If you start digging into the history of this letter – written by Abraham Lincoln to the mother of five sons who had all been killed in the Civil War - all sorts of bumps and complications bubble up. It later turned out that only two of her sons had died. Mrs Bixby herself was thought to have harboured Confederate sympathies. There’s even a suggestion that one of Lincoln’s private secretaries, John Hay, actually wrote it.
But put all that aside – as well, perhaps, as the idea of dying gloriously in battle - and you have what is one of my favourite pieces of writing; as pure writing. It’s one I turn to regularly, just to admire the choice of words and the graceful fluency of its prose.
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 word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering 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
Do other readers have examples they treasure as much as I do this one?
Thank you for this, Nick. My main thought is that the language, the sentiments and the style of Lincoln's writing are very much NOT the voice coming out of the current presidential role.
ReplyDeletePenny, yes. I doubt very much that 47 could even *read* the letter, let alone come within a million miles of equalling its tone or style. And anyway, he'd have just thought the five Bixby boys were suckers and losers and wondered why they'd gone to war in the first place.
ReplyDeleteI rather switched out at 'gloriously'. Having as a youngster watched the film 'All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1930 version, I concluded that there seemed nothing very great or here, glorious, about dying face down in the mud with a bullet in the brain. It's a word for politicians, and those who erect the war memorials. As a kid in Scotland in the 1960's, as a member of the Boy Scouts, I was a part of numerous Armistice parades of Remembrance. In Scotland there didn't seem to be the air of a kind of mawkish celebration that I have encountered in England. Perhaps because the soldiers of Scottish infantry regiments constituted so much of the cannon fodder for WW1. Or..?
ReplyDeleteI take your point, Andrew, and I did note my reservations about the word 'gloriously'. But my admiration for this as a piece of prose remains undiminished. If a leader IS going to write a letter of condolence to a grieving relative, they could start right here for inspiration.
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