Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1999 | Volume 50, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1999 | Volume 50, Issue 4
Saving Private Ryan , Steven Spielberg’s big movie of 1998, prefaces its plot with the very moving reading of a famous letter of condolence written by Abraham Lincoln to Lydia Bixby, a widow in Boston who had lost five sons in the Civil War. The letter, dated November 21, 1864, says: “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.
Saving Private Ryan , Steven Spielberg’s big movie of 1998, prefaces its plot with the very moving reading of a famous letter of condolence written by Abraham Lincoln to Lydia Bixby, a widow in Boston who had lost five sons in the Civil War. The letter, dated November 21, 1864, says: “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.”
The letter has long been legendary among students and scholars of Lincoln. The eminent Lincoln authority James G. Randall declared that it “stands with the Gettysburg Address as a masterpiece in the English language.” Carl Sandburg called it “a piece of the American Bible” that “more darkly than the Gettysburg speech … wove its awful implication that human freedom so often was paid for with agony.” Another historian, Daniel Kilham Dodge, wrote that “we can imagine how that great heart throbbed and that strong, beautiful right hand rapidly traversed the paper while he was bringing comfort to a bereaved patriot mother. There was as true lyrical inspiration at work … as that which impelled Wordsworth to compose the ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality.’”
Yet the letter is hardly what it seems. the Mrs. Bixby to whom it was addressed was in fact a Confederate sympathizer who ran a whorehouse. Sarah Cabot Wheelwright, a Boston matron who became acquainted with Mrs. Bixby during the Civil War, described her as “a stout woman, more or less motherly-looking, but with shifty eyes.” Wheelwright and a friend considered hiring Mrs. Bixby until