Bixby letter The Bixby letter is a letter sent from the United States President Abraham Lincoln to a bereaved mother of five sons who were thought to have died while fighting for the Union in the American Civil War . The brief , consoling message was written in November 1864 to Lydia Bixby , a widow living in Boston , following a request from Massachusetts Governor John Albion Andrew . The text has been widely praised as one of Lincoln ' s finest works of writing alongside the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address . Some controversy surrounds the recipient , subject , and authorship of the letter . Although her sons fought for the Union , Mrs . Bixby seems to have personally supported the Confederacy . Not all five sons died in battle , with records showing that three of them were still alive years after the war . Historians have long debated whether the text was penned by Lincoln himself or by his assistant private secretary , John Hay . These factors have scarcely affected the reputation of the letter , which remains in the highest regard of many critics . The letter was widely reprinted and the original is thought to be lost , yet this matter is frequently questioned as new copies are found and examined . Text . Lincoln ' s letter to Mrs . Bixby was printed by the " Boston Evening Transcript " on November 25 , 1864 , the same day it was delivered to her by the Adjutant General of Massachusetts , William Schouler . The following is the text of the letter as it appeared in the " Transcript " : Background . In a report to Governor John A . Andrew , regarding the father of five sons serving in the war , the Adjutant General of Massachusetts , William Schouler , wrote that Lydia Bixby had five sons who had died fighting for the Union . Andrew sent the report to the U . S . War Department with an additional note requesting the president to honor the mother with a letter . The report found its way to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton , who delivered it along with the records of the five sons to President Lincoln at which point the letter was written . The War Department incorrectly informed Lincoln about the fate of Mrs . Bixby ' s sons : Two had died in battle , the others eventually survived the war . It is unclear whether the errors in Mrs . Bixby ' s story were intentional , and why the War Department had failed to correct the report based on their own records . The actual fate of her sons was as follows : Bixby herself has been criticized as perhaps being a poor model of a grieving Union mother . Lydia ( Parker ) Bixby , by some reports , had moved to Boston from Richmond , Virginia , yet continued sympathizing with the South as a Copperhead . Contemporaries described her as a madam and " untrustworthy and as bad as she could be " . The original Schouler report might have been constructed with insufficient fact checking of her claims , which she could have exaggerated in hopes of financial compensation . One of her great - grandsons repeated his father ' s story that she angrily destroyed Lincoln ' s letter after receiving it . However , it is also possible that she was innocently unaware that three of her sons had not died ( Henry , for example , was released from a Confederate prison only after she received the letter ) . Mrs . Bixby continues to be a mysterious figure in the story about the letter . Copies . Mrs . Bixby is said to have destroyed the letter shortly after receiving it , which would be consistent with her alleged Copperhead sympathies . Certainly the original letter sent to her has been lost . However , there is in common circulation a lithographic reproduction of the letter of unknown origin . This copy could suggest that the letter ' s destruction was not immediate or that it was made from a forgery . The copy ' s existence has kept some hopes alive that the original may still exist , perhaps now forgotten in a collection somewhere . Apart from historical interest in the original there is also interest in the monetary value of such a find , with recent estimates ( as of 2009 ) saying it could be worth millions of dollars . The autograph dealer Charles Hamilton and Chris Coover of Christie ' s auction house receive numerous false original Bixby letters every year . Hamilton examined the facsimile of the Bixby letter and concluded that it was copied from a poorly executed forgery , citing elements of its construction incorrect for Lincoln ' s era as well as apparent pencil markings that were traced in pen . John Hay , whose name is heard frequently in authorship debates , demonstrated that he could ably mimic Lincoln ' s handwriting , and Robert Todd Lincoln too recalled that his father ' s handwriting was simple to imitate . However , Hay believed the copy to have been made from a " very ingenious forgery " , and Hamilton ' s arguments centered on factors other than handwriting in determining it as a fake . Starting in the early 1900s , Americans popularly believed that the original letter , or a copy of the original , could be found in Brasenose College at the University of Oxford on display in a place of honor above other great works in the English language . When the Lincoln scholar F . Lauriston Bullard investigated this claim in 1925 , he instead found that the college had never heard of the Bixby letter and did not even have a copy , let alone the original . Despite this conclusion , the tale continues to appear in popular media from time to time . In 2008 , a Dallas museum found a document in its archives that may be an authentic , handwritten government copy of the letter . The Dallas Historical Society is having the document appraised . According to Alan Olson , curator for the Society , the paper and ink appear authentic to the Civil War era . Some Lincoln experts doubted the authenticity of the document , citing the large circulation of copies distributed since the 1890s and the unlikelihood of an official copy being made of such a letter . Authorship . For many years scholars have engaged in on - going debate regarding whether the Bixby letter was written by Lincoln himself or by his assistant private secretary , John Hay . Most Lincoln experts believe that the president personally wrote the letter . The arguments in favor of Hay involve no hard proof , but rather several factors hinting that Lincoln might have delegated the task to Hay , who might have explicitly claimed authorship . One of the first arguments to emerge is the possibility that Hay claimed to have written the letter . Associates recounted that he claimed in numerous conversations to have been the author of the letter , but these accounts have been dismissed as second - hand recollections . Associated with this argument is one of Hay ' s scrapbooks that contained a copy of the letter . These scrapbooks largely — but not exclusively — contain writings by Hay . Others note that he also kept extensive collections about Lincoln , suggesting that this is not proof of a first - hand claim of authorship . Another factor involves Lincoln ' s letter writing habits , especially in November 1864 when the Bixby letter was composed . Hay said to William Herndon , Lincoln ' s former law partner and later biographer , that Lincoln read very few of the letters that were sent to him , but he still wrote about a half - dozen letters a week . November 1864 happened to be a busy month for Lincoln though , with Hay writing in a letter that very month noting the president ' s lack of time to engage in correspondence . Finally the wording of the letter has been argued by both sides as indicative of the true author . Lincoln supporters cite works , such as the Gettysburg Address and the Farewell Address , as similar examples of his highly - regarded style . Others have countered that Hay wrote pieces that compare favorably to the Bixby letter , and specifically highlight words and phrases in the letter that appear more frequently in the writings of the secretary . The most telling example may be the word " beguile " , which appears 30 times in the works of Hay and , excepting the Bixby letter , not once in the collected works of Lincoln . This has been countered as not proving anything , and the actual usage of the word " beguile " in the letter seems more in line with the " to divert " meaning than the " to charm " sense that Hay frequently employed . Legacy . An extract , " the solemn pride that must be yours , to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom " , adorns the statue of Lady Columbia in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii . The letter is reprinted in full on a plaque in a memorial garden at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in Southern California . The letter is frequently mentioned in America in relation to the topic of siblings going to war , such as when discussing the Sullivan brothers , the Niland brothers , the Borgstrom brothers , and the Sole Survivor Policy of the United States military . The 1998 war film " Saving Private Ryan " dramatized the tragedy of three out of four brothers dying in war , motivating a dangerous mission to find the youngest and last surviving brother missing in France after D - Day . In the film , General George Marshall ( played by Harve Presnell ) reads the Bixby letter to his officers before giving the order to find that brother , Private Ryan , and send him home . Former President George W . Bush read the letter during the ceremony at the World Trade Center site on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on September 11 , 2011 .