“Bixby letter” Who Wrote It....

[5fish]

I found this article about the famed Bixby letter and who really wrote the letter... a fun read... time to do Grant's memoirs....

Abraham Lincoln letter mystery solved 150 years later

Forensic linguists say they have likely unraveled the mystery surrounding a famous Civil War-era letter, long believed to have been written by President Abraham Lincoln. Historians have argued for …

nypost.com

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Historians have argued for years about the famed 1864 “Bixby letter” that was sent to Lydia Bixby, a mother in Boston grieving the loss of her five sons in the war. The beautifully written letter was signed A. Lincoln, although it has been suggested that the note was actually written by John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary.

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While facsimiles of the letter are in existence, the original has been missing for over 100 years, making it even harder to work out the letter’s true authorship.

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Researchers at Aston University’s Centre for Forensic Linguistics tested 500 texts by Hay and 500 by Lincoln, before drawing the conclusion that the Bixby letter was written by the president’s secretary.

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“Most of what we see in the Bixby letter is found in the writing of Hay, but not in Lincoln,” Nini said. In nearly 90 percent of the results, Hay was identified as the author of the letter. The remaining 10 percent of results were inconclusive.

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There was renewed interest in the Bixby letter after it was read in the 1998 film “Saving Private Ryan.” It also sparked a new round of debate centering on Lincoln’s authorship and the fate of Bixby’s sons. Evidence indicates two of Bixby’s sons died, a third was a deserter and a fourth ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp, the Associated Press reported in 2008. A fifth is believed to have received a discharge, but his fate is unknown.

 

[5fish]

Here is a more detail article of the Bixby letter....

A Century-Old Abraham Lincoln Mystery May Finally Have an Answer

Who wrote the Bixby letter? Researchers say they have a definitive answer

time.com

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Though Bixby’s original copy of the letter was quickly destroyed or lost, the state official had also shared the text with the Boston Evening Telegraph, which published it.

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The brief, but eloquent missive struck a chord for many in the war-torn nation, and it has since become famous as one of the best letters written in the history of the English language.

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But it’s also one of the most “controversial” documents in Lincoln’s large body of writings. Though the letter has other complications to its history — such as, for example, the fact that it wasn’t true that Bixby had lost five sons, and despite her Boston address, her family said she was a Confederate sympathizer — the main point of contention has been whether or not Lincoln actually wrote it. Many historians have wondered whether perhaps it was written instead by his secretary, John Hay.

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Enter forensic linguistics. This field — perhaps most famous in recent years for helping to out J.K. Rowling as Robert Galbraith — relies on the theory that, just as people from different regions may speak different dialects of the same language, each individual speaks and writes an even more subtle personal version of their language, known as an idiolect. “We pick up these idiolects over our lifetimes, not just because of where we grew up, but where we went to school, what kind of job we do, our personal history,” Grieve explains. Though the naked ear can’t often pick them up, computers can find and compare them by picking apart details such as the frequency of use of words as common as “the” or “and.”

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But while efforts have been made to analyze the Bixby letter to see whether it matches Lincoln’s or Hay’s writing style more, those attempts have never been conclusive, in particular because — though both Lincoln and Hay left countless examples of their writing styles — the letter itself is so short, containing only 139 words. “To make an analogy, if you take 10 people walking down the street in some American city and you look at their demographics, how many men you saw and how many women, different age groups and ethnicities, you wouldn’t get a very good estimate of the U.S. population,” Grieve says. “It’s so little data that you’re not getting a good measure of the real features of the population.”

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Nearly 90% of the time, the n-gram tracing method identified Hay as the author of the Bixby letter. The other roughly 10% of the time, the analysis was inconclusive. (Those times were when the researchers used groupings of just 1 or 2 letters at a time, rather than whole words, and those combinations proved extremely common overall.) That means, they believe, that the century of wondering about the Bixby letter can come to an end — leaving history buffs free to appreciate the letter’s beauty, as well as the uncontested writing skills of both men, without the distraction of this lingering question.

 

[O' Be Joyful]

I have for a long time believed it was Hay. That is typically a task that one would designate to an aide, read and then sign off on.