary, John Hay. November 1864 was a busy month for Lincoln, probably forcing him to delegate to Hay.
The second and third memories of the acquaintance show Hay may have claimed to others that he wrote it, but his children can not remember he ever mentioned writing the letter. Writing to William E. Chandler in 1904, Hay said "Mr. Lincoln's letter to Mrs. Bixby is genuine," but he may refer only to the text. In a 1917 letter to the historian Isaac Markens, Robert Todd Lincoln said Hay had told him that he had no "special knowledge of the letter at the time" written.
Historian Michael Burlingame, who believes Hay is the author, has pointed out that Hay scrapbooks have two newspaper clippings while mostly containing Hay's own writing. However, they also contain material written by Lincoln including the Gettysburg Address and the Inauguration of the Second.
Lincoln-like authors, including Edward Steers, note that the Gettysburg Address and Farewell Address are similar examples of the highly respected Lincoln style. Other scholars, such as Burlingame, have replied that Hay writes better pieces than Bixby letters and notes the words and phrases in the letters that appear more often in Hay's writings than with Lincoln. For example, Burlingame notes the word beguile appears many times in Hay's work and the phrase I can not restrain from the tender is used by Hay in 1864 to Quincy Gillmore, but does not appear once in other works collected from Lincoln. Although, the expression I could not resist from was used by Lincoln in a letter of 1859 to Salmon P. Chase.
In 1988, at the request of the investigator Joe Nickell, an English professor from the University of Kentucky, Jean G. Pival, studied the vocabulary, syntax, and other style characteristics of the letter and concluded that it was more like Lincoln's writing style than Hay.
Legacy
The passage of the letter, "the noble pride that should be yours has placed so much sacrifice on the altar of liberty" is written at the base of Lady Columbia's statue at the National Memorial Cemetery of Pacific in Hawaii.
Discussions on the subject of dying brothers in the war have often mentioned the letter; such as the Sullivan brothers, Niland brothers, Borgstrom brothers, and the Survivor Single Policy of the United States military.
In the 1998 war film Silly Private Ryan, General George Marshall (played by Harve Presnell) read Bixby's letter to his officers before giving orders to find and send home Private James Francis Ryan after three of Ryan's brothers died in battle.
On September 11, 2011, former US President George W. Bush read Bixby's letter during a memorial service at the World Trade Center site on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
See also
- American Civil War Portal
- Letter to Fanny McCullough
Note
References
Quotes
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments