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Did Mrs. Bixby get a bad rap?

THE BOSTON Daily Advertiser ran the story on Nov. 26, 1864, the day after Thanksgiving, under the headline “Local Matters.” It followed news that Union troops at the front had gratefully received and enjoyed their donated Thanksgiving meal. The story also told of a Boston widow, Lydia Bixby, whose five sons had been lost in battle. Bixby’s extraordinary sacrifice had caught the attention of President Abraham Lincoln, who addressed a condolence letter to her.

After Lincoln’s death, the 1864 letter was referred to alternately as “the most famous condolence letter” and Lincoln’s “letter to the Widow Bixby.” Americans turned to the contents of Lincoln’s letter after both world wars, and it was featured in the 1998 film “Saving Private Ryan.” Mystery shrouded many things about the letter, as scholars have argued about its authorship, and no one has been able to account for the original letter’s whereabouts.

But about one thing everyone seems to have agreed over the years: The recipient, Lydia Bixby, was a cheat, a fraud, and wholly unworthy of this most famous letter. Bixby enjoyed a very brief moment of fame before her name and the war service of her sons slipped into infamy. Suspicious Bostonians called her a drunk, a prostitute, or worse yet, a Confederate spy. Later, scholars discovered that two of her five sons managed to survive the war — Edward, who had enlisted at the age of 15, and Henry, who, instead of dying at Gettysburg, as had been reported to his distraught mother, had been a prisoner of war. 

Armed with this information, historians became suspicious of Bixby, repeating the tired old rumors about the widow’s unworthiness. As late as 2006, one Lincoln scholar continued to wonder if Bixby was not in fact “a wily Rebel sympathizer” or “the owner of a house of ill-repute.” Keeping in mind that we are talking about a woman who sent five sons into the Union army, why all the Lydia Bixby hate?...

With all the rumors circulating about her while she mourned the loss of her sons and tried to take care of her surviving children and a grandchild, Lydia Bixby might have welcomed the anonymity that finally came to her at the end of her life. But does she still deserve it today?

To continue to ignore her now, to allow her sacrifices to the nation to go unacknowledged, seems ungenerous.

Read entire article at Boston Globe