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Lincoln’s Bixby Letter, The Inspiration for Saving Private Ryan

In the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan, Gen. George Marshall reads a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to a Boston widow who lost five sons fighting the Civil War. Known as the Bixby Letter, scholars consider it one of Lincoln’s finest literary efforts.

The missive has won praise as a masterpiece of the English language and comparable with – even better than – the Gettysburg Address. It’s been called the “finest condolence letter in the English language.”

Delivered to Lydia Bixby around Thanksgiving in 1864, the Boston newspapers published copies of it. The original has never been found.

It may well be the most controversial condolence letter in the English language. Some say Lincoln never wrote it. Historians argue over exactly how many sons Mrs. Bixby lost fighting for their country. It certainly wasn’t five. And Mrs. Bixby herself has been reviled as a whorehouse madam who sympathized with the South.

We’ll probably never know the truth, but the letter speaks for itself.

Abraham Lincoln and his two secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay

The Bixby Letter

Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.

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 feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

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.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln.

Lydia Parker Bixby

In September of 1864, Lydia Bixby climbed the steps of the Massachusetts Statehouse to visit William Schouler in his office. She was just one of many anxious mothers and wives who thronged Schouler’s anteroom seeking help. She came to apply for a widow’s pension.

Lydia Bixby

Schouler, as adjutant general of Massachusetts, had already received several visits from Mrs. Bixby. She was around 60 or older, poor, lightly educated and careworn. She had married Cromwell Bixby, a shoemaker, in Hopkinton, Mass., on Sept. 26, 1826. They had at least six sons and three daughters before Cromwell died in 1854. Sometime before the Civil War, the family moved to the Dorchester section of Boston. After the war broke out, five of her sons enlisted in Massachusetts regiments.

She made her first known visit to Schouler In October 1862.

The Massachusetts Statehouse in 1860

She asked him to discharge her young son Edward. He was only 16 when he enlisted, she said, and given to “bouts of insanity” from time to time. Mrs. Bixby may not have revealed — or even known — that Edward had deserted from the Army five months earlier. If she did know, perhaps she thought she could spare him a likely death sentence if caught.

In 1862 she also asked him for help to visit another son in Maryland, wounded at the Battle of Antietam. Schouler helped her get $40 from Gov. John Andrew so she could nurse him in a Maryland hospital.

However, war records show none of her sons wounded at Antietam.

Two years later, she went to see Schouler again. She told him five of her sons had died fighting for their county. Could he help her?

Schouler then told Andrew, who asked the War Department if Lincoln could write a letter of condolence to the grieving widow.

The Bixby Boys

Sloppy staff work or perhaps the fog of war explain why Lincoln thought five Bixby boys died fighting for the Union cause. The War Department sent Schouler information that all five had been killed in the war. Lincoln – or Hay – wrote the letter to Mrs. Bixby based on that information.

But only two died for sure in battle, maybe three. Another son may have deserted as well.

The penalty for desertion

One reason for the mix-up: Bixby’s five sons had four cousins who came from the same towns and served in the same Massachusetts regiments, according to Kendall Banning, writing in The Bookman in 1922. ”In the confusion that attended the large engagements of the war, it is possible that the records of these nine Bixby boys became mixed,” he wrote.

Perhaps Mrs. Bixby herself thought all five had been killed, given the confusion of war. “Even if only two of Mrs. Bixby’s sons were killed, that was not a light sorrow,” Lincoln scholar Rev. William Barton observed in the New York Times on Aug. 6, 1925.

Gossip Rears Its Ugly Head

In addition to losing her sons, Mrs. Bixby suffered the contempt of her betters, both during her lifetime and afterward.

Sarah Cabot Wheelwright, a Brahmin philanthropist, brought charitable aid to Mrs. Bixby during the war. In a letter to her daughter in 1904, she wrote she had heard gossip that Mrs. Bixby “kept a house of ill-fame, was perfectly untrustworthy and as bad as she could be.” Wheelwright wrote the letter in 1904, 26 years after Mrs. Bixby died a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Even later than that, the Rev. William Barton visited Mrs. Bixby’s neighbors still living in Hopkinton He reported they remembered her sons as tough. Some of them liked drink too much, and one may have served time in jail.

True or false, the dimly remembered hearsay of Mrs. Bixby’s acquaintances lived on as hard fact in the historical record.

“The Mrs. Bixby to whom it was addressed was in fact a Confederate sympathizer who ran a whorehouse.,” Michael Burlingame wrote in American Heritage in 1999. Many others repeated the characterization.

William Schouler

William Schouler, who had met Mrs. Bixby several times and visited her at home, had a different opinion. “Mrs Bixby is the best specimen of a true-hearted Union woman I have yet seen,” he wrote on Sept. 24, 1864.

We’ll never know.

What did happen to the Bixby boys?

Historians have pieced together the records of the Bixby boys, though some are inconclusive.

The youngest, Pvt. Arthur Edward Bixby (“Edward”), enlisted at 16 and then deserted from the 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery at Ft. Richardson, Va., on May 28, 1862. He returned to Boston after the war.

Sgt. Charles Bixby, 20th Massachusetts Infantry, killed in action on May 3, 1863 near Fredericksburg.

Cpl. Henry Cromwell Bixby, 32nd massachusetts infanty, captured at Gettysburg, sent to Richmond, Va., and paroled on March 7, 1864. Died seven years later of tuberculosis contracted as a soldier.

Pvt. Oliver Cromwell Bixby, Jr., 58th Massachusetts Infantry, wounded at Spotsylvania, killed at Petersburg.

Conflicting military reports make the fate of Pvt. George Way Bixby unclear. Captured at Petersburg, he either died in Salisbury Prison as a POW or deserted to the Confederate Army.

The Original Bixby Letter

The original letter to Mrs. Bixby doesn’t seem to exist any more. Forgeries, however, have floated around since 1891. Christie’s auction house apparently gets about six every year.

Some of her descendants have said she sympathized with the South, hated Lincoln and tore up the letter.

Mrs. Bixby’s great-grandson recalled, “I was advised by my Father that my Great-Grandmother was an ardent Southern Sympathizer, and when she received the letter, she destroyed it in anger … shortly after receipt without realizing its value.” Other grandchildren and great-grandchildren heard the same stories.

But again, it’s all hearsay.

Questions of Authorship

Some scholars say it’s likely his secretary, John Hay, wrote the Bixby letter. Hay, a talented mimic, penned many letters for the overburdened president, And according to scuttlebutt that filtered down over the years, he told friends he had written it.

John Hay, by John Singer

In 2017, a team of linguistic researchers concluded Hay almost certainly wrote the letter. They based their conclusion on a computer analysis of word sequences in the letter to Mrs. Bixby and comparing it to other writings by Hay and Lincoln.

Others say the letter is pure Lincoln. Further, Hay’s own children said he never claimed the famous letter as his. The president’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, wrote in 1917 letter that Hay told him he had no knowledge of the letter at the time.

The Bixby Letter

A passage from the letter appears chiseled in stone at the base of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii. It reads, “”the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”

Then in 1998, Harve Presnell as Marshall reads the letter in Saving Private Ryan. Tom Hanks stars in the film about saving the fourth b rother after three died in battle.

Ten years after the September 11 attacks, former president George W. Bush read the letter to Mrs. Bixby during a memorial service.

Click on the image to buy the ebook from Amazon. Paperback version coming soon.

If you really want to know what a president and first lady were like, find out what they ate. The New England Historical Society’s new book, Eat Like a President, tells you about the six New England presidents, their servants, their families, their friends and how they struggled to make the White House presentable for public entertainment. Click here to buy the ebook; the paperback version is coming soon.

Execution of a deserter, By https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/3c/36/30789bfbc464742dc7c3ef6baa7d.jpgGallery: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0041826.htmlWellcome Collection gallery (2018-04-03): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/zev3bpgb CC-BY-4.0, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36647109. This story last updated in 2022.

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Clover Adams Takes Pictures of Grief (Her Own)

The famous statue “Grief” memorializes Clover Adams, a talented photographer whose husband wouldn’t let her work be published.

She committed suicide in 1885 by drinking the chemicals she used to develop photographs.

Her husband, historian Henry Adams, commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create the draped figure to portray nirvana, a state of existence beyond joy and sorrow.

It was meant to ask a question, not to give an answer, wrote Adams.

So why did Clover Adams commit suicide? Do her photographs suggest the reason why?

Clover Adams, Photographer

New techniques gave women a chance to explore photography after the Civil War, and Clover Adams went all in. Her photographs convey isolation and limitation. Many of her settings evoke the claustrophobia she may have felt as a woman in Gilded Age America. Others express isolation and the distance between people.

Brooks Adams, Henry’s brother. Photo by Clover Adams.

She lost her mother at an early age, and married a man descended from the famously remote John Quincy Adams. Though they longed for children, they never had any.

“Creativity also undoes, overwhelms, gives power to hidden undertows. What’s brought forward in expression is exposed and becomes irrefutable,” wrote her biographer, Natalie Dykstra.

Clover Adams, Brahmin

Clover Adams was born Marian Hooper on Sept. 13, 1843 into a Boston Brahmin family. Her mother, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, won acclaim for her Transcendentalist poetry. Her father, Robert William Hooper, achieved prominence as a Boston physician. The wealthy Hooper family lived at 114 Beacon St. in Boston’s fashionable Back Bay.

The Hoopers had a history of mental illness.

Self-portrait by Clover Adams.

“I am a ‘Hooper, and if a feeling is very pleasant I feel as if it were wrong,’ Clover Adams wrote to her sister.

Grief marred her pampered childhood. her mother died when she was five, and her Aunt Susan, a surrogate mother, killed herself when she was nine. She grow close to her father—too close for her future husband’s liking.

Marriage

In 1872 at her father’s summer home at Beverly Farms in Massachusetts, she married Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams and son of diplomat and historian Charles Francis Adams. Henry Adams described himself as ‘absurdly in love’ with her, but his brother Charles warned him about the family’s mental instability. “Heavens!–no!–they’re all crazy as coots,” he said when his brother told him he intended to marry Clover.

Henry Adams. Photo by Clover Adams.

Henry, a workaholic writer and historian, told her how he’d ‘improve’ her once they married. He discouraged her artistic pursuits. In one of his novels, he wrote that a woman ‘cannot both enjoy love and be truly herself in her creative ambition or beliefs.’

When Clover Adams got interested in photography on a trip to New York, he told her that wouldn’t happen again. And when a prestigious magazine wanted to use one of her photographs on the cover, he said no.

Charles Francis and Abigail Brooks Adams. Photo by Clover Adams.

Washington, D.C.

Five years into their marriage in 1877, Henry and Clover Adams moved to Washington, D.C. She belonged to the literary circle called the Five of Hearts, along with her husband, John Hay, Hay’s wife Clara and Clarence King, the famous geologist who led a double life pretending to be a West Indian railroad porter with a secret family in New York City.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,, friend of the Adamses. Photo by Clover Adams.

Her world was a clubby little one: her friend John Hay had an affair with her brother-in-law Brooks Adams’ sister-in-law, Nannie Cabot Lodge.

Her friends viewed her as witty, clever, athletic. Perhaps they sensed her troubled nature. She inspired Henry James to write Daisy Miller in 1878 and Portrait of a Lady in 1881. When she died, James wrote, ‘poor Mrs. Adams found, the other day, the solution of the knottiness of existence.’

Clover Adams. Few photographs of her survive.

Grief

She remained close to her father, to her husband’s dismay. When he died in April 1885, she lapsed into a depression.

In 1885, the Adamses were building a baronial mansion on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., and living in temporary housing on H Street.

On Dec. 6, 1885, Clover Adams drank half a vial of potassium cyanide in the bedroom of their rented home. Henry then found her lying on the floor in front of the fire in the fireplace.

Henry Adams with the family dog. Photo by Clover Adams.

He never mentioned her, not once, in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and he destroyed all her letters and photographs of her. A year after he died her wrote a friend that he hadn’t had the good luck to attend his own funeral. But, he wrote, “I have buried pretty nearly everything I lived for.”

With thanks to Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life by Natalie Dykstra. Featured image of the Adams Memorial By Wikipedia Loves Art participant “red_herring” – Uploaded from the Wikipedia Loves Art photo pool on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7821686. This story was updated in 2022.

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A Gilded Age Gentleman Farm in Each New England State

During the Gilded Age, the gentleman farm was an important element of the upper-class lifestyle. They served as formal summer mansions and working farms that often supplied produce and dairy products to the owners’ winter residences.

George Washington led the way as the nation’s first gentleman farmer in chief. But the fashion for elegant mansions sitting on landscaped farmland didn’t take hold until after the Civil War.

The Gentleman Farm

Gentleman farms reflected the outsize egos of their wealthy owners during an age of soaring inequality. They sat on large swathes of land, sometimes thousands of acres. Elite architects designed the mansions as well as the farmhouses, barns, carriage houses, greenhouses and follies.

Sometimes business moguls or their heirs used their farms to demonstrate their prowess in agricultural pursuits. They developed prize livestock or managed woodlots scientifically or created vast formal gardens. Landscape designers like Frederick Law Olmsted and Beatrix Farrand sculpted the grounds for scenic vistas, pleasant walks and interesting flower gardens.

The income tax put an end to many of the Gilded Age estates, though a brief perusal of real estate listings shows the gentleman farms may have entered a new heyday. Here, though, are six late-19^th to early 20^th century gentleman farms, one in each New England state.

Eolia Mansion at Harkness State Park

Birdseye view of a Connecticut’s gentleman farm, Eolia.

Stephen V. Harkness had the good fortune to invest silently in John D. Rockefeller’s fledgling Standard Oil Co. His son Edward, clearly a fan of the gentleman farm, built a 42-room mansion on 230 acres overlooking Long Island Sound and named it Eolia.

The family used the estate as a summer retreat and a working farm, which included a prize dairy herd and vegetable gardens. They later added outbuildings, like the teahouse and the carriage house.

Architect James Gamble Rogers redesigned the interior of the Roman Renaissance Revival style mansion to evoke the feeling of the inside of an oyster shell. Landscape designer Beatrix Farrand improved the grounds with lush formal gardens.

In 1920, Mary Harkness turned some of the grounds into a summer camp for children with polio. In 1950, she left the estate to the State of Connecticut. For years the house had to be boarded up, but by 1998 it had been restored.

People can rent Eolia for weddings and parties, as well as visit the estate on weekends and holidays from Memorial Day Weekend to Labor Day.

275 Great Neck Rd., Waterford, Conn.

Isaac W. Dyer Estate

The Isaac W. Dyer Estate in Gorham, Maine.

Gilded Age gentleman farms are increasingly scarce in Maine, but the Isaac W. Dyer Estate survives in a rural section of Gorham.

Isaac W. Dyer and his wife lived in Portland, where he built a large corporate law practice. For many years he served as district attorney, earning a reputation as an old-school conservative. Dyer also wrote a biography of Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle.

He bought the large Greek Revival farmhouse and 126 acres in 1887 and transformed it into a gentleman farm. Eventually he built many of the outbuildings, including sheds, barns, a garage and a greenhouse. Landscapers created a croquet lawn, a sweeping circular driveway and a rare walled garden.

In 1998, the National Register of Historic Places put the Isaac W. Dyer Estate on its list.

The Dyer Estate has shrunk to 6.4 acres and is privately owned.

180 Fort Hill Rd., Gorham, Maine

Turner Hill Farm

Turner Hill Farms, one of several gentleman farms in Ipswich, Mass.

North Shore businessman Charles Rice and his wife Anne Proctor Rice bought 700 acres and a farmhouse on Turner Hill in Ipswich, Mass., just before the turn of the century. They then crossed the Atlantic with their architect, William Rantoul, to check out the gentleman farms in England and Scotland for ideas. The Rices came back and spent the next few years building an immense Elizabethan mansion.

They also built 13 other buildings, including cottages for the butler and gardener, stables, a garage and barns. As many as 50 people worked the farm in the summer to pick produce and fruit and milk the 20 cows. The gigantic house required 22 domestic servants.

The Turners had three children, and during the summer held children’s parties every week for 175 children. Anne Rice, a skilled equestrienne, broke many bones riding over the property, and in 1933 died when her horse threw her. Charles Rice declined and died 10 years later. The LaSalette Fathers bought the property and turned it into a spiritual retreat. The National Register of Historic Places listed Turner Hill Farm in 1982.

Today it functions as a golf club and condominiums. Another gentleman farm in Ipswich, Castle Hill, is less than 10 miles away.

Historic Ipswich has fascinating photos of Turner Hill’s early days. Click here to see them.

251 Turner Hill, Ipswich, Mass.

The Fells, John Hay’s Gentleman Farm

The Fells in full bloom in Newbury, N.H.

In the 1880s, New Hampshire farmers were abandoning their land and moving west for better farmland. The New Hampshire state government stepped in and encouraged wealthy families to buy up the properties and turn them into gentleman farms.

John Hay, who served as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary and U.S. Secretary of State, answered the call. He bought 1,000 acres of land on the shores of Lake Sunapee in 1888. Hay hoped to establish a summer colony for his group of friends. But then one of his friends, Clover Adams, committed suicide, and Hay abandoned his plan.

Instead, Hay built a rustic cottage and named the property The Fells, a term for a rocky upland pasture. His son Clarence and wife later expanded the cottage into a 22-room Colonial Revival mansion. Clarence wrote a book about it in 1962, called Gardening in Granite. “This is about a rock garden on Lake Sunapee, in the foothills of the White Mountains,” he wrote.

The Hays donated much of the land to the government, and when they died The Fells became a nonprofit organization. The Fells, a preservation project of The Garden Conservancy, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today visitors can hike the forest paths and, in season, visit the house and grounds, which include a rose terrace, a rock garden of rare alpines and a hidden walled garden.

456 Route 103A, Newbury, N.H.

CCRI Knight Campus, Once a Gentleman Farm

Part of the old Knight Estate, now a community college in Warwick, R.I.

The Fruit of the Loom brand started with Rhode Island’s Knight family, headed by Benjamin and Robert Knight. When Robert died in 1912, the New York Times called him the largest cotton manufacturer in the world.

The Knights actually replaced the Spragues as the dominant manufacturing family in Rhode Island. When the Sprague family’s businesses went belly up in the financial panic of 1873, the Knight family bought many of the Spragues’ textile mills, mill housing, company stores and large farms.

The Knight Estate in the Natick section of Warwick was considered the nicest of the Knights’ gentleman farms. It had a large Federal and Greek Revival home and a number of fine farm buildings. Robert Knight used the farm to develop prize livestock.

In the 20^th century, developers bulldozed some of the farm to make way for the Midland Mall. Then in 1964, Royal Webster Knight donated the farm to the State of Rhode Island for a junior college.

Today, the old Knight Farm forms the nucleus of the Community College of Rhode Island. In direct opposition to the ideal of the gracious farm, CCRI built a Brutalist megastructure on the campus to house all educational functions. Some of the original farm buildings still survive. The college uses the manor house as the president’s residence.

400 East Ave, Warwick, R.I.

Shelburne Farms

Shelburne Farms in Vermont, one of the Vanderbilt gentleman farms.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the richest men in history, had many descendants who built elaborate mansions and yachts. Vanderbilt’s granddaughter, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb, chose to create one of the Vanderbilt’s gentleman farms in Shelburne, Vt. Her brother George then one-upped her with the granddaddy of them all, Biltmore, in Asheville, N.C.

Eliza and her husband, Dr. William Seward Webb, bought up small farms to create their 3,800-acre estate in 1886. They hired Frederick Law Olmsted to design the winding drives, scenic vistas, parklands, gardens and a golf course. Architect Robert Henderson Robertson designed 16 buildings, including a stunning Shingle Style mansion. No less a conservationist than Gifford Pinchot advised them on forest management.

The farm began to shrink in 1910, and the next generations of Vanderbilts struggled to keep it up. In 1972, the Webb descendants incorporated Shelburne Farms as a nonprofit educational organization. It has 400 acres of sustainably managed woods and a grass-fed herd of Brown Swiss cows.

The National Register of Historic Places put Shelburne Farms on its list because of its significance as a Gilded Age ornamental farm.

It’s also one of the principal concert sites for the Vermont Mozart Festival. Shelburne Farms also features an inn and restaurant, open seasonally, on the shores of Lake Champlain, tours, walking trails, a children’s farmyard and a farm store that sells, among other things, cheddar cheese.

Shelburne Farms, 1611 Harbor Road, Shelburne, Vermont

Images: Eolia By I, PostMan1107, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2412245; Isaac W. Dyer Estate By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35570189; Turner Hill Farm By User:Magicpiano – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21986299; Knight Estate By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20439041;The Fells, By The Fells –http://www.gardenvisit.com/assets/madge/the_fells_newbury/600x/the_fells_newbury_600x.jpg, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11155642. This story was updated in 2022.

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